skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I have A, B, and C tags ordered by "importance" to me - i.e. mostly rss feeds where I want to read or skim every entry.

The rest are ordered by category/tag.

Works fine for me!

Also I use Postrank to turn some of the high-volume into low-volume high-importance feeds.
If you look at the first sentence of the article, it is linked to the subheading of a blog post that explained my intellectual evolution -- the subtitle of which was "The Contemporary Philosopher’s Stone" which is how I refer to this problem. (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Philosophers_stone) You're not the only one drawing the comparison ;)
david seems like a raging asshole.
Medical Pics
Yes, but that should not be necessary unless an application is hung.

It's much easier and quicker to quit Safari by closing its tabs.
My optometrist told me the following rule: 20-20-20

At least every 20 minutes look away from the monitor at something (the ceiling in the far corner, ideally out a window) at least 20 feet away for 20 seconds.

I have a pair of computer prescription glasses. They seem to have helped me vision from declining more.
If there's something everyone needs to do, no amount of education will saturate the population to the point that everyone required to do it, does it. Some people just don't care outside of the here and now, unless they're made to care with a carrot or a stick. You need to have a law either punishing them for not doing it, or rewarding them for doing it (i.e. carbon-neutral business tax credits) for them to pay attention. (And even then, some people still won't care, or will willfully skirt the law. Hopefully this number will be negligible enough to allow the law to still have its intended effect.)

Don't think of it as a big, scary, nebulous concept like "justice", though. Call it what it is: game design. The body of law is the game that every citizen of a country is always playing, and like any game, you can encourage paths to be followed, and choices to be made, by putting variable-scheduled rewards and increasing "justified" challenges along those paths.

The only people who need to understand the "public policy questions", in a world where public policy is set up as law, are the legislators (the "game designers"). This is simply an argument for better-educated legislators, not a better-educated populace.
Huh? I wasn't talking about that. I don't have to pay for cable tv to get ESPN 3. I have to pay for internet. I'm very aware of that.
I'm not talking about voluntary compliance to government regulation.

I'm talking about regulation and government freely agreed to by people when they decide to engage in an activity in an area. And these rules should be decided upon by those whose property is at stake, not by people who just collect tax revenue off in Washington.

The problem is that no system of property has been worked for territorial waters. So no one has any direct financial stake or right to investigate and sure over pollution from rivers. That must wait until the government decides to give it its fully divided and compromised attention.

Human beings only need to be coerced when they fail to live up to their agreements or when they violate the rights of others. But that is not the wrong use of force I seek to stop. Its authorized by your human rights and by the contracts people freely agree to.

Beyond that, coercion is destructive and should be avoided. There is no right that authorizes its use.
I like my droid. The keyboard is great for things like this post. It's fast. The screen is lovely. The integration with google services is smooth.

TBH I was a bit worried that I'd regret not getting another iPhone but I'd never go back to that world now.
I fully agree that finance is useful because it increases market efficiency. The problem is that like most fields, most of it is uncreative legwork that doesn't provide much leverage to get rich from. So a smart creative person should consider whether they're falling into the cognitive trap of "I want to make money, finance deals with piles of money, so I should apply my creativity to finance".

It's just a crapshoot unless you have some real information asymmetry[1] you can exploit to make money. This could be in the form of noticing some sort of systematic inefficiency, having a unique and effective strategy of gaining market information to identify mispricings, etc. Otherwise you'd be better off finding some unmet need to creatively address and avoiding the cognitive trap that leads from "I want money" to "I should go into finance".

1. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Information_asymmetry
I have both the Droid and Nexus One. Nifty keyboard aside, Nexus One is a much better phone hands down. Lot's of instability problems with the Droid, and performance overall is much slower (and the keyboard while neat does make the device heavier and clunkier).
that's very cool. Does it have any cool space saving features you can show us?
Looks interesting. What have you done with it?
It should be noted that these things help with productivity in the office as well, raising the heart rate can help stimulate the mind and help with the after lunch food coma that most of us experience!
This is awesome. Congratulations to the always-incredible developers of ffmpeg.

One thing is worrisome about this: since H.264 (the current industry standard video codec) and VP8 are highly similar, we can share code (and more importantly: optimizations) between FFmpeg’s H.264 and VP8 decoders

So it looks like VP8 is so similar to H.264 that decoders for the two can share quite a bit of code (something Jason Garrett-Glaser suggested might be the case: http://x264dev.multimedia.cx/?p=377 ). Have to admit that this doesn't seem to bode too well for VP8's claim to relative freedom from patent litigation.
Cycling Devices, Inventions, and Discoveries
I'm not British (or David), but I think if I were (either or both), I would say, "That's rather the point."

It's meant to be funny. I laughed and posted it, but I grant that your mileage may vary. (If you're on the fence, try this one: http://www.27bslash6.com/p2p2.html.)
yeah, I think the website says he has several small houses on his property. I guess all his guests get their "own room" :-)

One thing I like about it is how easy it is to completely clean the house from top to bottom. But no place washer and dryer. I think it would be cool to have one as a retreat.
It is a cofounder though, maybe not literally or by definition, but someone who plays a large part and owns a large stake in the project. I didn't see anything about hiring, he's looking for a technical partner.
Which part of the Java experience did you hate?

1. Java the language? It has abominable syntax and execrable semantics. Clojure fixes this; interop makes even strongly Java-flavored code tolerable. With Clojure, even Swing sucks less.

2. The JVM? Honestly, the JVM is rather nice. Except for the startup time, it's refreshingly fast. With Clojure, you don't really need to restart the JVM very often.

3. Learning about the classpath? It's no worse than PYTHONPATH or GEM_PATH, and far more self-contained by default. This makes deployment much easier. Yes, you have to understand it up-front, but what is difficult about it? It's a list of libraries your app depends on. Clojure is one of those libraries. Unless you need to compile your Clojure code into .class files, that's it.

4. Ant? It's a poorly-designed monstrosity with horrific XML syntax. Don't use it. You don't need it.

5. Maven? Yes, it's a beast, and unfortunately, you need it. Luckily, the latest version of Leiningen wraps it very nicely, so you don't need to learn the details. You also don't need to look at its XML. You just make a project.clj file, put in your dependencies, and run "lein repl".
All money is fictional, in that it only has value to the degree that people agree and believe it has value. This is no less true for the US dollar than it is for gold, silver, oil, cattle, etc.
I take short-term jobs and contract work for a few months, then quit everything for full-time research. Usually the jobs I take happen to require learning something tangential but possibly useful. It's a happy coincidence that I am perfectly happy with the absurd level of frugality required. (I live in a place that most people call the "House of Squalor. It's really not dirty, but it is semi-dilapidated.)
I like it being noisy! Of course, it's best if you have your own office.
I use much less math than your average quant. I prefer simulations with a lot of agents. Think Game of Life, not partial differential equations.
About a month ago, I ordered a HTC desire online from the UK (I'm in Australia). So far I couldn't be happier with it! The screen is large and responsive to touch. The entire experience is snappy, and the modifications HTC has made to the default Andriod look and feel work well. I highly recommend the desire.
I agree that other drugs are definitely harder to obtain, however I still believe that the people who would try and use harder drugs would remain the same. I just don't think the demand is that high for hard drugs such as LSD, cocaine, heroine, etc would increase with additional supply. Its just not that common for people to want to to them. Therefore, if they were legal there just wouldn't be that much of a market for those drugs and again there wouldn't be any noticeable difference in the day to day to the non-user.
I was not out of school at 17. What caused you to infer that? (I'd like to correct it if it sounds that way.)

I am actually starting a masters/Ph.D. program in the fall in computational social sciences. Like I mentioned in the post, I am interested in social systems in general, not only markets. (However, I do find markets to be the most interesting.)
I have an Incredible. Sense (HTC's UI tweaks) is very nice, and I thought it was a must have, but I played with someone's Nexus One, and I think it's fine. In some ways I prefer the stock UI, and getting all of the updates instantly would be really nice. (I'm still waiting impatiently on Froyo, which will come "in the 2nd half of the year" or when someone figured out how to root the Incredible :) )

I'm not sure how pay-as-you-go would work, but you definitely can be without a 2-year contract if you buy a Nexus One. (Though you probably could just pay full price to get an Incredible or the like and also do that.) If I had to guess, I'd say that people's pay-as-you-go data rates will be really high (since most people with pay-as-you plans don't have smartphones) that it won't be worth it. But if you do want to go that route, look at different companies' rates and see if it'll work.

I really like my Incredible, and I'm glad I got off AT&T since I'm heading to Silicon Valley in the fall, but I kind of wish I had gotten a Nexus One so I could get Froyo. It's going to be awhile 'til I get it, and when I do, it probably won't have WiFi hotspot, so I'm going to have to use PDANet or the like if I want tethering.

Here's the rundown of pros and cons as I see it:

* Nexus One--Get updates immediately without carrier interference. Nice hardware. Stock Android.

* HTC Incredible--Basically the same hardware as the Nexus One. 8MP camera instead of 5. Verizon. Takes awhile to get new Android versions.

* HTC EVO--Big screen, but also big physically (you have to carry it around in your pocket everywhere, remember). Apparently has pretty bad battery life. Have to be on Sprint. Same Sense pros and cons as the Incredible.

* Droid X--Also big like the EVO. Verizon. Pretty similar to it spec-wise. Has a special Motorola-branded Android, so also will probably be slow to get new updates. I generally consider HTC to make better hardware than Motorola. Hard to know too much since it's not out yet.

* Droid 2--hard to know too much since it's not out for awhile, but you probably don't want it unless you have to have a physical keyboard. You probably don't need one. The correction is pretty nice, and lately I've been using Swype, which allows me to type pretty fast.

If I were you, I'd get the Nexus One unless you really prefer Sense to stock Android or really prefer Verizon to AT&T/T-Mobile, in which case I'd get the Incredible.
These are acceptable, but there's enough keystroke lag that using it for coding gets pretty annoying. Editing files locally fixes the most important latency issues.
I do have to say I still haven't gotten entirely used to the keyboard on the Droid. It can be hard to tell where the individual keys are, and the keys are a little shallow so it's not the most responsive.

Another benefit for the Nexus One is that it does seem to get updates the soonest out of all the Android phones, whereas I'm still waiting for 2.2 on my Droid. Hopefully it'll be updated soon though now that Froyo has been open sourced.
Except that we live in a democracy, where people vote for the legislators who they think will do the better job. When the populace believe in stupid things, you'll get legislators who pander to that, while ignoring the important stuff.
Computer science largely falls under the old dictum, "if it has the word 'science' in the name it isn't one".
Regarding "whitespace" - I personally find head room to be a lot more psychologically meaningful that square footage (in other words, I'd rather live in a 1,000 sf house with 9ft ceilings than a 2,000 sf house with 7 foot ceilings, although the analogy breaks down eventually). And the advantage of head room is that you can't fill it with junk :-)

I wonder whether "digital packratting" (collecting e-books, scanning everything to Evernote, collecting gaming "trophies") can replace the hoarding need that is so important to many people, but without the downside of being burried in clutter.
I don't think this is something that "everyone needs to do"...I mean, there will always be substantial numbers of people who believe the earth is flat, the stars control our destinies, etc. Talk of reaching everyone seems like a distraction.

The real issue is that if 30-60% of the population thinks climate change is bunk, there's no way to make them care with carrots and sticks because opposing them becomes politically difficult.

The only people who need to understand the "public policy questions", in a world where public policy is set up as law, are the legislators (the "game designers"). This is simply an argument for better-educated legislators, not a better-educated populace.

I don't think this is true at all. Legislators do not have absolute freedom to legislate, even on topics for which the public is ignorant. Such topics can be demagogued which means that they're politically toxic to legislators, even for legislators that understand the issues completely.

If I'm a legislator who is convinced that climate change is a huge problem but I also know that most of my constituents don't believe that, then I'd better not vote for a carbon tax or else I'll lose the next election. Those incentives remain true no matter how much I understand the public policy. It is true that we don't need everyone to fully understand all public policy, but we do need a decent fraction of the population to understand the big issues well enough to make addressing them politically feasible.
The real problem is that to understand a statement like "And that's why I hate cats", you have to realize that it's asserting a relationship between the speaker (the "I") and cats, and that the justifications given must therefore contain facts about both the speaker, cats, and the two together, not simply facts about cats alone.

In other words—cats (and Forth) are generally well-known. You aren't. If you're going to tell us why you hate Forth, you should be giving us less facts about Forth, and more facts about yourself.
I think just about everything anyone believes is false, or at least arbitrary and unfounded. We lack the frameworks to examine the vast majority of things that determine our decisions, and are thus de facto beliefs.
Link: http://ed.fnal.gov/projects/scientists/andy.html
By sophisticated, I meant refined and cultivated, not devoid of simplicity. It was a poor choice of words. At some point in my development, I started to eschew more complicated forms of AI and machine learning, in favor of simpler agent-based models with "laughably" simple assumptions. I think it's the proper direction, then again, the title I chose for the post was not arbitrary. ;)
Samsung Galaxy S, it's not getting as much attention as HTC or Motorola phones, but it's still got the features. Plus, it's available for the cheap (about $59 per month with 1GB data transfer here in Australia)
Avoid Suicidal thoughts |How To Prevent Suicide
Seriously! I hadn't seen this article before... Brilliant! I get the sports thing. Thank god for the Sox or half of our city would've killed themselves by now (yes I love the Cubbies too and hope they take the pennant someday really soon! - Go Cubbies!) but why the heck do we get this guff?
iPhone 4 is the best mobile phone on the market — period.
It is a great idea, though a little too over-designed. The concept gets in the way of reading more than it should.
What? Their time-tested bond arbitrage algorithms worked great. They beat the market month after month.

Only when they tried speculating on equities did they fail. And even then, their positions only took short-term losses that they would have recovered from had they not been leveraged 100-to-1. Their algorithms were correct, but they didn't have enough capital to see their positions through to the end.

The LTCM story is about greed and leverage, not algorithmic trading. Plenty of money can be made trying to beat the market: it pays the salaries of the hundreds of thousands of investment bank employees around the world. The problem is, you personally can't do the same things they do, because you don't have enough capital.

Raise a billion dollars and your days of commuting to work are over.
Well, patents only cover the patented claims, though the lawyers try to make them cover as much as possible, which is how we get these ridiculous overreaching patents. But maybe this can be said to show that those features are, on some level, generic (i.e. not innovative/novel), and therefore the sort of thing that shouldn't be protected by patents.

That said, I certainly hope that the Bilski decision is a reasonable one, lest we end up with patented novels, grocery lists and other inane legal "innovations." Because I just can't see the MPEG-LA sitting around while Google derails their gravy train. I don't know what they'll do, but FUD and litigation seem like the most likely options. If I had to bet, I'd say that they're gathering up whatever patents they can find and waiting to see how Bilski turns out, so that they don't get shut down right at the start.
PayPal X Developer Network
The %ages for English language are all over the place in terms of errors, depending on which source is taken and whether the same words are counted on multiple occurrences.

(see comments http://paul.kedrosky.com/archives/2010/06/the_web_is_brou.ht...)

It's a cute post, but I'm not drawing many conclusions from it.
That assumes pg does better than average at choosing startups. I agree, he SEES a lot more than most folks.
Sort of. We don't vote for legislators based on their beliefs or knowledge-bases, we vote for legislators based on a combination of status moves, group affiliations, and physical characteristics that have more in common with mate selection than anything else. What legislators pander to while looking to get elected, has little to do with what laws they end up actually passing.

There's no real correlation between what the populace believes, and what its elected representatives believe. (Well, there would be if we were all purely rational beings who hadn't invented lying and adhered to Aumann's agreement theorem...) In algorithmic terms—this isn't a hill-climbing heuristic, where you'll eventually optimize toward politicians that believe something in particular; it's a random search.
Sounds smart, but does anyone really do that? Starting with an API? Seems very clean, but I've never seen a startup actually do that. The API is always a tack-on.
I realized these were just people, prone to the same errors in judgment that everyone else deals with.

I don't understand how this is relevant to the discussion. No one has ever claimed that scientists are all-knowing or super-human or somehow not subject to the cognitive defects endemic to all human brains.

But just because scientists are human and make mistakes does not mean that their claims about scientific matters are wrong. I mean, my attorney is a human guy who makes typical human mistakes, but when it comes to giving me legal advice, he's a hell of a lot better than the average person. His expertise is beneficial even though he sometimes forgets things or gets confused or gets angry or suffers from status quo bias. All those problems mean that I should exercise some judgment while considering his advice, but statistically, his advice is still much better than what I could come up with on my own.
Ask HN: Review my new Web app - Weekis
Please share your feedback on this side-project I've been working on lately.

Weekis is a minimal, unobtrusive and focused week planning tool - http://weekis.com

There are thousands of to-do lists, week organizers, productivity apps, time and task managers out there. Most such apps are overwhelming, bloated or obtrusive. Weekis is different in that it is minimal and unobtrusive.

I developed Weekis out of my own need to manage my weekly tasks better. While it requires discipline to manage time, I think that the discipline must come from within, rather than enforced limitations, nagging or nudging.

I've been using Weekis for the past few months and I've felt a clear improvement in my task management. I no longer procrastinate (as much).

Weekis requires no obligation. It doesn't throw constant attention-seeking, concentration-breaking alerts or reminders, yet it will make it easy for you to recall your weekly tasks and focus on what's important. Weekis provides a clear week view, without the clutter of dates or time slots.

You can create as many tasks as you want, but you may find that Weekis intuitively promotes the "do less" principle, by encouraging you to only have a few, more important, tasks each day.

I'll appreciate your suggestions.
LSD isn't a "hard drug" in the slightest. But more importantly, cocaine and heroin don't have constricted supply--you can get plenty of both. I don't think there's enough LSD to satisfy demand at the moment, especially not with authenticity concerns.
Link: http://weekis.com
The title was unnecessarily provocative, a reflection of my mood at the time of writing it. (It's Sunday; I'm hung-over; and I was looking at the results of a four day simulation run that were ambiguous.)

My priority is in "beating the markets" because it's a fascinating challenge. I also have interests that lie beyond satisfying my intellectual curiosity but require wealth. I find the idea of using my own wealth to solve problems (e.g. avenues of cancer research) far more appealing than fund-raising or requiring public funds.
When I've needed to work with Java libraries from Clojure, I've continually felt that Clojure provides enough abstractions over Java's syntax/conventions to make it not an issue.

Java libraries are so numerous and prevalent that I'm growing to prefer that kind of availability. Coming from Python, I'm not uncomfortable at all with Clojure's java library use.

It really doesn't feel like I'm interfacing with Java. It feels like I'm interfacing with a library designed with OOP. (No more verbose or unwieldy than necessary, given an object-oriented library.)
The life cycle is weeks; you probably need several apps in the store at various stages of lifecycle, and several more in development simultaneously to "make a living"
...as long as you don't need to make a phone call.
This is HUGE. The new hire can wind up with a substantial tax bill, and no cash to pay it with. Don't gloss over this!