skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Reminds me about my experiences in martial arts; notably Brazilian Jiu Jitsu. You will go in every day to train and spar and get your ass kicked by someone smaller, bigger, weaker, stronger, newer, more experienced, etc. It gets pretty rough on the ego, and if you're not smart enough to figure out that all the ass kicking's don't really matter, then you'll be one of the guys who drops out. But if you keep coming every day, commit to training despite losing constantly, you'll be absorbing more and more information and progressing faster than people who train strictly to "win" or stroke their egos.

This happens with everyone, nobody ever gets to the top by being the best from the beginning. Thats why the best fighters in the world are very humble; they've paid their dues and got their asses kicked every day to get to the top.

There's something to learn from everyone, and learning never stops. The day you think you're better than everyone else, or are "good enough", is the day your results start declining.
I think the name is poorly chosen. Based on the name, I was expecting some sort of job/employer matching site. Instead...I got a site about answering questions.

When I want to ask a question to a group, I don't ask "Who'll help me", I ask "Does anybody know [anything about x]?"

Also, there weren't any answers on the site, just a bunch of questions. Having people who are willing to answer questions is far more important for repeat traffic, since the answers are the content.
Ehh, I was trying to show why "significant digests" are a poor approximation of accuracy.

His explanation in terms of addition is incomplete. Since "3" only has one significant digit (3.03.0 is a more precise number with 2 significant digits) the answer itself can have no more than one significant figure. 3 +/- .5 + 101.5 +/- .05 = 104.5 +/- 0.55 which has 2 significant digits. Now in his example 3 + 4.7 the three does limit the question to 1 significant digit, but your example has more than that even though your also adding 3 to a number (104.5 +/- 0.55)

PS: This is all assuming the accuracy based on the number of digits given you could easily have 3 +/- .0001 and 101.5 +/- 70.
See the top of
http://sivers.org/book/ArtOfLearning

The fixed theory of intelligence versus the growth/incremental.

You're right: no use to be an Eeyore and assume you're doomed.

But if you're dedicated to learning, then assuming you're currently below average keeps you learning harder than if you assume you're most of the way there.
These firms use Windows because of the tremendous cost associated with switching

It generally does not alway means that new firms will use them. If incumbent are bureaucratic and slow enough to the point of negating the regulations in place, than it might be easier for a linux using firm to enter the market.

If the regulations is skewed enough, than firms that used windows may in fact not died at all. Even though I know that the regulations is very skewed, I still like to think that the merit of other operating systems will win out in the long run, even if that long run is a really long time.
It's all "for now." Eventually we will exhaust the Earth's resources and possibly become enslaved by a race of artificial intelligence, but I'm not pretending to even think about solutions to those problems.

It'd also be cheaper to have slaves, but we don't do that either. The ends do not justify the means. In order for capitalism to be effective at increasing standard-of-living across the board and allocate resources and capital efficiently, it must be tempered with rules that set limits on what avenues are pursued for profit.
Uh, no. Aside from petroleum issues, it was a SUSTAINABLE CLOSED SYSTEM of trade among similarly-developed countries with similar standards. This could continue even if innovation had suddenly stopped in 1985.

It's only a closed system if you ignore the resources and cheap bottom-tier labor the first world extracted from the third world at a fraction of their potential value. The U.S. in particular was very active in this time period propping up puppet regimes around the third world in order to get cheap access to their raw materials and labor. The world has never been a closed system.
Ha, these guys were doing screencasts before the concept of screencasts existed.
A month earlier someone posted a link to the same email as a comment to a different 37signals post

http://37signals.com/svn/archives2/define_enterprise_in_10_w...
btw, do you ever think we'll reach a point where it will be common to have 99.9%+ automated factories? (robotic, possibly even full input/output lifecyle & distribution, etc.)

I think one way to answer this is by analogy to farming. Every year, less and less of our food is touched by human hands on its way to the market.

According to the USDA, in 1900 41% of the American workforce was employed in agriculture. If you went back to 1900 and told a farmer that fewer than 2% of Americans would be involved in the production of food in 100 years, would he believe you?

This tectonic change has gone unnoticed by most because displaced agricultural workers have been able to find gainful employment elsewhere. The whole issue here, I think, is what we'll do when most of the productive labor across all economic sectors isn't needed anymore. So yes, in that sense, whether we use 99% automated domestic factories or whether we build 99% of our stuff overseas, I think we'll reach that point.
You're talking about saving 3 bytes per int. I'd imagine it's pretty hard to find a workload where you can achieve 75% compression by using exclusively varints that are less than 128 in magnitude. In fact, I'd imagine that most of the data shipped in most workloads is mostly strings/binary, which have very little if any savings.

So let's talk about the ideal situation where we have exclusively fields that are varints that are limited to 128. This means that each will be 2 bytes (1 for field data + 1 for the varint itself, both of which are under 128 in magnitude). How many of these can we fit? Well, if we use the bottom 3 bits for specifying the type (a conservative estimate) that leaves only 4 bits (remember, subtract 1 for varint or not) to ID them, which means 16. So if a message has 16 fields and we save 6 bytes per request, we're talking a savings of 96 bytes. For the next 2048 entries, we're saving, 5 bytes per (5kb vs 15kb), then beyond that, we're saving 4 bytes per (and eventually none). This is also an incredibly arbitrary situation where you expect ALL of your fields to be small ints.

Same with disk, it's unlikely that your workloads will allow you to save a lot by using varints.

So, you're right that, for some workloads, this may be better, but if someone put a gun to my head and said "protocol buffers or thrift?" I'd have to go with thrift.
I really like the fair tax, but it bothers me that it is regressive. I know it is the same % for everyone, and there is the rebate at the poverty line, but the wealthy spend a much smaller percentage of their money at the retail level. Why is buying a car taxed but buying a company isn't? I've heard different answers but I'm not convinced by any of them.
Not for the field keys :) But yes, for the actual data you're in no way bound to varints and it's worth stating so.
I think you were being sarcastic, alluding to teachers doling out gold stars for effort. Sarcasm doesn't really play well on mediums without body language or intonation. If this was your intention, then I agree with you.

Talent and intelligence tends to cluster in individuals. People who are above average in certain skills tend to be above average in related skills; the converse is also true. Yes, certain classes of skill tend to have an inverse relationship with others, but I don't think it's a problem of the "definition of above average." Instead, I think people simply have evolutionary reasons for inflating their worth.
Hear hear.

China manipulates its currency, and so does the US: to keep the rich rich. If we were on the gold standard (not that I'm saying we should be) the dollar would already be worthless and US labor would be competitive. But then Wall Street 20yos wouldn't be able to afford a ferrari.

We must either begin enforcing fair trade, and fair employment, or we must face the fact that tens of millions will be unemployed. We cannot support them either. They will not be able to buy the iphones or the xboxes that pay our salaries, and we wont be able to pay our taxes.

And do you imagine that they will just starve to death? Or is LA a testbed for containing the lawless future?

I do not know what is happening to the USA. It seems as if those who should know better are willfully ignoring the consequences of their actions.
Simple answer is that it depends

Depends on if you care about the scalability, optimization, and speed of the site. If you do then you will pay a lot for US dev

The alternative is to outsource and get all those features for 2k. Go to elance, guru, odesk, or getafreelancer.

The latter I would suggest for proof of concept of prototyping an idea. Once you get a whole bunch of traffic and users you can rebuild it correctly when it's worth it to do so.

Launch fast with the least investment.
...until other people I trust to be objective tell me otherwise.
But Gandhi shouldn't have had to be completely responsible for how his son turned out (assuming he turned out badly).

I might blame some but not all parents, as a class, if their kids became alcoholic, but in the case of specific individuals it's hard to say.

I agree with you on the first point.
oh snap!
I love my Kindle (1st Gen). I took it into court with me every day. It was the smallest, lightest item in my briefcase.

Despite its ugly appearance, it's easy enough to use that octogenarian judges were able to start using my Kindle without any assistance.

Plus, even though the Kindle uses proprietary DRM, that DRM is easier to remove than the ePub DRM. I've archived DRM-free copies of every book I've purchased from the Kindle store.

As other commentators have pointed out, the Kindle is not a good choice for technical books in the Mobi format because the Kindle overrides fonts and spacing. However, I haven't had any problems reading technical books in PDF format on my brother's Kindle 2.
"There is a great deal of historical revisionism happening here. Liberals and progressives don't hate or even begrudge wealthy people. We do have a problem with crooks who use our retirement to gamble on casino derivatives, and then expect the federal government to bail them out (there is an example of socialism for you--privatizing the profit and socializing the risk). Recent wall street action and other corporate maleficent beg the question of Ziad, does wealth accumulation really indicate moral integrity? Does that suggest that people who aren’t rich, don’t have moral integrity? I don’t think rich people necessarily lack moral integrity, but I don’t think it is an indication of it either. There are other great attempts to revise history by the far right especially in an attempt to make Hoover into a progressive, so conservatives don't have to take the blame for the great depression. Hoover was against regulation. The favorite phrase of the Republican presidents in the 1920s was "What is good for GM is good for America." This is what led to the great depression. Hoover did implement some tariffs after the depression hit, but that was a drop in the bucket compared to what came after FDR. The GDP drop from the great depression hit a few months after FDR took office. It skyrocketed up over the next several years--unemployment went down by half by 1937. Questions for you who see class envy from those espousing liberal policies? If redistribution is so bad then why, since the income tax was passed (1916), has the US built the strongest economy and middle class known to the world? If Keynesian economic is not successful, then why from 1933 to 1980 (Nixon said "we are Keynesians now) did the US experience explosive economic growth? If redistribution and Keynesian economics are so unfair to entrepreneurs, why was has there always been a thriving wealthy class since the US inception even during the New Deal and Great Society era? Why, if deregulation is so troublesome, did we not have banking and financial calamities like the Savings and Loan scandal, stock market crashes, and the derivative blowup from the time of FDR until Ronald Reagan come along and dismantled the regulatory infrastructure? And my favorite historical revision attempt: Why, if lowering taxes on the wealthy create more revenue, did Clinton raising of taxes increase revenues and create a surplus? Why when Bush lowered taxes on the rich, did revenues nose dive for six years and turn a surplus to deficit?"
As someone who is currently an IBM employee, this is news to me.
I remain optimistic about the prospect for more IP jobs. We don't need five billion of them though. I think there's a limit on what types of things will make economic sense to be automated. People often far underestimate the efficiency of humans at service tasks and overestimate the cheapness and ease at which robots and computers can do things that humans find simple. History has shown us that computers and robots are often good at things humans suck at, but are often very very bad at things we find simple. Also, I think as the world becomes less and less "human," demand for personalized and human services will surge.

Your bank example is an interesting one. Have banks decreased the number of tellers due to ATMs and online banking? Not really. The tellers can also process more transactions per unit of time because of computer automation. Banking services have just become more convenient and available to a larger audience through reduction of costs. When was the last time you paid for a checking account?

There are some excellent signs that the world population will self-regulate. The more a country develops, the more reproduction falls. The elite have the most to lose in any anarchy scenario, and control the vast majority of resources that can be used to prevent it.

The real future threat is resource exhaustion, not lack of jobs, lack of capital, or robots.
Especially for driving, I think most people are above average. This is because the distribution of driving ability is negatively skewed, meaning the tail on the left is longer than the tail on the right.

If you were to put a number on driving ability, most people would get something like a seven (out of a maximum of 10).

In my opinion, there would be a very small amount of two's and fives. There would also be a small percentage that would get a one out of a maximum of a ten. (The drivers that don't follow the speed limit, make dangerous overtaking maneuvers, and are agressive towards other drivers).

I think those drivers make most people claim they have an "above average" driving ability.
Interestingly, apparently Google has the MySQL query engine running on BigTable.

That might make migrating from Oracle to BigTable a bit easier.
It's ok, I'm interpreting all of these downvotes as sarcasm.
Totally agree about the Kindle DX not really being great for technical books. I have a DX, love it, but I generally still by technical books in hard copy because the charts, tables, etc are much easier to read.
Many of them shifted into fields that didn't exist in 1900 because in 1900, food and shelter were the majority of what people in the US worked for.
Huh? I use protocol buffers for rpc all the time. It's even supported in the .proto message format, to wit:

rpc Search(SearchTermProto) returns (SearchResultProto);

Have I missed something?
If anyone's interested, we're hiring :)

http://www.iteleportmobile.com/jobs
Might be like digital cameras and the added shutter noise - speakers outside each car broadcasting pre-recorded engine noises based on a factor of electrical output and fuel load, plus some random number so the looped track doesn't sound like a looped track.
For a while after I first saw that, my opinion of myself became slightly oscillatory. (Then after a bit I went looking for objective measures, which besides being more stable have the extra benefit of showing how to improve.)
One very minor mention of subpixel rendering, no mentions of antialiasing, no mentions of hinting. This piece focuses almost entirely on structural and library issues rather than the actual rendering of text (which is still subpar on Linux compared to OS X, though somewhat better than Windows).
New Futurama episode makes fun of iPhone, Apple users
This is exactly right. I actually was a user of enterprise software at the university and put together a list of my complaints about the software. Probably a list of ten items.

To my utter surprise there were good reasons for why 9 of my items worked the way they did. And some of them were things like it actually being a law that you had to explicity retype a student's identification code.

The problem with enterprise software, is less often the software, and more often the enterprise. I've seen expense reports that have had to go through 6 organizations, each with slightly different ways of handling various parts (some handle things for tax purposes, others of SarbOx, others for fraud detection, etc...). It's not as easy as an iPad sketch program.
These people are very, very valuable. Hang on to them.
The approach I find myself taking is to keep moving the goal posts by putting myself in groups where I genuinely am below average, or at a minimum where there are prominent examples around me of people much better than me at the thing I'm trying to do.

There's also something about approaching one's limits that helps distill genuine personal weaknesses and learn to either live with or work around them.
30:1 longshot bet "investors", you mean like VC's and angels? And corporate raiders? You mean the people who buy and improve the value of existing companies [1]?

I'm really not sure what your criticism of Blackhawk Partners is. Could you elaborate?

[1] Or occasionally shut them down and sell their assets to more productive companies.
Quite true - the problem we have is not capitalism; it's corporatism: the alliance of corporate oligarchs and the state.
Disease and intelligence: Mens sana in corpore sano
Fake Explanations
This is a great mindset to have. For his next achievement, Mr. Sivers should try to combine sentences in paragraphs.
He agrees with you. You both come to the same conclusion. What you fail to realize is that we've essentially paid the capital to educate people and build infrastructure in another country. Once their wages rise and our massive capital investments no longer make economic sense, they've gained these, and we are stuck without domestic manufacturing capacity. Essentially, we are mortgaging our future.
Read what I said - I said "muzzle" them, not eliminate them, Captain Strawman, And I've been to China, and yes it feels like stepping into a smoke-filled room.
I've found that when I have less than 15-20mb memory left everything is slow. I know it will kill programs as it needs memory but even waking from standby takes longer.

This could be more of a function of the Jailbreak on my 3G than the software.
Kayak also runs on top of ITA

(only 90% sure, i can't find my notes to confirm right now. i had to know this a few months ago for work reasons)
Is there a reason why you chose to pivot to this extreme immediately after all I did was argue to attack things that result in high labor costs for domestic manufacturing, or are you just an unserious hyperbolic reactionary by nature?
Internal Google Social Media Research
LightScribe on Ubuntu | Public Relations | Business -
Funny how reports of this bogus conversation can make it to the top of HN, yet the articles I submit on possible future apple products always get deleted. =(
Not to mention dropping the realtime buzzword.
I believe its about attitude. One need consider him/herself to be below average to be attentive to what others say and not consider others stupid.
Considering myself below average has not really worked for me, this has actually hit my confidence and made me apprehensive about sharing my views
Highly Relevant: https://secure.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/wiki/Dunning%E2%80...
What you desire is the exact sort of use case that companies like Orbitz were created to serve.
Wasn't there just a thread about the Dunning-Kruger effect recently?

Anyhow, yes; the more you know the more you know that you know little. The more experienced you are the more you know that you lack experience.

But that doesn't mean that you're not knowledgeable or experienced. This kind of worldview is a good basis for approaching anything, but it's not a good way to make decisions.
Some additional comments on my survey submission:

I've begun rolling my own small leaderboard & badge/reward component for my (unlaunched) site and I'd be very interested to see what your API is like.

I'm a fan of the "serious game" element on consumer sites that suit it, though have little interest in seeing badges spring up on every second site I'm registered with (let alone virtual goods).

I checked $50-100/month as I've no good revenue projections yet and my site's market is relatively niche. Badges would be a nice flair, but I don't see a 3rd-party API pulling in >$100/month in value anytime soon. My site is already based on scoring so the leaderboard element is the one I'm focusing more on at the moment.
What's a new project in Java? Last time this came up, the only examples given were five years old (note: "new" meaning newly launched, not just those that are active). Not bashing Java; this is a genuine question.
Yes, very. I could tell you all about the glycosidic linkages.

Some observations: Polysaccharides are not sugars. Mono- and di-saccharides made of carbohydrates are. Glucose has other uses than becoming cellulose or starch or glycogen. The life cycle of a plant is not linear or simplistic. CO2 is not only used as a substrate in anabolism.
I'm very surprised there's no prior art here. It seems like something I've seen before, although I can't think of any specific examples. (I've definitely seen old flashlights designed for those big square 6V lantern batteries so that, as long as you put the thing in with the contacts facing up, they would always work...)

If there's no prior art in the wild, then my tendency is to wonder why not -- I find it pretty hard to believe the guys at Microsoft are the first to think of this. I wonder if some poorly-manufactured batteries would short out the contacts, and that's why other designers have shied away from doing it?
Yes, it does. It's in the press release at: http://investor.google.com/releases/2010/0701.html

"ITA's QPX software tool for organizing flight information is used by leading airlines and travel distributors worldwide including Alaska Airlines, American Airlines, Bing, Continental Airlines, Hotwire, Kayak, Orbitz, Southwest Airlines, TripAdvisor, United Airlines, US Airways, Virgin Atlantic Airways and others."
I would often assume people I met were smarter than I was. I was proven wrong time and time again.
Interesting that it's a mechanical design and not an electronic solution, which was my first intuition.

One interesting thought: is the lack of battery installation diagram going to cause consternation in consumers who are by now very accustomed to battery installation diagrams?
This is interesting, but will it work in practice? It seems that this merely relies on the little bump on the plus side of a battery to differentiate between the positive and negative end. But this would make the clearances very small, so I am not sure it will work in practice with different batteries and people jamming them in and out, etc.
If you went back to 1900 and told a farmer that fewer than 2% of Americans would be involved in the production of food in 100 years, would he believe you?

And he would be wise not to... well at least not if you add Farmville numbers in there.
I was kind of disappointed that it wasn't an active voltage-sensing solution. If it works well with all batteries (even cheap ones) then I guess it's a good hack though.