skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Actually, their P/E ratio has been steadily declining over the past five years, even as their stock price has risen dramatically. Usually a stock is considered overvalued if the P/E ratio is really high. But this chart (stock price on top, P/E ratio on bottom) seems to indicate that AAPL is not being overvalued by the market as the stock price goes up: http://bigcharts.marketwatch.com/advchart/frames/main.asp?ti...
It's really very well done. Lots of obvious spots where it's 1.0 (can't select text, lots of ads for iPhone apps that don't link to the store [fail!], some interactions are nonobvious or a little clunky), but the experience is fantastic.

Unlike most Flash websites, the tablet Wired is generally a genuine improvement over dead-tree, merging the interactivity of the web site with the design and browsability of the magazine with the UX capabilities of the iPad. Really, it's an accomplishment.

Too bad most of Wired's content is so resoundingly meh...

Edit: It's worth noting that 99% of the iPad magazine apps are roughly comparable to Flash websites: gain a little glitz, lose a lot of usability. The Wired magazine is the first one I've felt really nails it.
Did MG Siegler just violate SEC laws by not disclosing if he owns Apple stock and telling thousands of his readers that Apple stock will continue to increase?
If you can, try nginx + unicorn or passenger. It should be faster than JRuby on Rails with Glassfish.
I have a pair of Grado SR225s that are fantastic, but they're only good when I'm at my desk. For travelling I used to have a pair of Bose QC2s that I got as a gift. Due to the terrible head strap design they broke after 2 years of moderate use. I now have a pair of Audio Technica ANC7Bs that are exactly the same as the Bose, and have a better strap, that I picked up for $140, and they're down to $120 now on Amazon. Apparently the first version of the headphones was so similar to the Bose QCs that they got sued and had to change them slightly.
I try not to smoke joints; the water bong is much friendlier on your lungs and throat. I probably average 1-2 joints' worth per day.

I think a lot about whether pot has been a net positive in my life, and honestly I'm still unsure. Certainly I enjoy the experience, and I've met some great people as a result, but it comes with a cost (in dollars as well as time). Jury's still out.

I should add that I have a deep-seated loathing for most kinds of alcohol. I enjoy an occasional glass of red wine, but my alcohol consumption is easily less than 1 drink per week.
If this was a government or public institution website you'd be correct.

But it's a website specifically for the GOP to garner ideas.
Delhi IIT-JEE topper is just 14 & homeschooled
I don't think that's allowed.

"III. Storing and Using Data You Receive From Us
...

7. You must not use user data you receive from us or collect through running an ad, including information you derive from your targeting criteria, for any purpose off of Facebook, without user consent." [1]

I suspect that means you need consent from every user whose information you collected (your own list of contacts is made up of other peoples' basic information).

[1] http://developers.facebook.com/policy/#policies
What language is not terrible?
I think the point that was trying to be made is that it seems like the majority of Republicans (or at least the majority of the vocal ones) hold views that border on self-satire to the point where you almost can't be sure if someone is trolling or serious.

I think that you were be hard-pressed to find someone that believes that the majority Democrats believe that God put their leaders into power. Especially since (at least in my opinion) a majority of America views the Democrats as being associated with Atheism/science (e.g. Creationism vs Evolution).
It interesting view this google vs apple in:
http://www.google.com/finance?q=NASDAQ:AAPL+goog

put the graph to 1y or 5y.
If you consider the PEG ratio of both, you'll actually see that when taking growth rate into consideration, Apple is still cheaper than Microsoft...barely. So, if you put faith in PEG ratios, Apple is still a better buy. If you don't know what a PEG ratio is, check it out here http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PEG_ratio
You're linking to a blog post, not an official DNC site. Anyone can post any tripe they want on my.barackobama.com... Notice the "my" domain name?
New GOP site looks good to me:
http://hammerandsteele.com/?u=http://xkcd.com/personal/gop/
MeeGo v1.0: An Important Step
or subscribe to r/tldr
"What I can’t figure out is why he (Steve Jobs) is even trying (to be the CEO of Apple)? He knows he can’t win."

- Bill Gates, June 1998

(AUDIO)
http://www.cringely.com/2010/04/masters-tournament/

http://macdailynews.com/index.php/weblog/comments/25385/
But this presumes that keeping it illegal prevents people from using it, and it clearly doesn't.

Mandatory drug tests are common already (Home Depot does drug tests on all employees -- don't you feel safer about hardware?) People's performance are also impacted by stress, sleep deprivation, etc. - they should be monitored for performance, not blood chemistry.

>It's certainly an area that needs a lot more research before legalization occurs.

No it doesn't. It's safer than other existing legal drugs: http://www.saferchoice.org/content/view/24/53/

A gallery of loser stoners: http://coedmagazine.com/2009/02/06/the-10-most-successful-po...

And if it is a concern about people's health, why is it treated as a criminal matter?
PEG would be a more appropriate way to compare the two...don't you think?

Also, earnings for MSFT are about $17B and AAPL is about $11B
. There is no way to tell, otherwise you'd be very rich already ;)

Conversely, the aggregate opinion of investors does has some value. Otherwise you could make a fortune betting against any stocks with high P/E ratios.

Many believe that Apple stocks are overvalued today, that's for sure.

Sure. And just as many believe it's undervalued, otherwise the current price would be lower than it is. This is true for any stock.
Yeah, they are well over their real worth. I'm looking forward to the pop.

There's too many people chasing the bus.
How many drunks do you know?
Quit linking to insane blog posts and pretending it comes from an official DNC website. Anyone can create a blog at my.barackobama.com. It's like blogspot.

Unfortunately, there is no mandatory mental health screening required to purchase an Internet connection or a computer.
I played back in high school and a little bit of college and found them enjoyable, but I don't think I've touched a computer game in the last 4 years or so. I already have so little time, I don't want to waste what I do have on games.
I was rickrolled on the 7th comment I read. I don't think I've ever been rickrolled on HN.

I think they just underestimated the need for moderators. Though I can't really fault them for that, a good moderation system is tough.
Yes, but in the example we're talking about elected officials. It's their duty to represent everyone in their constituency, not just the ones that are members of their political party.

I was of the understanding that this thread had branched to discuss communication at the ground level with your elected representative, not a forum to discuss the direction of an entire political party as a whole. The discussion was just framed around each political party providing their elected officials with a way of communication with their constituents.

[I could be way off here, though.]
seems to work great, thanks.

any chance of changing the link color? too much red.
I play games for about 10-15 hours per week. My time is split between Star Trek Online or EVE Online for multiplayer, Half-Life 2 (and its add-ons), maybe one or two others in any given week (sometimes racing, sometimes RPG, sometimes SF - like Dirt 2, Alice, Torchlight, Freespace 2, and Sims 3), and various casual games on my iPod and Android devices.

I believe gaming can influence productivity in both positive and negative ways, but it's different for everyone. Obviously though, playing Quake IV when you should be working is a drain on corporate resources ;)
An almost exactly analogous argument could be used to "prove" that Wikipedia would entirely fail [1]. Replace "Great political ideas" by "High-quality encyclopedia articles" etcetera. I don't personally think much of Republican policies, but I'm glad they're at least giving things like this a go. I could wish, however, that they'd spoken with more people who have real insight into how social websites work. They could have started with the founders of Reddit, and a bunch of other YC folk.

[1] Yes, I'm well aware some people claim that Wikipedia has failed. But arguing with people who use "failure" to describe a site with Wikipedia's impact isn't worth the time.
Iowa's 10-year business sale tax break - Is this common in other states?
I'm no tax guru, but this is the first time I've heard of this. Are there similar or better laws in other states?

http://www.iowabiz.com/2010/05/iowas-tenyear-business-sale-tax-break-what-do-you-need-to-have-for-ten-years.html
The glue on velcro tends to melt and become a very gooey mess in extreme heat too. It wouldn't work well in summer heat.
"If you simply want to turn off instant personalization, we've also made that easier" would read a whole lot better if it read:

"If you simply want to turn on instant personalization, we've also made that easier."

If "personalization" is such a great feature, people will turn it on. "opt in" by default, please!

I see absolutely no changes here, except that privacy settings are now tabbed, and that instead of a dropdown, you now have radio buttons. Wow, now this is simpler! /sarcasm
I wonder if this DB will be available from any clouds?
Why didn't I know about this?

Thanks for the link!
I found this article particularly prescient as I work for a large company that has an especially draconian open source policy.

We're not allowed to contribute to any open source projects, post about software, speak publicly, or report security vulnerabilities (either to the security community at large or even to the vendors).

I was part of a small (approximately 200 person) security company who got swallowed up by a large company about 4 years ago (who has since been acquired by an even larger company) and the intellectual property agreement we were made to sign after the acquisition was particularly heinous. In fact, it led directly to the resignation of my entire 12-person team (all except for me).

The consequence has been that we now operate as a sort of parasite in the security community. We make direct financial use of the efforts of the security community, but in no way give back anything. I most certainly wouldn't move to company with as restrictive an open-source policy as where I work now; if I were a more principled person, I'd probably have quit over it.
Now all he needs is a velcro glove to hold the iPad comfortably with one hand.
It's the same to me, catching up over FB is crap. But there are a lot of RL social stuff that if FB wasn't there a lot of people would be missing.
Apple is a monster.

Google's stock price is pretty much downhill, considering they left the second biggest (and soon to be biggest) market in the world. China.
ComScore Is Now Free For Startups (Save Thousands of $$)
Why not? It is a solution to the cannabis-crime factor. Prohibition of alcohol isn't "a solution to the crime factor", but it certainly led to a reduction in obtaining-alcohol-related-crime.
The point of immersion is not that it's fun. The point of immersion is that pre-puberty, it's still more effective to 'acquire' languages than 'learn' them. The ability to intake languages organically from the environment degrades as you get older, but it's widely believed that there's a qualitative inflection point around age 13. Before that point, immersion is useful. Three years of Spanish instructions gave me the skill to conjugate verbs on a test. The following one year of light immersion[1] is what made me able to assemble sentences in real-time, and think directly in Spanish without having to mentally translate in and out of English.

If you're learning a language at age 16, like the author was, then yes, the most effective way is to smash your face against the brick wall until it crumbles. 10,000 hours, as they say.

What I'm curious about, for personal reasons, is whether learning additional languages early takes away any of the face-smashing in learning additional languages later on. I'm trying to acquire Bulgarian, so I'll get to find out on my own.

[1] During our one-hour-a-day class period, we were allowed to chat in class if we did so in Spanish.
percentage wise; a lot less than the badly affected pot smokers :)
Are SEC laws that easy to violate?

Hey everybody, I think Apple stock is going to continue to increase! I may or may not own Apple stock.
This reads like marketing-blogspam to me. These two projects solve totally different problems, and the author acknowledges it, yet he still goes on to highlight benchmarks where VoltDB is 10-20x faster than Cassandra. Of course it's going to be! It's an in-memory store!

So why benchmark against Cassandra? It's got a lot of buzz around it, of course. What a better way to shove your name into the "NoSQL" ring. Blech.

With regard to the numbers themselves, I would refer the author to the CouchDB boys' discussion of benchmarks (under "Good Benchmarks are Non-Trivial"): http://books.couchdb.org/relax/reference/high-performance
This was posted before and submitter commented on it: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1302311

That was the only comment submitter left on this site. No submissions prior to this one.
I'm at Gluecon, where Mike Stonebraker (CTO of VoltDB) gave a talk about Volt this morning. He's very clear that VoltDB is not a NoSQL product; it's a SQL product, but a next-generation SQL product. He says they've achieved enormous performance gains by keeping ACID compliance by throwing out tons of older tech still present in MySQL and Oracle.
I have $1000 that I'm willing to throw into development right now, but I'm not sure how to spend it wisely. It seems like $1000 might not be enough to code a fairly simple application. What happens if the money runs out before the project is finished? Would I end up with a non-functioning set of code, or would the feature set just end up severely reduced?
I see. I did not search for the actual study -- only that the researcher interviewed said that exercising aiding sleep is a myth in the article.

Silly me, I forgot to remember media often distorts science If that is indeed what they are claiming in their work, then that makes sense and Gretchen Reynolds (nytimes author) should have been clearer.
Ruby-traileraddict: easily display movie previews in your application
http://github.com/aarongough/ruby-traileraddict
wouldn't it be great if instead, you could turn it on and it was turned off by default?

give people a compelling reason to use a product (in this case to turn it on), or you have no product--period.
The most exciting thing about this was:

>In addition to payments, MasterCard has identified approximately 20 platforms and services that it plans to open up to developers via the portal. These platforms and services provide additional functionality and enhancements to MasterCard’s payment capabilities. The Open APIs will further enhance the development of new applications and systems beyond those currently available, including CRMs, ERPs, online games, merchant e-commerce web sites, eWallets, mobile applications, and payroll systems.

I think this could get really interesting.
The more content is private the fewer pages of targeted advertising Facebook will serve. So if everything was private facebook would make less money.

By tricking users into making more information public they get more hits and get more opportunities to 'share' your data with 3rd parties.
Has anyone on HN gone through this program? I'm probably just dense but this is the first time I've heard of these guys. What do we know about them? Seems like your standard YC clone (not that there's anything wrong with that).
I see no real correlation between "great political ideas" and their source. You're just as likely to get terrible totalitarian, unworkable, incoherent, or simply misinformed ideas as good ones from any one source (e.g, Ayn Rand & co for an example of a series of well-formulated but relatively baseless ideas).

Is it possible that there is no way to predict the quality of these sorts of systems (assuming non-triviality) without actually carrying out an experiment?
Shameless plug:

I wrote an Android app a few months ago to help learn/maintain Spanish.

http://www.appbrain.com/app/com.h4labs.free.spanish_vocab

I've been studying Spanish for several years, including 10 weeks in Guatemala. It's easy to get rusty and I always need a refresher so I wrote this app. Gonna add more grammar and hopefully turn it into a "real" app, including versions for French(started), German, etc.
No, I quit after I wrote two games that were sold commercially, mandatory play for testing killed a lot of the fun.
That's not really true, Hawkins theory revolves around prediction as it relates to intelligence. There is an entire section at the end of the book that explains why intelligent machines based on the neocortical algorithm he proposes won't resemble human intelligence/self awareness for a long time to come (if ever).
This is a fairly simple wrapper around the TrailerAddict 'API' that makes it possible to get the trailer embed code for a movie automatically.

Their normal API interface requires that you supply the movie's 'tag' which is a TrailerAddict specific string that may or may not be similar to the move title.

Suggestions and constructive criticism welcomed!
Final day at Tech Crunch Disrupt
I used to play games a lot some years ago, but now when I start a new game I get stressed because I feel how my time is wasted without doing something ... good. I would rather prefer watching some soap (Friends, TBBT) and get back to work, or better, go out.
> but it certainly led to a reduction in obtaining-alcohol-related-crime.

As I pointed out, it's incomparable because it is a different type of crime. Prohibition of Alcohol probably would reduce the overall amount of crime in society. But it's another matter. If, on the other hand, prohibition drove individuals to other (hypothetically legal) substances which had the same affect as alcohol and were eventually as widespread then it is a comparable issue.

You can't turn around and present legalization as a way of reducing crime - because that seems very unlikely. It's better to rely on other arguments.
> What I'm curious about, for personal reasons, is whether learning additional languages early takes away any of the face-smashing in learning additional languages later on.

From my own experiene, a definite yes. I learned Polish rather later in life but already had 4 languages under my belt. It went relatively easy, even though I never got the hang of the writing (but then again, there was no need to).
Yes, I think so. People have been forced to settle with the SEC for comments made on forums for example.

http://news.cnet.com/SEC,-teen-settle-Net-stock-scheme-case/...
General-purpose languages that are "born" successfully (manage to gain a wide following) have a very hard time "dying" in the sense that everyone talks about. New lines of code will be written for 30+ years after a formerly successful language becomes functionally obsolete.

Perl already dead in the sense that it is no longer a "cool" language, and as such there aren't going to be many passionate programmers picking it up.

Once a language has lost the ability to recruit talented and passionate programmers, innovation dies soon thereafter. Perl may have new modules, but I'm not sure many of them can be called innovative- most of it is just "Me too!" kind of work.
I've learned a bunch of languages. Learning ANY language as second language helps with acquiring the next language. Here are tips I put on the Web for language learners:

http://learninfreedom.org/languagebooks.html

(Hmm, it's about time to revise that webpage, but the advice is still good.)
PNGs are good at compressing gradients too, I hear.
Even if that were true, I give money to Apple and I don't give any money to facebook. Apple extracts thousands of dollars directly from my wallet, while facebook just sells my wandering eyeballs.
A dropdown box on Facebook would do, but nobody can put it there so some people decided to go with Plan B.
I can see it now: Iowa becomes the new startup capital!
Because it's not going to work.
Is Organic Food More Healthful?
Wave's stuff isn't part of the standard right? So if I were using some other mail service/client I could only use the intersection of both services. Please correct me if I am wrong, I haven't had much exposure to wave (except a brief stint in the private beta where I realized nobody is using it, and therefore it was useless).
Research confirms that youth care about their reputation
Binary Search Revisited
It's his job to make his company's motivations understandable to users and to investors and to business partners.
And where do women get testosterone? Hanging around men. Seems like natural selection at work!
Have you ever tried to hold on to a small air filled rubber ball and swim to the bottom of the deep end of a pool? Its impossible. Now think about how that is magnified 1 mile below the ocean. A small amount of buoyant hydrates create a lot of upward pressure.
+1 for Sennheiser HD 280 Pros. I love these headphones. Treated myself to them this past Christmas. They do block out outside noise, so much so I sometimes don't realize if my desk phone is ringing -- but that's a good thing when I am focused on coding anyway. The sound quality is outstanding as well!
Crud. Well in that case... hey everybody, I don't own any Apple stock!
can quite sensibly be used by atheists since it means "assuming powers which should only belong to (hypothetical) gods"

Sorry, but I refuse to call atheist to anyone who believes that an arbitrary, human-made list of values can be "godlike" in any meaningful sense. If anything, should that person use that list of values to base their political or scientific arguments, I would call them theocrats.
Very interesting read, and deeply disappointing because it fails to provide any sort of conclusion, advice, prescription, etc. The summary of this article could be "Gee, we sure are sharing a lot of stuff on social networks these days."

It's very eloquent, but lacks a point. Shame.
Apple valuation may be a bubble; Microsoft valuation has been building for twice as long. This may be temporary.
What games?

Just curious and apoligies if this is common knowledge.
This does indeed suggest that there may be other factors at work. I could try tossing out other ideas, but they would be little more than hypothesis. (Bending during the tipping process damaging the joints in multi-segment launch vehicles? This might explain the difference with SpaceX's Falcons, which I believe do not have joints with O-rings.)
perhaps the technical people that want the engineering aren't the same ones making the purchasing decisions.
if I were a more principled person, I'd probably have quit over it.

There's a middle ground: Fight to change it. I've had sufficient personal success in a large corporation (50,000+ employees) to convince me to stick around and keep pushing. But then again, I am in a position to head elsewhere should progress stall. Having that degree of security has been important in being able to speak dispassionately to the issues with our previous policy.
Also see: http://www.goodsearch.com/
Personally, I've found it's very expressive and easy to follow, although I'm using Java play. And having reliable autocomplete and ctrl+click navigation is something I really missed in Rails, but have in Play.
One kind of pathogen only; no mention of the heavy chemical innoculation tap water uses to get so "pure".
More Thoughts on Transactional Memory
Email me your IP (jedberg@reddit.com) and we'll see if we can figure it out.