skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
You've learned a lot, so you're obviously not a failure, but I think your post illustrates how draining a winner-take-all field like quantitative trading can be. You can never be sure if your wins or losses are real or just mirages caused by noise. Humans need the emotional encouragement that incremental success brings. Nothing get's me excited to work more than a good day of sales or a thoughtful comment from a customer. It takes a special type of personality to keep on persisting in the face of repeated failure. Certain start-ups also have winner-take-all properties. Anything that relies on network externalities or advertising revenue is more risky. The rewards can be big, but I prefer markets where the product's value isn't a function of the customer base and success is more incremental.
Does it really matter? Most people can believe in witches, intelligent design and what not while doing their jobs good enough. Europe, Far East, Russia trust science way more, but it doesn't seem to lead to any significant advantage.
Virtually all of these states could make significant progress on their budgets by cutting the pay of government employees. Teachers, police officers and assorted bureaucrats all tend to be overpaid for the work they do.

The fact that not a single state is even attempting to do this suggests they are all just waiting for the feds to bail them out.
Genetically Altered Salmon Get Closer to the Table
If HTML/CSS (or more specifically, some HTML renderer) had somewhat better support for paragraph-level typography and column-by-column or page-by-page layout (that is, hyphenation, justification with proper paragraph composition, widow/orphan controls, better floating image positioning especially in a multi-column context, some ability to organize floating content both horizontally and vertically without using tables, page numbering and same-page footnote layout, etc.), then it would be a perfectly fine e-book format (or, for that matter, printed book format). Adding support for all the typographic features in modern fonts (small caps, uncommon ligatures, lower-case numbers, etc.) would be a nice plus, but wouldn't really be essential.

Unfortunately, as it is, the book printers of the 16th century were able to make more readable text layouts than can be easily done with HTML/CSS today. Instead, all the new HTML/CSS features are focused on whiz-bang, rather than getting the (text) basics right.
"... Things that may change the world someday. Maybe not today, maybe not tomorrow."

Well said.
the first two angles make sense. Facebook is what facebook is because of the culture around it. Culture changes with the emergence of new technologies/features. So i would think that the most probable scenario for a facebook death involves new companies that make better use of emerging technologies, e.g. geolocation. And i happen to believe that if facebook drops the ball on geolocation, and geolocation services see a major increase in popularity, we may see the birth of a competitive social graph. That is a real possibility.

As for your third angle, I think there is room for a niche-facebook that could be crazy profitable--but i don't see a niche social network taking over the social graph. that seems relatively far-fetched.
I have 2 suggestions:

1) How hard would it to write a JavaScript/HTML port of it? I don't see why anyone in the modern day and age should need to download and install a program to play with BASIC. It should be possible to interpret BASIC directly in JavaScript, all within the browser. I don't believe any server round trips should even be necessary.

2) Have you let David Brin know about your effort? He seems to be doing talks on the subject still as recently as '09, so he might be able to at least mention it to people.
We have/had a similar issue. We got around it through the "social proof" of similar customers testimonials, industry specific press releases etc. The first few sales were really difficult and we had to do them pretty cheap to get the work but after the first few it started to pay off.
I've tried several Firefox plugins, Outlook, and a few others that I can't remember and finally settled with Google Reader.

Not sure why you think it's horrible. It's always available from wherever I am, mobile or desktop. Adding feeds is as easy or easier than most other readers I tried, and it even creates feeds for sites that don't have them. Also, the sharing and commenting features are nice.
Ask HN: How horrible is the SF to Silicon Valley commute?
I just moved to SF from NYC for a bit. I commute to Mountain View each day. I'm not willing to live in the Valley, and it seems lots of other people living in SF feel the same way.

Does the commute influence your decisions on where to work? Why don't companies have offices in SF? I can't believe they think it's a good idea for employees to lose 2-3 hours every day in this way.
> [Edit: formatting, stars were getting swallowed when put inline]

The same thing happened to the post you're responding to, and that's why it's not making sense to you. The author really meant to say star-foo and star-foo[5], but instead italicized a bunch of text in between.
First, this seems like an incredible gift to give to your students.

"After the main bus deteriorated you could see the capsule still intact," says Breitmeyer. "Then the capsule decelerated, and we lost sight of it.

Second, I hope someone posts the article regarding the contents of this capsule.
The default view is the last used view for that feed. I'm planning to have that in later today.

Drag and drop moving feeds is coming sometime this Summer, but you can delete a feed right now. There is a "manage" button at the bottom of the feed bar.
Yeah, but you don't need that stuff unless you're Pixar or running production servers.

I think there's a market for a midrange, expandable mac. A quad-core machine with a few extra drive bays and two PCI x16 slots. A software developer's box. A Mac Mini is underpowered, but the Pro is way overpowered, esp with regards to I/O. The quad-core iMac is a step in the right direction, but it's not really expandable.

Apple has traditionally taken the position that there's not enough margin on this sort of market. But all those iOS developers have to run something. Couldn't Apple sell it at cost and write it off as developer evangelism for iOS?
Thanks a lot! I'll fix the link pronto. :)
> Is it perhaps the same difference as between "I am English" and "I am an Englishman"?

Yes, that's a very good analogy.

If you say "Ich bin Berliner", it just means that you live in Berlin. I doesn't put any emphasis on identifying with a certain group of people. It merely says that you belong to this group, maybe just by accident.

However, if you say "Ich bin ein Berliner", especially in the context of his speech, it means that you identify yourself with the group, i.e. with the people of Berlin.

That's why I disagree with that point of the Wikipedia article. "Ich bin ein Berliner" was a perfect formulation. I guess Kennedy got the help of a native German speaker or had a very good translator.
If that's true, I think it needs a lot of thought, then we at least know that negative findings are valued far less. I found that my TOE was wrong is not likely to win me a Nobel unless there are associated "positive" findings ...
I use Feed on Feeds, a PHP script that runs on my home machine so I can access it from anywhere. It pulls in feeds once an hour and I view them in a big list. It's got a bookmarklet that makes it easy to add a new feed when I'm looking at a site I like.

My workflow is to scroll down the list of unread feeds. If something looks interesting, I either read it within the browser window, or I open the article in a new tab and continue scanning. When I hit the end of the list, I "mark all as read". If I don't finish the list I can mark everything up to the one that's visible as read. Then I go through the tabs I've already opened.

I follow about 200 feeds, most of which are infrequent posters, so I'm going through about 100-200 items a day. Out of those I find I open up maybe 5 or 10. Since I'm scanning everything in a row I can go through the list in a few minutes if I check a couple of times a day.

In most cases I've found that high volume feeds have the good stuff duplicated elsewhere, so I can unsubscribe from the high volume one (though for some reason I still subscribe to Slashdot, even though I learned about all the good stuff a few days prior from other feeds)

The Feed On Feeds interface is also so sparse it doesn't get in the way.
This should link to the news article instead of the blog post which only links to the news article...

News article: http://www.boston.com/bostonglobe/ideas/articles/2010/06/27/...

The guys flickr account with many more us/them comparisons:
http://www.flickr.com/photos/walkingsf/sets/7215762420915863...

Very cool to see, but after you think about it for a while, the images aren't very surprising. Very nice work.
My understanding along with the comments in the article is that non ferrous metals are acceptable.
After eight years, I have nothing concrete to show for my efforts.

So sad, so true. This is what happens when you play a zero-sum game. Even if you win, someone has to lose.

Here's an idea. For the next 8 years, why don't you do something that helps others by making the pie bigger for everyone instead of just trying to game a bigger piece of a smaller pie for yourself.

When you do for others, you always have something concrete to show for your efforts. It may not be what you expected, but it will definitely be something worthwhile, I promise you.
Note that the full-text modes only support prefix searching. For postfix you could either reverse the field your looking for (redundant data in your table), or use something like sphinx; which nowadays has great integration with MySQL.
Why You Should Invest Your Time In Networking
Oops, nevermind, silly suggestion. It's already been done, you just have to Google "basic interpreter javascript" to find it.

http://www.calormen.com/Applesoft/ - Starts right at the interpeter

http://www.ngbasic.com/ - Has more of the classic BASIC feel, opening a window that looks like ye olde BASIC interpreter, but requires two clicks before you can find it.

http://www.quitebasic.com/ - Also starts at the interpreter, but with a more complicated example program.
Many smart people have tried to "beat the markets" and failed. From what I've seen of it, this sort of activity is at best a form of numerology. Also, in trying to move money around slightly more efficiently than the next market analyst you're not really generating wealth as such, and your ideas and activities will leave no lasting value for society.

You may not be a failure, since the skills acquired in analysing trends can be utilised in other areas. The process of having promising looking preliminary results, only to find that they are illusory is familiar to many scientists.

Ultimately it comes down to what you really want to do with your life. Is your life only about moving money, or something else?
The Battle To Become The Mobile Search Leader
A conversation with Pixar's Ed Catmull
I'm not so sure. If we are talking about the advantage in terms of the advantage in enhancing scientific knowledge, then certainly things have changed since WWII but pre-WWII, if my knowledge of history is correct, the majority of advances in theoretical science and mathematics happened in Europe. Even today a large number of scientists working in America are foreign-born. Now I don't know how much people trusted science and the scientific consensus in Europe vs America back then but I wouldn't be surprised if Europe was more progressive back then either.
I hate Forth
Hm, I accidentally upvoted this so I may as well leave a comment. The dichotomy between "creating" wealth and "pushing it around" is false, in my opinion. Lots of people make it and it's intuitive, I know, but figuring out the proper value of things, trying to make forecasts about the future, even profiting from differences that shouldn't be there, all this is part of the capitalist meta-system called financial markets.

One should not confuse the agency issues, borderline-legal information advantages, or even outright fraud in the markets with the basic activity that sustains them. Think about the alternative: Would you like to have to sit with a dimwit credit officer (= bureaucrat) from a big bank who can then effectively veto your plans? Or would you rather have a lively market that decides on such things? Do you want to do your IPO in a public equity market or would you prefer to try to break into an insider club of old rich people who may never come to understand your funny newfangled business model ("what's internet?!").

German sociologist Georg Simmel wrote an interesting book about money, one of the ideas I liked is that its fungibility dissolves the need for relationships, making us free to choose them, and thus effectively increasing personal freedom. The same, I'd venture, is true for capital markets. By spreading transactions around, they increase your options and freedom as entrepreneur. And for markets to work, you need people actually _in_ the market, like it or not.

Figuring out value (as opposed to the going price), identifiying and exploiting inefficiencies, trying to make more intelligent forecasts of likely developments, all these _are_ "real problems" in a market economy. Having intelligent, hard-working people working on them makes the system as a whole more intelligent.
Oh yeah? Well what about this then :

Picasso Painting Sells for $106 Million-Painted in One Day

http://www.imaginelifestyles.com/luxuryliving/2010/05/picass...

:)
The commute is horrible, whether by car or Caltrans.

Many firms locate down in the heart of the valley for many reasons including that office space is considerably less expensive, infrastructure is theoretically somewhat more robust, traditionally the biggest money firms are down there, many of the firms down there are related by chains of nepotism, there are fewer "distractions" for workers in those boring areas, executives can afford more posh places down there, ....

The valley proper, back when I worked there, had all the elements of an old-school company town: easy for workers to move into, hard to move out; collusive hiring practices across firms; not much to do beside eat, work, sleep, and pay rent; even its own set of camp-follower brothels. It's an ugly, horrible environment and you're darn right it influences the decisions of some to simply not work there.
The best terminology for this phenomena would probably be (neo-)Lysenkoism, where you have a field of science under attack for conflicting with political orthodoxy.

I agree completely with your point that a college degree has limited impact on your scientific literacy. Taking baby-bio or physics for poets isn't going to give you the tools necessary to churn through scientific papers, nor will it give you perfect objectivity when evaluating scientific arguments, particularly volatile ones that challenge your own core beliefs.
A lot of people didn't care about social networking before it became prevalent also, but that didn't mean there was a social networking opportunity.

I have some track record in spotting opportunities, esp. in social networking. This is one piece of the puzzle in outflanking facebook and a vulnerability they've chosen, imho. The privacy of the initial years of facebook was a significant ingredient in their success.

Clearly the competitor will not be 'the same as fb but w/ privacy'.

We can find ways to say no, or create ways to make 'yes'. ;)
Couldn't agree more.

I've never really understood why anyone cares about who believes what when it comes to topics in science. You can't advance in a career in the sciences without accepting on some terms evolution by means of natural selection so who cares if a bunch of people don't agree?

I'm sort of amazed at the arrogance on display by those who seem bent on making sure everyone agrees with them. It seems like we would be served well by some degree of skepticism of the bishops and the scientific establishment (in all areas). It seems like the more we know the more we lose sight of what we still don't know and don't proceed with much humility.

For my part I'm skeptical of the claims of biologists, mainstream economists, climatologists, and those who offer financial advice. I don't take a strong position on evolution one way or another because the outcome doesn't affect me in any way. I might get made fun of behind my back for doubting these people but that's fine by me.

I also didn't take any losses in the latest stock market crash because I saw it coming three years ahead of time and was safely in cash waiting for the market to figure out what I already knew. I take strong positions on economics because the outcome can really affect me and my family. I might be wrong of course but at least I'm going in with my eyes open.
Yes, that is the main pitfall with machine learning in general. Usually you do two things to mitigate it (but they don't fix it entirely): regularization and a test set.

Regularization is some means of complexity control. You switch form trying to find the model that has minimal error on your data to finding the model that minimizes "error(model, data) + C*complexity(model)". There are many ways to measure the complexity, and usually the value of C is pretty unimportante (it is empirically found that it only affects the solutions when you change it in orders of magnitude). Keeping a test set is always testing your predictions on held-out data that you didn't use to train the model and that is hopefully independent from your training data.

Still, if you come up with a huge number of models and test them on the same test data you're statistically bound to find a few that seem to work very well, until you try it in different data.

My feeling with most of these market-beating schemes is that just the price history of stocks shouldn't be that predictive of future prices (but aggregating real-world information should). After all, usually what creates spikes and valleys in the prices are some relevant news or decisions.
Sleep on it: Dreams help solve day's problems
Yes, but is it racist?

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=t4DT3tQqgRM
I think if the decision makers face the consequences directly, they'll be inclined to make better choices and also learn more quickly from their choices. Legislators don't necessarily have to live with the consequences of their choices. The local condo board does.

And the consequences will undoubtedly be worse. To someone. And ideal to others. But if they can each live in a community with rules they prefer, there's no problem.

That is a major challenge and opportunity of good government. Drawing the lines so that people are free but not stepping on each other's toes.
Not hard. Study sociology and psychology.
In this case BP is at best being disingenuous, since the health hazards from crude oil emissions are fairly well understood. People engaged in the operation without proper equipment are risking potentially serious and long term damage to their health.
I tried to beat the market using all kinds of AI stuff off and on for a number of years. Learned a lot about AI techniques, and became a better programmer, which helped in my day job, but never got anywhere. It's a fool's game.

Besides, most of these HFT systems hold positions for only a few minutes or less. There's no way someone without a huge account, to cover commissions from trading so much, and access to a lot of expensive real-time data streams could possibly make any headway at it.

Not to say there aren't people who do make money at trading, but they are swing traders and/or people who've figured something out about the market that the market doesn't know yet, and thus has not revealed at all in the price movements of the stock. Since price movements are the primary input into a lot of trading algorithms, most trading algorithms are blind to these developments.
agreed. people do care about 'uncomfortable' moments though... your friends' mom sees your embarassing pics and tells your mom... those photos of your lawyer in a bikini getting sent around the industry...
I'd use Reeder if it weren't for the fact that I read a bunch of math blogs and Reeder usually doesn't want to download the PNGs of formulas produced by the LaTeX plugin for Wordpress. It's OK on other feeds I've tried it on.
Here's a process that's worked for me:

1. Lay out a few general themes you think will resonate with the user/reader.

- What problem does this solve?

- What's the end result?

- What's the most interesting nugget of info here?

2. Write a few headlines for each of your overarching themes.

3. Take each and edit for clarity. This usually (but not always) means choosing simpler words and shorter phrases.

4. Finally, take your best headline from 2-3 themes and split-test them to see which is most effective.

With this process you'll get data to help you write better headlines and you'll gain a deeper understanding of your user/reader.
This is a very valid way to put this, and it helped me. Thank you.
After reading: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1406714

Sounds like it may be a way to turn your kid into an artist :D
This is where it gets fun though. An inefficiency being found amounts to you knowing something about pricing that others don't. You exploit it for profit, and the process of exploiting it removes or reduces the inefficiency. The only way the market is truly screwed is if consistent arbitrage opportunities become available, but the kinds of inefficiencies people find seem more transient than consistent.

On another note, betting markets are (or were) apparently far less efficient than financial markets, in that the true likelihood of a team/horse/camel winning in a competition may be different to the money which punters are willing to bet on it. I know of a guy who made his fortune after many gruelling years by finally coming up with prediction models which worked in these kind of gambling scenarios.
ps. Progressing along nicely, expect more updates soon, and maybe even screenshots :D

This is from their latest (backers only) post five days ago.
Make sure you communicate a clear understanding of their problem. There is a strong temptation to leap to your solution, try more focus on making you sure you understand their problem and that they know you understand it. Then offer proof that you have solved similar problems for firms like theirs. Here is where case studies, testimonials, references can help. Finally, try and determine a trigger for action: is there a date or event where their situation will get worse? For example, April 15 for taxes, summer vacation driving trip for oil change, adding a new employee for a payroll service.

Jeff Thull's website is http://www.masteringthecomplexsale.com/ and the 2nd edition of his "Mastering the Complex Sale" is on Amazon at http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0470533110/
The Importance of Provenance
Cool, definitely get back to me. Kinda random but I am very interested in complex networks as well as some finance stuff.
Read "Made to Stick". Here's a summary of the book:

Sticky ideas:

1. are simple
2. are unexpected
3. are concrete
4. are credible
5. elicit emotion
6. tell stories

(http://www.madetostick.com/excerpts/)

Next, google "Linkbait titles" and spend a few hours reading the top 20 results or so.
That actually disappoint me - that the quest for scientific understanding is being demoted to being just a job and not a vocation. To me a scientist will never really be someone who just does science for their job (no true [scottish] scientist would do that!!) - indeed a scientist needn't work as a scientist IMO.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apophenia
Ultimate guide to URL rewriting
I think the article should just say "because it's in vogue" and "because Twitter did it", or something along the lines.

I would say there are few startups that need APIs the way Twitter needed, for example.
Steve Keen's Paper on the Economics of the Depression
If this technique would save energy for you, then you need to get rid of your CRT and buy an LCD.