skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Wait a second: they have a 5 year 5.3 million dollar NSF grant running from the end of 2006 to the end of 2011 (http://www.nsf.gov/awardsearch/showAward.do?AwardNumber=0639...). They'd better be producing something!

"*In this project the PI and his team will design and build an extremely compact and practical model of an entire personal computing system from the metal upwards, including the equivalents of an operating system, development tools, graphical user interface, applications, media, end-user programming, and internet communications, sharing and media (analogous to the web++) - as an "Exploratorium" for itself that can be readily understood by teenagers on up. [...] This funding is for support of the central part of this large project (which is partitioned so that a complete and interesting system will result from the NSF support alone)."
Looks nice, however, clicking the back and forward buttons doesn't do anything for me using chromium on ubuntu (worked in firefox). It seems you are using the jquery history plugin to manage this, and trying the demo page at that plugin, it didn't work either. It seems that jQuery.browser.safari is set to true when it shouldn't be is causing the problem. If I set jQuery.browser.safari = false, the back and forward commands work on the demo page and your site. Not sure how you would test for difference between chrome and safari, but figured I'd let you know anyway.
the species that live long enough to journey far into space do so because they're friendly enough to live long enough.

Note that they only have to be friendly to themselves to survive to get into space. What if the mechanisms that ensure their peaceful cooperation just don't apply to naked apes? Just one example: we say that a smile is "universal" but that's just because it's wired into our species. An alien species would've been subject to an entirely different evolutionary context. A smile would be meaningless to them. We still don't know everything about how altruism works in our own species. I posit that we have not a clue about how it would work with aliens, or even if it would exist at all towards us.

(Another example: when was the last time you felt pity or forbearance in response to a reptilian submission signal?)

I have no idea what a low albedo impactor is

It's a kinetic projectile that doesn't reflect a lot of light.
It's a good point, but we're all unique, so we all might be part of the "easily categorizable subset of the Long Tail".

Take the most average guy you know, and he still has unique qualities, and lives in a targetable location. Add any hobby or interest, and now he's part of some long tail group.
Participate in CASP9, the protein structure prediction competition
The problem with that approach is that it requires open and working lines of communication. It only has to fail once, say at the mid-level of Chinese politics, and it could quickly go downhill!
The analogy to a Ponzi scheme is actually pretty good: at a certain level a Ponzi scheme is any business that lives entirely off a positive and growing first derivative while heading faster and faster toward a certain death.

If eventually (though I'd personally find it extremely surprising) Facebook doesn't manage to find a sustainable and highly profitable business model, that description would have been accurate.

Still waiting for data from the OP though :-)
A physicist argues that information is at the root of everything
I appreciate the intent but I do find it a little annoying that I had to register, agree to a vague TOS and then verify my email address to look at the guides. The guides themselves were ok, but I'm sure similar information can be found elsewhere on the Internet without having to hand out my email address.
Facebook, Graph API, and Open Graph
I agree that generalization from one instance is wrong. But you can't assume that every case is different because if you did that then science could not exists. If you would assume that each subsequent item would fall different way there would be no point in searching any universal law of falling.

You construct theory about something with the data you have, and try to gather more data and see how it fits. Especially you look for the data that doesn't fit.

As I live my life I gather data and construct theories. I shared with you with one of my theories that seems to check up so far.

Namely: Music helps you the same way that glass of whiskey helps some doctor, cop or worker of printing press to deal with dull and stressful job.

In my opinion it creates an illusion that it's beneficial for you, same way as you feel better after drinking coffee or alcohol.

You get accustomed to music, listening to it makes your brain addicted to such stimuli and when you abstain from it you have trouble concentrating. That's why you have such trouble concentrating without music.Music gives you value. It only satisfies your addiction. You can argue same way that nicotine gives you value.
One thing about the moratorium... Most college students nowadays have grown up alongside telephones, computers and TV. They haven't learned any other ways to contact people who aren't adjacent to them in a timely fashion... I, for one, would be very hard pressed to say "hello" to many of my friends on my campus, simply because the dorms are locked, and I have no way to say "hey, let me in". I don't blame college students for being dependent on technology, as that's how we stay in contact with each other.
Index Ventures Puts Heavyweights Behind New Seed Fund
My recollection is that Max Levchin presented his vision for Slide under these exact terms about two years ago. Interestingly enough, Lance Tokuda, who had launched RockYou with an analog vision, publicly buried the potential for brand advertisement last summer (in comparison with virtual goods). I imagine it's a reflection of the time it takes to ramp up sales accounts with large consumer products corporations.

There also was some great data on the wide disconnect between attention market share and ad spend market share of the net in the last Meeker report: http://www.readwriteweb.com/archives/mary_meekers_internet_t...
> * Delegates could be done in java albeit not trivially. They're essentially just syntactic sugar for a one-method class.*

No, there are many differences, both at the language and at the VM level, although you could emulate the behavior of delegates. You should look at the new MethodHandler from the JDK7 InvokeDynamic proposal ... they've added it for a reason ;)

> The CLI has true generics

The jury is still out on what constitutes "true generics" ... IMHO the C++ templates are more true than their C# equivalent ;)

But yeah, the Java generics system is a far cry from what it should've been. And it also sucks because there are exceptions ... arrays are reified, and the new MethodHandler from JDK7 is also reified.

That said ... you can add reified generics on top of the JVM. It is just a lot of hard work because you can't reuse the current generic types.

There are other features that are difficult to implement ... stack allocated values, the primitives that aren't mapping to the JVM types (decimal, ulong), pointers / unsafe code, PInvoke, tail-calls (although I know of a way to have tail-calls, but it's heavy).

You can implement anything on top of the JVM, but you will lose efficiency (not to mention of interoperability with Java code).
I definitely wouldn't hire a job hopper who is dumb enough to not somehow cover that up on his resmue...
Asshole? Dick? What's the point of that language. Mark's free to hire (or invest) however he wants and you're free to not work with him. Even though I have my disagreements, I found it very useful to hear Mark's perspective on hiring. There are a lot of people who share his philosophy and you're better off understanding it.

On the asymmetry of loyalty, it's just basic economic incentives. An individual has to be much more concerned about what their former employer says about them than a company does about what a single former employee says. It may not be perfectly 'fair,' but that's just the way the world works.
I suspect online advertising is undervalued precisely because it can be measured. I further suspect that "brand advertising" is a scam for all but the largest advertisers.
> As it turns out, placing nuclear weapons in space is disadvantageous ... It significantly limits the targets, in space or on Earth, that weapons are capable of hitting.

That is only true if you think of traditional applications. There are other uses of nuclear weapons in space, one of which is to create massive EMP attacks. It will only take a couple of Russian satellites in high orbit over the North American continent to fry most of unprotected electronic devices on it. That type of attack will be very hard to prevent and warn against. It is also very effective as it is very disruptive -- imagine most vehicles, radios, cell phones, planes, power plants, water treatment plants being rendered inoperable. Basically if you see this happening, start heading for the closest nuclear bunker.
What now? Now you learn not to attach so much value to the little number next to your own comments, even when it's a 0.
Except the author doesn't say "like a ponzi scheme" it's unsustainable -- they say it is a ponzi scheme. I know this is just semantics, but the whole premise of the article is flawed... facebook doesn't need each successive generation of advertisers to be bigger than the previous which is what causes ponzi schemes to implode.

Now if we're saying that they need their advertising revenues to grow so that they can maintain growth -- well that's the same dynamic of almost every company.
Lots of radical muslims here, huh? :P
Are we dignifying Suster's post a little by calling this a "debate"? Has anyone reputable reinforced Suster's side?
Better:

[up-arrow] 13 points [down-arrow] by isleyaardvark 1 hour ago

This way, the up and down are unambiguously tied to the total number of points (nobody will wonder why there's a down arrow way over next to the word "link"), but are separated by enough of a margin that it's difficult to click the wrong one.
Ask HN: Are you an information addict?
Do you check your phone too much? HN? Digg? Your email?

Are there things you really need to do rather than sit here and read HN?

What are you doing to deal with this?
I suppose the opposite happens as well: upvote when downvote is intended. In the long run it levels out.
Peter Thiel, Eliezer Yudkowsky, Aubrey de Grey Singularity Summit 2009
don't you keep up with current events? He's recapitulating the plot of V....
1) "Welcome to Matchio! Get started by viewing our intro video!" --- THIS Gives me a video that is too big for the window it's in. (Firefox 3.5.9, 1024 x 768 monitor, browser is maximized)

2) "OR WATCH A 60 SECOND VIDEO TOUR" --- DOESN'T do anything, even though it looks like a play link

3) Why must I have a .edu account if I refuse to use Facebook? Are non students not invited?

4) The slidedown and slideup at top and bottom of screen are cool, but I get confused by the up/down arrows. On the bottom, they are reversed, and on the top, down arrow seems like "minimize" to me.

5) On http://bradley.matchio.com/tos.html , I'm getting some weird characters in place of the apostrophes. "Click your "Iâ€™m buying" or "Iâ€™m selling"

6) I love the graphics. I wish my sites looked half this good.
That's my point. Similar products had been around for years, those products were launched before the market was ready for them.
It's a book review -- doesn't really explain what the physicist is arguing in any meaningful sense.
Actually I think he is saying that they need their advertising revenues to grow in order to maintain perceived momentum in advertisers' minds, in order to have revenue at all. So it's more drastic than what you describe, assuming of course that the OP is right and that retention of FB advertisers is null (which I'd love to see data about).
Facebook seems to overwhelmingly treat their users as just "metrics" instead of individuals.

Their short term revenue has been supported by:

a) Small businesses - like this story mentions - buying into an ad platform that performs on the low end of AdSense.

b) CPA scammers pumping rebill offers and breaking through FaceBooks meager ad-clearance department to get anything they can on there.

c) Sketchy fly-by-night dating sites & apps that take advantage of lonely hearts.

d) 25 - 35% of the ads are simply facebook app makers, who in turn sell users "credits" in a model more akin to selling addictive narcotics to addicts than anything else.

That's all bad enough, but the complete disregard for user privacy through their continued "opt-out" policy is out of control.

Through each update of Facebook we've seen bolder and bolder violations of user data , and I think that will ultimately be Facebook's undoing once people recognize just how much your typical advertiser can uncover with your profile.

References:

Zynga - http://www.businessinsider.com/gossip-2009-11

Zoosk - http://manybodytheory.com/777/ive-spent-over-5-million-dolla...
IPad Is First Computer 100-Year-Old Woman Bought
Wing IDE 101 might work: http://www.wingware.com/wingide-101
What is the line between freedom of speech and hate speech?

Government also has a lot of limitations to freedom of speech.

"The free communication of ideas and opinions is one of the most precious of the rights of man. Every citizen may, accordingly, speak, write, and print with freedom, but shall be responsible for such abuses of this freedom as shall be defined by law."
I guess I can see too how using the 'Ponzi scheme' word is not warranted, as it makes it sound illegal.
My understanding is that Blu-Ray has mandatory encryption, and that those encryption keys are quite expensive. I'm not even sure that Blu-Ray Association would allow FOSS BR authoring tools.
In an intro linear algebra class, I think a 6x6 determinant is legit. I asked one on my midterm. It was actually a very easy problem since the matrix was about 2 row reductions steps away from being upper triangular.

Unless the professor is evil, "compute this 6x6 determinant" is really asking "do you know the properties of determinants which will simplify this problem?"
I've been following 3D scene reconstruction for years now, and I tend to stray away from methods involving lasers (because I believe video/stereoptic images can be algorithmically analyzed to produce the same results, through software alone), but this post is doubly intriguing.

The quality of the depth field is outstanding, but it's shadowed by the versatility of the author in a plurality of disciplines! Comp. Sci., photography, engineering, rapid fabrication. The author is who I want to be!
Breathtaking 360º Virtual Image Tour of the Sistine Chapel
I was thinking more in terms of the product than these particular guys, who were wise in all of the products they decided not to bring to market.

What I am trying to express poorly is that you can't look at the success of a particular new technology and say "if it weren't for that implementation, nobody would have built it or brought it to market". If it weren't for the Wright Bros. someone else would have had powered controlled flight. If the DropBbox guys hadn't made a successful online filesystem, someone else would have (successfully) filled that niche eventually.
Move on. For many reasons:

- The karma points don't mean anything.

- if the comment was in fact good, it will be corrected by other viewers

- the comment can not have been so good that you should spend a bad afternoon thinking about it

- in just a few hours, nobody will ever see that comment again, because new articles and comments will continue to come in.

No, really, no need to feel bad: this is just a comment, this is just a pretty meaningless karma point.
In theory it requires encryption, but no actual Blu-ray players care, so you can pretty much ignore that requirement.
Please don't reply saying you downvoted by mistake if you aren't already adding a comment to it, from what I've seen everything works out in the long run and accidental downvote comments just distract from the whole.
you cannot deny that he doesn't make some compelling arguments. objectively of course.
Presentation Hacks: Timing, timing, timing
I manage over $100k/month in adwords advertising spend for clients who demand results. I've also spent a few thousand dollars on Facebook ads for those same clients. Facebook ads do not work as a direct response type of advertising.

However they work fabulously well for sending traffic to your company Facebook fan page and building your fan base. You can typically get new fans for about 40 cents to a dollar a fan. These are people who you will be able to influence on a daily basis for years to come, and although you won't be able to directly track sales/leads/whatever to your Facebook advertising, I also believe there is tremendous value in interacting with your fans in this more personal way. It's a lot harder to convince clients of this value, but it's real.
I cannot count the Tuesday nights I spent banging my head against the wall, just to find out that Facebook broke something again. It's one of the many prices you pay for being a slave to The Platform.
Yeah, I signed up and couldn't find the damn pdf's. But found them with a quick google search and it doesn't require an account --
http://www.windowfarms.org/howto/3plantairliftHOWTO_3_4_10.p...
I'm a liberal regs-enthusiast cap-D Democrat who's been reading McArdle since she landed at the Atlantic (so: awhile) and I just don't agree with your assessment of her. She's going to sound like an apologist because she's a UofC-trained conservative-leaning libertarian. That doesn't make her an actual apologist.

In fact, when you read the article, you probably saw that she concluded it by saying that GS deserves the populist outrage (she hasn't been talking down the recent SEC suit, either). I think it's hard to argue that she's criticizing Taibbi because of ideology.

No, her problem with Taibbi is that he doesn't appear to know what he's talking about. These aren't critiques on "delivery". Taibbi's article is premised on the idea that GS orchestrates calamities to profit from them. He appears to have drawn that conclusion from the fact that GS has survived many calamities. But McArdle appears to be correct: GS survives calamities because they don't go all-in the way firms like Lehman, Bear, and (it's alleged) Merrill did.

If GS is no worse than Lehman, Merrill, Morgan, or Citi, Taibbi's argument is damaged. If GS comes out ahead of them because it acted more carefully and less irresponsibly than those banks, Taibbi's argument is more or less destroyed. The fact that Taibbi doesn't seem to know the difference between a CDO and an IRS is amusing but besides the point.
"What's interesting about this format is that it's identical all the way from 8086 to x86-64 with the exception of SIB byte and REX prefix.... Intel, AMD, and other vendors have added more instructions but the above encoding has survived over the years. Pretty neat, huh?"

Indeed.
Yes, I have had people click on FB ads. It's not clear to me if they are more effective than alternative ads, but people are clicking on them. The ads are not traditional, though.

I have an ad campaign running now on Facebook encouraging people to go to http://join.marrow.org/gosusan . ("My sister has cancer. Help her and people like her beat it by donating your bone marrow! Click here to sign up!" )

Short answer is I've yielded 6 people signed up out of ads from Facebook, Myspace, and others. The signups could be improved, but it looks like at least one of these methods is recruiting donors.

Overall Facebook campaign since 9 March 2010:

4,801,855 impressions
803 clicks
CTR 0.017%
Average CPC $0.99
Spend $796.99

My banner ads on MySpace ("A CANCER KILLA IS YOU! My sister has cancer. Help her or someone like her kill it by donating bone marrow. Click this ad to get started!") overall have these numbers:

973,774 impressions
452 clicks
CTR 0.05%
Average CPC $0.45
Spend $203.00

At first blush MySpace looks like a better deal (compare the CTR). The thing is, for targeted geographies, I am seeing a lot more clicks, faster, from Facebook than from MySpace. That is, while the clicks from Myspace are cheaper, I'm seeing fewer of them.

My most recent campaign is targeted to south Ohio and south-east Ohio. (Turns out this is where a lot of people with similar heredity as me and my sister live. Therefore I expect these people to be more likely to have a matching bone marrow type). The Facebook ad for this geography has yielded 95 clicks in the last two days. The MySpace ad has yielded 10 clicks.
What is songbook?
The largest advertisers became the largest because they spend a lot on brand advertising. So perhaps it's true that you have to spend a lot to make brand advertising effective, but it's not a "scam" in any conventional sense of the word. It is what it is.

If we're going to sling arrows at online advertising, I think we have to start with the fact that there are a lot more publishers than there were back in the day, and virtually all of them have an undifferentiated audience of "eyeballs". It's still possible to get high CPM rates, as long as you've got a targeted audience and a sales team.
If the SEC believed Paulson lied, then Paulson would be on the dock with Goldman.

In any case, I obviously don't have the ability to prove Paulson never said they were the long side. On the other hand, it's the job of the SEC to prove that a) ACA asked who the longside was and b) Goldman/Paulson lied about it. I see virtually no evidence of this.
Lots of fluff in the article.

The only real explanatory investment comments I saw were about him timing his exit of both the tech bubble and the housing/credit bubble right near the peak, riding both to the top and then betting against both to the bottom. If you know an investor who successfully did both of those things without making any huge mistakes along the way, you know an investor who's averaged gaudy returns.

What it doesn't tell us is how he "knew" those bubbles were about to burst. How much of a role did luck have?
Being an accredited investor to invest less than $10,000 in a small web startup sounds ridiculous to me, especially if one has good knowledge of the startup's business environment and a rapport with the founders. If it's the law, so be it, but there'd have to be a legal workaround for hackers to connect with another hacker's startup financially.

This must be Deja Vu, I remember having a conversation with you about Barack Obama after his election win in a thread where I lost over 60 points.

-- I wonder how bpick is able to invest legally in this case, because I don't think he fits with the accredited status but is still looking for investments.
I am an information addict.

I am making things worse by compulsively reading blog posts on low information diet: http://www.fourhourworkweek.com/blog/category/low-informatio...
Sometimes I think Apple just jumps out of a moving train. For example it isn't possible to turn off the notebook display and only keep the connected monitor/projector active. Or, if you wake it with the lid closed to turn on the (notebook) display at a later time without disconnecting the external display.

Same with this. I can understand why they do the switching the way they do it, but where is the harm in putting a "Don't use discrete graphics" option in the Energy-Saver menubar drop-down menu? If they believe their customers are that stupid display a dialog box warning them, with the option to never show it again.
It's not that important of a problem. I prefer knowing my vote is irrevocable and using it carefully.
I didn't suggest volume alone suggested special sauce, " sheer volume of trades and absurd average over 18 years makes".

I was more trying to get the point across that they weren't rolling one die for 18 years but rolling it thousands of times.

All this talk about special sauce is making me hungry...
Thanks for letting me know - fixed now