skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I think you can buy this one now: www.jetlev-flyer.com

It's connected to a water source which limits about a 10M altitude, and the market seems to be focused towards a adventure tourist market.
By "genetics", I invoke the Rights of Talent. It's not hereditary and certainly not racial, since talented people appear at a highly (if not completely) uniform rate across all races and ethnicities.

Fact: the talented thinkers-- the people who can see the big picture, who are capable of philosophical thought, and who have a strong sense of morality and compassion-- belong on top of society. This is the Right of Talent. Control rightfully belongs to such people, and not the scumbag gangsters who rise to the top in a poorly-managed, entropy-driven system such as ours.

The hereditary elitism you describe is one where a parasitic elite uses the trappings of culture but ignores the spirit of culture. Hereditary aristocracy is a horrible system-- and what our supposed market society actually is in practice (large corporations and clubby boardrooms exist to ensure the absence of meritocracy).

What we need is a true "meritocracy" (I'm scared to use that word, seeing how badly it has been abused) where knowledge and thought determine who rises to power, rather than political and economic machinations.
Also check out Ack, a recursive grep-like tool that works like a charm when searching directory trees:

http://betterthangrep.com/
That depends on what you mean by 'moral.' In common usage, it is a synonym for 'ethics,' but in older usage it had religious connotations. Using the older meaning, a 'moral atheist' is an oxymoron. The fact that many religious ethicists still use the word this way leads to some unfortunate misunderstandings.
most probably Netlog, i deleted my account months ago
Hahaha!

Getting serious for a moment, I don't envy RIM if they buy Palm. Having bought QNX, a bunch of their engineers might have been disgruntled over the obvious message that their own stuff is junk and that the company doesn't trust them to fix it.

Some will have bought into QNX, some will be resisting it. Then they buy Palm and all the engineers who bought into QNX suddenly have the rug pulled out from under them.

While upper management are blinking in the flash bulbs, shaking hands at press conferences, and boasting about RIM's road map for taking over the world, middle management will be desperately trying to keep the talented people from quitting in disgust.
Great link. This is key:

"Gladwell’s success as a speaker illustrates one of his homespun themes - hard work pays off. But he has also made an important realisation. He is not giving a speech or a lecture - he is giving a performance. And like any good actor, he knows that you have to learn your lines."
>> or just get drunk every night (they actually encourage parties and drinking!)

Do you work for Accenture?

Sure sounds like their strategy:
(1) hire young, incredibly bright & talented people
(2) isolate them by
(a) sending them on the road for engagements
(b) work like dogs
(c) party (very hard) only with other Accenture people in limited free time
(3) repeat

Make no mistake, it's a cult. Fun for a while, but ultimately very empty.
OK, fine, being gay is a choice. So?
Once you've tried Spotify, you won't call Grooveshark instant any more. I swear, it starts streaming faster than Rhythmbox starts playing a local file..
[infographics] Why You Should Lie in Your Online Dating Profile
Imagine having no Farm Policy and we end up having food shortages, there would be a revolution.

I can imagine. After all, this country has no Plate Policy, and I routinely end up eating off the floor. And I really wish we had a Consumer Electronics and Computers policy; I'm really jealous of the country that produced the iPhone and the Macbook because of those attributes.

Fortunately, the country I live in does have a Real Estate Policy and a Banking System policy, and they're willing to put my money where their mouths are! It's working out about as well as one would expect.
I take this sorta stuff with a grain of salt, sure, it looks neat and all, but there's so much post-facto rationalization that goes into these things. In honesty, it is a lot of work, but it's also trying to present it in a way that makes the mark compelling.

at the far extreme, it's the equivalent to golden-ratio-vision that so many people have where they see something and then scale a golden section to fit atop it:

1: http://www.virtualprojectconsulting.com/images/monalisa.gif
2: http://www.laputanlogic.com/images/2005/04/14-10CYQHUUC00.jp...

At the humorous end of the spectrum was the joke identity manual for the new pepsi logo:
http://www.underconsideration.com/brandnew/archives/in_brief...

they play the same joke on the mona lisa, too!
Good stuff. It seems that every field of endeavor that's difficult to make headway in and has no clear pathway to success has this kind of industry grow up around it.
Play nice and find another job as soon as possible. In your spare time, work on whatever you want without publicly mentioning or launching anything. When you leave the company, launch whatever you've been working on in your spare time.

If the ridiculous contract says they own everything you do during your employment, wait a reasonable amount of time until after you've quit to launch anything.

It's better to never sign the contract or take the job in the first place. We'd all be better off outing companies who force people to sign these kinds of contracts.
It doesn't matter if you don't read dense programming books straight through or do all the exercises, as long as you are using them. If you make almost any effort to flip through looking for something new to chew on, you're usually rewarded pretty quickly with the listed selections, and that's why they're good books. The practice aspect is a good pursuit as well, but not intrinsic to the value of the book.

Edit: And I should add - that's why they're still valuable even in the Internet era. The "pure compilation of awesome content" aspect is a compelling reason to have them.
I saw your original comment and started to respond, but in the edited version it is much more clear what you mean.

> So you're expected to double your money (and then some) for each investment.

Over time that is true. The average over time is what to look for. With a single investment and you can expect to lose your money.
>Are you trying to discourage people from trying to solve it?

Not at all, the complete opposite. It's a fascinating area but I feel the expectations are completely out of whack with reality. Most of the articles like this have people saying we're only a decade or two away from proper AI, when I'm arguing that that is just not backed up at all - and people are underestimating what work is involved here.

When expectations are set wrong, and people eventually realise it, it can damage research in this area as people don't take it seriously any more. Ref the'AI Winter' - the dramatic cut in funding when governments realised most of the experts in the field had massively over-promised and under-delivered.

I think we need to break this down into smaller chunks of bounded problems. There is some amazing research around using human like neural networks and similar processes steps for machine vision - e.g. for object recognition, trying to mimic what happens in nature. This is greatly achievable.

Trying to model the entire human brain, with talk about how this will lead in the near future to intelligent, reasoning - even sentient AI - is fun but for the reasons I outlined needs an expectation reboot.
All of which you can do with PowerPoint. The article is more against bullet point presentations than PowerPoint.
You could have said the exact same thing about Apple buying NeXT in 1996.
Teaching in New Orleans (post Katrina)
do you have stats on the breakdowns of the different charter schools?
Slightly OT, but it's probably the first time I've heard someone "officially" say the QT name. For some reason everyone I met pronounced it "cutie", not "cute". I was just wondering if that's a common confusion?
"For the most part there is no real extra benefit for Organic food - assuming you are not opposed to the idea of pesticides and other treatments (which are mostly benign anyway)."

From a nutritional viewpoint, what you said agrees with what I've read. I think there's real worth, though, in experimenting with different farming techniques that don't rely on mass produced chemicals. Reliance on these chemicals makes me think of the "putting all your eggs in one basket" adage.

Recently I heard an NPR piece about nutrition studies done across decades. One line that struck me is an apple grown in the early 20th century in the US had the nutritional value of 3 apples grown today. I'm not sure how the researchers came to that conclusion. But, if it's true and if a similar ratio applies to other produce, we have the potential for a serious health issue coming up.

EDIT: Enclosed the quoted text in actual quotes for readability.
Nice little rant, Daniel. Certainly struck a nerve here.

Sometimes I think I'm living in two worlds, the customer world, where everyone is scrambling to get stuff done, and the startup world, where everyone is talking about what the customer world should be like.

Don't misunderstand me, though. I love the startup world. There is an underlying current of optimism that I rarely see in the customer world, where people are just too busy to see the possibilities if they hit them in the nose. Sometimes I have to grab my customers and yell, "Let's slow down for 5 minutes and think about a better way to do this!"

In the startup world, it's often too easy to lose sight of the definition of success. Success is not starting a business, getting into an incubator, or securing funding. Success is satisfying paying customers over and over again.

In the past 6 months, I've had 5 different customers ask me for the same thing. I described my approach to satisfying them to a startup investor acquaintance. He told me that no one would ever pay for it. Now I know I'm on to something.

I like living in 2 worlds. It helps me maintain perspective. Sounds like it works that way for you too.
pi / 180 = 0.01745 (a value commonly used for degree<->radian conversion). 1 / 180 = 0.0055555. That's the connection between the "magic" constants used in this trick.

It brings an older, simpler, not nearly as interesting calculator "trick" to mind: 11111111 * 11111111.
Yeah, your idea is much cooler than mine.
The difference being that Woz actually wanted HP to take the computer and make it. He helped start Apple when that fell through.
But why does the average over time matter more than the expected result? Any single investment is (according to the numbers) going to make a significant expected contribution to the economy and to the investor. So why not go for it?

According to this logic it would be bad for 20 people (with a net worth of $1m+) to invest $100k each, but it would be good for one wealthy person to make 20 investments of $100k each. That doesn't compute.
> Imagine having no Farm Policy and we end up having food shortages

There is little doubt that agricultural policy in the west is all about protecting a specific industry from the realities of globalization and not about securing the food supply.

Being a small country, not having a farm policy and also going to war with your neighbors might lead to food shortages. The agricultural policies of the EU and USA do way, way more harm than good.
Facebook fanpage bug causes fluctuating fan count
Sure, but can anyone explain 5318008?
Poker is probably more advantageous to learn if you can get good at it; more money, more prestige and a focus on reading/bluffing others.
They would probably have to find a way to preserve the vegetable buns as well as the existing bread buns. They're currently loaded with a generous amount of sugar and miscellaneous preservatives.
IAMA founder of NewsTilt, a YC startup trying to reinvent journalism.
Has the Internet Actually Been a Force For Good?
Container cruise missle ad on Youtube, with music from Pirates of the Carribean
http://www.anand-topalov.com/
Not behind a pay wall.

Live commentary by GM Susan Polgar: http://susanpolgar.blogspot.com/2010/04/topalov-anand-g3-liv...
A Note to Google Users on Net Neutrality, by Eric Schmidt (2006)
Yahoo doesn't have much of a hiring filter. It's very easy to get hired there. Thus, there are a lot of people just taking up space, or worse. There's a lot of cargo cult "engineering" going on. This makes it hard for good people to not lose their minds. Whenever Yahoo acquires a company, the acquired talent flees as soon as possible. Google started down the same path of talent dilution with their huge hiring spree a few years back, but they already had enough talent so it's not going to affect them as much. I didn't intend this to be a Yahoo/Google comparison, but it is incorrect to say that Yahoo has done more than Google the past few years. Buzz and Wave are indeed solutions without a problem but are technologically more impressive than anything Yahoo has done, ever.
Everything of interest here is a consequence of the author's decision to use annual rate of return as his figure of merit.

Simplified example: you have a pool of investment opportunities where with probability 0.01 you gain $100 and with probability 0.99 you lose $1. So your expected gain from making a bunch of these investments is a gain of 1c per investment. If you make a million of them then with very high probability you gain something very close to $10k in total, on your $1M investment, a 1% gain. Now, suppose each of these investment opportunities takes 10 years to do whatever it does. Then (to first order) your return rate is 0.1% per year, more or less all the time; so your average return rate is about 0.1% per year. So far, so good.

Now suppose that you can only make one investment. Then your annual return rate is 99^(1/10)-1, 1% of the time, and -1 the rest of the time. Key point: 99^(1/10)-1 is about 0.6, which is a lot less than 99/10. So your average return rate is now absolutely wretched.

So, have we just discovered something interesting about the real costs and benefits of high-variance investments, or merely blinded ourselves with science? The latter, I think. I'll try to explain why.

Why use averages to summarize things, in the first place? Because they describe what usually happens in the aggregate. When they fail to, or when that isn't what you care about, averaging is unlikely to tell you what you want to know. So, does our averaged return rate tell us anything useful about what happens in the aggregate? Why, no. Suppose A and B both invest $1; A loses his money and B doubles his. And suppose each of these things happens over 10 years. Then their return rates are -1 and +0.072 respectively; their average return rate is extremely negative; but A and B collectively neither gained nor lost any money. Similarly, if you make a whole lot of investments then the average of your return rates is not the same as your overall return rate. (That's exactly why the author's calculation produces the results it does.)

Here's another way of looking at it, which I actually prefer. There's nothing magical about annual return rates. But the author's curve would look completely different if he plotted six-monthly return rates (it would be worse [EDITED TO ADD: than the author's annualized curve) for smaller numbers of investments) or five-yearly return rates (it would be flat and show a positive result for any number of investments). So what the curve illustrates is not a fundamental truth about investment, it's an artefact of preferring to look at return rates over a time period that differs from the length over which the investments make whatever return they do.
"Rates to not include publishing & performance rights for song writers" - even though that's where most of the income comes from.
Computing a theory of everything (Wolfram @ TED)
Expert Profile: Nick at Becoming Capitalist’s AI Approach to Trading
I had access to Stanford's numbers. Its big ticket sports are profitable. The lesser sports aren't., although some are closer to break even than others. If Stanford has a loss in sports as a whole, it's because the lesser sports cost more than the profit from the big ticket sports.

And yes, that includes the new football stadium and the newish tennis stadium.
I definitely agree, the article uses some messy statistics.

An additional concern is that if your argument is that 10 investments reduce variance, you want to keep in mind correlation effects. The probability of one investment failing is likely to be dependent on other investments from the same domain, due to the nature of booms and busts.
The problem with GoF (haven't read it cover-to-cover, but have browsed it for inspiration) is that it is more or less an encyclopedia. It lists the discrete patterns, gives them names, as if they've come down the mountain on stone tablets.

I found a book like Head First Design Patterns to be much more bottom-up. It hammers home the idea that discrete design patterns really are just the organic side-effects of applying concepts (meta-patterns?) like "composition over inheritance", "don't repeat yourself", etc., to recurring problems in computer science.
CAP Confusion: Problems with 'partition tolerance'
All very interesting. How do you propose such an elite be selected? Keep in mind you need a natural process rather than any formal institution making these decisions, since the institution itself would simply become an elite.

The nice thing about a merchant elite is that they can arise through some sort of market system, with no one group or institution holding a monopoly on kingmaking. If you want to establish a philosopher elite you have to establish some sort of analog to that--and probably destroy the market in the process, especially if you're interested in allocating the nicer apartments to the philosopher elite.

(There is of course a political elite as well, which is partially chosen by political institutions and partially evolving through the democratic process. Perhaps the political system could establish a philosopher elite. How do you propose it do so? Democracy obviously won't work.)
Yes, you're right there.

As I said in my main post I think the real important thing to work on is ethical farming - regardless of organic or not.

The other thing is that from a sustainability point of view (in terms of the farming infrastructure) Organic is very cost/labour intensive compared to other techniques.

There is probably a good balance; as you say we can reach it by experimenting.
Add threaded comments to Rails in only 7 lines of code: has_threaded_comments
I was sitting in a meeting with my then-manager once, watching an elaborate PowerPoint complete with animation and he turned to me and said, if anyone working for me made something like this I'd fire them for wasting time.
A little amusing that the article claims you shouldn't use Ad Hominem attacks because otherwise you will be "stupid".
I met with Trolltech years ago at a trade show and I never heard "Cute", just "cue-tee".

The Nokia rep I met with last month insisted it's always been "cute". The history in the old reference books say it was inspired by "Xt", and I don't see that pronounced as "sweet".

Anyway, I've been working with the Qt Declarative stuff for a little while and while it's nice and certainly a path to get iPhone/Android experiences on their platform, it's still got a long way to go.
I don't understand how a salary jump of 3 years can be a career regression of 5 years. That means you are paying him 8 yrs behind what he should be earning by his career progression? That is sad.
Its merits notwithstanding, I suspect the Dragon Book was at included at least partially as a dig at Jeff Atwood.

(Disclaimer: I haven't read it myself, and don't plan to. My reading stack is close to overflowing as it is.)
This is how language comparisons should be.

He's got a few years with both languages and he writes it after he's made something substantial in them. He tells us up front that he's subjective and that he loves static typing so we can take his words the correct way: with a grain of salt.

Out with the boring feature comparisons table-style and in with a fluid, with lack of a better wording, talk about his positive and negative experiences. For the things that matter are not syntax, dynamic or static typing but how the developing process is. Tools, debuggers and techniques are far more important and I think he did a fine job describing them.

If I wanna be picky about anything then it would be about his conclusion, it felt like he didn't reach anything definitive. But then again it's a breath of fresh air against the otherwise so flamy language discussions and what do I know? Perhaps both Erlang and Haskell are good languages! Gasp
Looks to me like you've already tried diplomacy, and it's failed.
A counter-point: instead of storming into work one day and quitting, ask your boss for a meeting and point out in the most direct-but-professional manner you have that this isn't what you signed up for: that this is hurting you as a developer, and that if they intend to enforce those rules, you can't stay at the company.

No company will have regulations which are all-and-always perfect for every employee, and some managers will be stupider in applying rules than others - this is a good exercise in learning to stand up for yourself and getting what you want without quitting. If you're a good developer, they'll be willing to "bend a few rules" to keep you.
My comment wasn't about the article's point (which I thought it is valid), but about one idea that keeps getting rehashed ... i.e. if you want to learn about real compilers, you should read the Dragon Book.

> If modern languages are more than a compiler, that does not denies the ability of the book to cover how to write a compiler.

True, but the best way IMHO to learn about compilers is to start more lightly and then to read lots of source-code.
Self-inlining anonymous functions in C++
Urban tiny home: 400 sq ft with tub, laundry & office [video]
for those of you who didn't get it

http://www.urbandictionary.com/define.php?term=5318008
The source for that figure is nothing more than a guess. It takes the approximate number of UK premium subscribers, multiplies by 12 months and £10. Then it arbitrarily doubles the amount to account for advertising income, and divides by the total number of streams in all countries.

I don't know how much an artist may get from Spotify, but my guess is that it is significantly more than from radio.
Interested if anyone has any views on this. Could be a great opportunity to build better websites and applications faster, and with customers and users having more say...
Pretty horrible. Generally employers don't want you writing code for the following reasons:

They are paranoid you will steal from them the ideas you code on and compete.

They want to own your ass.

In either case, I don't like paranoid management, and I don't like people "owning my ass".

Now on the flip side I don't see why someone you TRUST can't own the company. You might program for it unofficially while working at your current company.