skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I think the comprehension remains just fine. I use a desktop version of zapreader (now obsolete as far as I'm concerned, I like web apps much better), and I comfortably read at 800wpm without any comprehension issues. The brain caches words as they're flashed to your eyes, and you only have 2% of "real" (narrow) vision anyway, so from a psychological viewpoint it makes sense. That's also why zapreader has a pause button. The nice thing about my desktop reader (which I admit I don't use a lot, hence I'll switch) is you can pause it and show the context, which lets you think for a while if you want to.
Wow, this is awesome! Many CS grads I've worked with before had little experience of any web technologies or concepts coming out of school, which makes it that much harder to get them up to speed. I quickly realized I can't take for granted that someone would know source code version control, or understand protocols like HTTP and POP3 or how to telnet into them for debugging. Definitely bookmarking this for future use!
For that you can use http://www.aiderss.com/best/news.ycombinator.com , it is filtered based on popularity
I go back and forth between trying to read between the two styles. It mostly has to do with whether I'm trying to read to "savor the language" or to gather information. I'm definitely not willing to skim through Howl, but if I get the point on a textbook without having to read every word in a paragraph that's awesome.
Did it stop being competitive?
haha textbooks. i used to just read the summary at the end of the chapter in most text books, and maybe the section headings, and that's it. skipping most pages is even faster than speed reading or skimming :)

of course that doesn't work for math textbooks and some sciences.
Maybe Twitter finally has a business model here.
Thank you, this was informative. I'll believe you about the sources.

Who are the two geniuses?

I've heard the block of text at a time thing before. In fact, I even think most people who I know that read significantly faster than me do so this way. The strange part is that when asked, people have told me that they have a hard time deciding whether they read a word a time or in larger blocks of text. My only question would be: can this skill be learned/trained? If so, how does one go about doing that?

I'm a bit ambivalent about the bottleneck, at least personally. I guess it depends on what kind of reading you do most of the time, but I'm inclined that I read more materials that are written in simple text that was meant to be consumed easily and that in those cases the bottleneck is in the text->parse stage. When reading technical material (which I also spend a fair amount of time doing) the bottleneck is definitely on the parse->meaning stage and that process probably takes several orders of magnitude more time, but speeding up the text->parse stage would be worth its while still. I say this because the process is a little bit different when reading technical material. You get through the text and you think about it for a long time, do problems, discuss, perform thought experiments, etc. But everything in the list seems to be a different stage than the parse->meaning stage. It is more of a meaning->true understanding/intuition stage. Something like first you read and you need to comprehend what you have been told at a "language" level. Then you go and understand the concepts more abstractly and at different levels. However, it is difficult to draw the line between those two stages.
Enter my open-sourced, BigCo-praised biz plan, online at http://www.loveatmadisonandwall.com.

An excerpt:

1: Learn how the introduction of particular online markets, starting with a new kind of market for the ad spaces on blogs, will provide people with new and improved ways to develop, showcase and profit from expertise. Details >>

2: Learn why owning popular markets of the aforesaid kinds is an ideal way to increase profits for an American media conglomerate that owns a broadcast TV network. >>

3: Recognize that the aforesaid conglomerates are actively seeking to acquire Internet startups. >>

----

If the plan is so good, why am I open-sourcing it?

Some time ago, I set out to develop a sitcom that showcases the best ways to leverage the Internet to expand educational and economic opportunity.

The biz plan took shape because it turns out that producing this sitcom is inseparable from launching the online markets described in the plan, not least because:

1. starting a markets-maker costs money

2. raising money from investors is easier if the marketing plan is good

3. a sitcom is an ideal centerpiece of a marketing plan (e.g., a plan for operating marketing as a profit center)

Best,
This analysis is a bit silly. In both cases, the "ugly" combinations have much less value contrast.

More useful link: http://handprint.com/HP/WCL/color11.html
E-commerce Hosting
Zeus Cart offers easy-to-use features to open your first online store quickly, advanced features for additional customization, and integration with desktop administrator control panel.
Returning '(()) Considered Difficult
why go tru all this. All they need is to monitor their customer service lines to help customers.
If you think you're reading too slowly, the solution is to read less crap.

If you're enjoying your book, you don't wish it would end sooner. This would be like wishing your delicious meal would end sooner. And if you're not enjoying it, why are you reading it? The answer for many people is that they need to meet some quota to uphold their imaginary status as intellectuals. That's the real problem to be solved, not reading speed.
agreed. "build something enough people want" and the money will follow. never failed so far.
HYIP Script
We have introduced new patch for All versions of AJHYIP Script to safe your transaction from hackers.
Red Black Trees: Approximate best case binary search tree
"""The child is hungry for parental care from her indifferent parents who have given up on getting their bee stings looked at..."""

Have you spent an time in poor rural areas, or are you just talking out your ass? (Most of the peasant farmers, etc., I know are wonderful parents, nowhere close to indifferent. Their problems are about infrastructure and economic inequality, not attitude.)
It's a good idea to manage tasks, not time. Which is what GTD aims to do, isn't it? And only the chores should be managed--things that you wouldn't spend your time doing if you had the choice. Real work should be enjoyable, and when you try to manage it, it turns into a set of chores.
That’s not a responsibility to society. That’s a rejection of society. Which is to say, in your eagerness to repeat your previous point again, you’re deliberately avoiding the question asked of you. If the answer is “no”, you shouldn’t be afraid to say so.
Maybe for people who are deeply into Facebook, this is the cat's meow, but this actually makes life more difficult for me, the occasional user. The last thing I need in my life are friends on yet another incompatible IM network.

Facebook is okay, but I'm not giving up the rest of the internet just to interact with their precious social graph. Do they really think otherwise?
They could use our beta tool:
http://twist.flaptor.com/freq?gram=comcast&submit=Show+t...

(Running on a desktop machine right now, please be gentle)
Jive Software Releases Clearspace 2.0, Acquires Jotlet
How might they implement this without otherwise compromising their current free/open model? TOS on the data, asking that commercial users pay? Premium version for company representatives?
He’s being downmodded because the article most certainly can’t be summarized like that. He is summarily rejecting its whole argument, with a flip remark that adds little to the discussion.
Fun with Unicode (and Ruby)
Y Combinator: Part of Why They’re Smart
Or Tweetscan etc. has a business model and Twitter commercializes their API taking the cream off the top.

Twitter is bigger than we imagine.
PR at work. I'd like to think that Comcast follows blogs and twitters, looking for unhappy customers. However, I'm willing to bet that a PR person picked up Arrington's tweet and said 'fix this or face negative branding'. If you aren't an influential blogger, don't expect companies to fix your problems with any haste.
I didn't think it could get any better.. but "open with editor" is awesome.
Eat What You Shoot
Women in Computer Science
Global Wireless Data Market Update 2007 Update
More Crappy Censorship From Your Friends at Yahoo! - Y! threatens Loren Feldman
Jive Software acquires Jotlet (web calendar startup)
Cheap GPS
I looked it up, you're right. Thanks for pointing it out :-)
A combination of a Tangible Vision, Mindmap and a task/objective list
I like to talk politics too, actually. However, I think it's an argument that is poisonous for sites like this. I don't want to see a bunch of links from mises.org, and the equivalent from the other side - I can get that stuff elsewhere.
We'd be unlikely to own 6% of a co that got bought for $10m. We'd probably have been diluted down to 4% or so by later investors.

And there are actually a fair number of schleps. As work goes, the effort is somewhere between a regular job and running a startup.
Yahoo Leak To Reuters: Tomorrow They’re Going To Write A Very Stern Letter To Microsoft
Clearspace 2.0 released
Better switch majors-- in a few years, the market's going to be glutted with philosophers!
Open Source, Closed Minds: Can an OS company be part of the OS community?
If you're a speed reader it doesn't mean you read everything quickly. It just means that if you choose to, you can.

A good novel is a terrible waste of time if read quickly. But a blog post announcing that company X has done something vaguely interesting shouldn't get too much time.
They gave up on this one?

19. 'Tis known in refined company, that choosing K things out of N can be done in ways as many as choosing N minus K from N: I pick K, you the remaining. Find though a cooler bijection, where you show a knack uncanny, of making your choices contain all K of mine. Oh, for pedantry: let K be no more than half N.
If you like that, you'll really like this: http://www.cs.princeton.edu/~rs/talks/LLRB/RedBlack.pdf

Sedgewick's left-leaving red-black trees. Easier code to understand, same performance bounds. Beware, though, some of the code in the preso doesn't really work as claimed.
I have written a social news site which you might be interested in: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=135495
I don't know; it seems like 'bio-weapons researchers" are the only people today capable of exercising the 2nd amendment as purposed, and therefore should really be well-trained in matters such as the difference between morality, ethicality, and legality ;)
It has the same use as most of the patterns: working around the brokenness of the popular OO languages of the time.
From one half of the currently-winning BellKor team.
Tips For Young Graphic Designers
Congratulations, I have written one too, what a coincidence (sarcasm directed towards situation, not the person). I bet most of the people reading this thread have done something around netflix results :)
But people would not accept a blog post made entirely of quotes, even ones that much deserve quotation. You have to say something, or you're just stealing someone else's act.
That's what they said about the phone, until millions got one, and then gradually, voice support deteriorated. Imagine another few thousand people takling about the Comcast problem on Twitter. Will Comcast execs be able to follow Twitter to address individual problems as closely as they do now. I have my doubts.
http://www.research.att.com/~volinsky/netflix/ProgressPrize2...

That paper describes what they are doing.
I noticed that as I became a faster reader, I lost my interest in novels. I used to think this was because my taste had changed, but now I think the speed itself is the problem. When I read novels in foreign languages, I enjoy them much more.

My advice, start reading slower (and closer) and save time by stop reading fluff. Anything worth reading is worth rereading.
Submarine alert ;)
I'm not sure if Philosophy is the kind of intellectualism we're looking for...
I think the US should put satellites in orbit that provide free internet to people with the proper dish. We could distribute small digitally identifiable satellite dishes to less free countries. By default they would be disabled. But if a government ever decided to black out communications for a crackdown we could enable all of our dishes in that country. It wouldn't be perfect but if you made the dish small and cheap enough you could get a bunch of them to the right people via intel channels. The goal being more pictures like this:
http://regentsprep.org/Regents/global/themes/conflict/images...
Which is problematic when to have the market in the first place, huge investment in infrastructure has to be made.
Toward Engineering Cumulative Advantage
I am sure that most people don't get the probabilities right, but maybe there is also something else: if you factor the utility into the equation, the probabilities might not be so bad? E(money) < 0, but E(utility) > 0? As the other reply sad, people get a rush out of gambling, among other things.
Mastering Regular Expressions is by far the best-written technical book I've read. It's amazingly concise and well-explained.
What gets me is that few people seem to consider "find a job with better pay" as an option. It just doesn't even occur to them. On the contrary, I often hear stories where people might actually pay more for their job than they earn, for example if they drive 50 miles every day to work a minimum wage job (petrol+car maintenance might cost more than what they earn). Either they really don't get the maths straight, or they see it as a temporary thing (need one job to get another), or else I don't know...

What about you, what do you study? Are you sure you could not get a better job, for example by building on the things you study? I must admit I was stupid as a student - I studied maths, but instead of taking on some programming job and earning shitloads of money on the side, I just worked standard student jobs with average (low) pay.

My point: maybe many people just are not aware of the options. I suppose it is infeasible to assign personal life managers to every poor person, but perhaps information technology could be some help? For example better job boards.
Does Comcast monitor all of Twitter or just Michael Arrington's?
Major Google Announcement Monday Evening: Is It BigTable?
'Ruthlessness gene' discovered
Indeed. On the subject of long vs. short term thinking, or the time-value of money, the most clear example is the case of rent-to-own stores.

Rent-to-own is a form of financing, equivalent to taking on debt, but unlike other forms of debt, we know that it's used specifically for buying certain classes of durable goods, such as furniture, appliances and televisions. Due to the nature of these goods, we can assume that in most cases the owning of a given piece of furniture, for example, is not a necessity, and further, that buying these goods new is not the lowest cost alternative, when speaking about the total or even initial price. For example, I might be able to get a sofa off the street or sleep on a mattress without a frame or box springs.

Rent-to-own is also heavily favored by poor folks, who have another opportunity, which is to save up and replace their television or furniture at a later date for a lower total cost.

Making the latter choice is the rational one, if your personal discount function for the future value of money is sufficiently low. That is, if you have a long-term perspective, you value future abundance nearly as much as present abundance, and so save up for an outright purchase. However, if you have a short-term perspective, the extra you paid for the television would seem insignificant, because it accrued far in the future, and you're more concerned with immediate abundance.
Interesting - there might be differences across the waters. I'm from Denmark.
Half-baked thoughts on Python web frameworks
Yep, there's a whole area of psych research on that: learned helplessnes (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Learned_helplessness). Seligman's famous experiment of conditioning dogs by electric shock demonstrated this... something you could probably get away with in 1967.
Ubuntu picks KVM over Xen for virtualization
"things like novels"

Only if they're bad novels. When I read (good) novels, I'm constantly trying to slow myself down - to the point of literally mouthing the words or forcing myself to linger five minutes on a page. It takes so much longer to _feel_ a novel than it does to intellectually take in what's going on - so if I read too fast I end up knowing what happened, but not having experienced the novel.

As somebody pointed out on the 'heroes' thread, fiction often has a very high information content - it's just buried in symbolism and multiple meanings and the like.
It's been a while that I read it, but I thought the original "Design Patterns" book was pretty good. You won't find something like the "return early from function" in it. I think it is best to read the original design patterns book, not the language specific clones (ie not "Design Patterns for Java" etc).

Most patterns in the book are not that trivial, so I don't think you can apply them without understanding them (in general).
Just like it says on the tin.
Angel financing - Term sheets (part 2)
This isn't news... this has been around forever. But, it is still awsome none the less.
That article seems to subscribe to a zero-sum game view of economics, whereas in reality, it could be more of a win-win situation.
Dissertation Writing
Dissertation Expert has been developed to assist students in the affordable custom dissertations or thesis providing. We offer various fields disertations like computer science dissertation, dissertation in art education dissertations etc.
Subordinate monkeys more likely to choose cocaine over food
Why not just study math instead when you want to learn how to argue?
21. In 29 words or fewer, describe what you would strive to accomplish if you worked at Google Labs.

"The same thing we do every night, Pinky..."
"Say for example your company currently has 1,000,000 shares outstanding. You and the investors settle on a valuation of $1 per share for a pre-money valuation of $1,000,000. The investors put in $250,000 and in exchange they are issued 250,000 shares. The post money valuation of the company is $1,250,000 and investors own 20% of the company."

I have trouble understanding this. Why do they only own 20% of the company, if they own 25% of the shares?

I guess it is also a complication that the investment actually changes the value of the company (because it now has 250000$ more)? But wouldn't it make more sense to conclude that if an $250000 investment buys you 25% of the company, it is evaluated at 750000$ (before the investment)?

Sorry if I get this completely wrong, I am not used to those calculations.
Calaméo - Scribd en français? (no English version)
SEO Standards Debate is Back - But Something's Missing...
I am shocked by the people who allegedly switch from maths to philosophy. Seems to me that maths is the real philosophy. Usually whenever I pick up a philosophy book (rarely, I admit), there is a wrong assumption in the first paragraph and I can readily dismiss it as worthless.

Any philosophers the news.yc crowd could recommend?
The 250,000 new shares are created, not transferred. So there were 1,000,000 shares before the investment and 1,250,000 shares after the investment.
The Java code mostly looks bad because it's a statically typed language, and templated/generified code always looks ugly (in part because it's going directly against the general grain of the language).

If you were content throwing around lists of Objects like back in pre-generics days, the original code would be pretty readable. Though still not terse.
Cheaper?
This is for prototype/scriptaculous (not jQuery) but I thought I'd let you know anyway:

http://www.knallgrau.at/code/colorpicker

I use it on my web app; Twitter also uses it.
How about just handing out a certain amount with no strings attached at all? To everyone.
OK, that makes sense ;-)

On the other hand, how can shares simply be created? Is this how people get "diluted"? Like before this transaction, some other guy owns 10% of the company, and afterwards suddenly he only owns 8% - how is that possible? By claiming in theory that his 8% still have the same value in cash? But since all those are just virtual estimates, not hard transactions, how can you ever be safe from being screwed over?
Hey iamelgringo,

if you are still using the extension I would suggest re-installing once more. I made some fixes and added a few other things, as well as integrating the Firefox update manager. So if you re-install once more, Firefox will automatically find new updates to it for you from here on.
MocaFive : desktop virtual software and management tools.
Agile Release & Testing Procedures - How, When, How much?
We need a hack that sends text messages over the voice connection.
Would love to get some feedback from the Y-crowd on this. Once the dust settles, I'll report the results.

Either that, or just tackle me at the upcoming Startup School event!
You are quite right, utility is usually steep near 0, and flattens out toward the top.

I was simply pointing out that if the author is right, the difference between 10k and 15k would be very small (indeed, quite possibly smaller than that between 100k and 150k).

In fact, I'd suggest that diminishing returns explains American "poverty" much better than flat utility curves. 45% of the poor own their own home, 95% are not overcrowded, 75% own a car (30% own 2 cars), nearly all have a TV (25% a big screen). Virtually no one is starving, over 70% of those the USDA classifies as "hungry" are obese. The typical poor family is also supported by 16 hours/week of work. It's quite possible that poverty is explained simply by a low marginal gain from increased work (the poor already hit the point of diminishing returns).

All numbers are taken from here (http://www.heritage.org/Research/Welfare/bg1713.cfm), who in turn stole them from the census. See also this chart http://www.heritage.org/Research/Family/images/Chart1.gif of working hours for poor families.
http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=138170
For Twitter: http://tweetscan.com/rss.php?s=yourcompanyname
Computers Programmed to Ignore Abortion
I will upfront admit only a limited knowledge of economics, but hopefully my math knowledge will save me enough to sound reasonably collected.

I think you make two assumptions here that are either fallacious, or require additional evidence.

The first is that the poor are short-term oriented by choice, not by mandate. Allow me to propose the following Gedankenexperiment. You are a person who is given sufficiently low pay that your net asset change is $0, or nearly so. You are presented with an opportunity for a long-term payoff with a reasonably attractive expected gain, excepting that if the payoff doesn't occur, you no longer have the wherewithal to pay for food and shelter. If you don't take the risk, you are given a near certain probability to maintain your current status. Which would you chose? Keep in mind, these people will place maximum utility on the basic needs of life before venturing into more discretionary purchases, as any one else would.

The second is that they are somehow inclined to take greater risks because of their being in poverty. I'm not convinced by an assertion that even a majority of poor people end up in a life of crime, or any other high-risk behavior. It would seem to me there's far more reason behind staying as low-risk as possible, especially when the few possessions you refer to are the difference between staying warm and dry, and not. A person with several thousand dollars in the bank can afford to play high-risk. A person who is in poverty may be one case of pneumonia away from homelessness.