skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
What goes on (that you are allow to share) in those places that requires so much time and energy? I can see building things taking a lot of effort, but is it just for theater that people put in so many hours in those places?
It depends on the kind of work. I think there's a distinction between creative work and the more mundane stuff, and any role worth doing has both aspects. I think people only have a few hours of high quality creative work in them a day. But the reality is that most important work has a much larger drudgery component and working longer hours for that most definitely does scale linearly. Fixing bugs or pouring through financial data for inconsistencies is probably going to take you X number of hours no matter how many days you spread it over. In fact, you're probably going to be more efficient doing it in some marathon sessions.
Programming Languages: Everyone Has a Favorite One
>Besides, the value of Ivy-League schools is overrated.

If employers overrate you because of an ivy-league education, it's usually to your advantage.
Infospace and the Great Shareholder Robbery of 2007
www.ted.com
Not since the inductor was discovered has there been such cause for rejoicing.

Hilarious. I think that depending on the noise immunity properties they may increase storage density signifcantly, but it will be more along the lines of a sustaining rather than revolutionary product, in terms of impact. I doubt, due to imperfections in the manufacturing process, that we will ever be able to store a continuous analog signal with perfect fidelity. In fact, Shannon's law forbids it has to be sent along a channel, which it does.

Analog computing has been with us forever, we'll see if this makes it commercially viable.
Not since the inductor was discovered has there been such cause for rejoicing.

Hilarious. I think that depending on the noise immunity properties they may increase storage density signifcantly, but it will be more along the lines of a sustaining rather than revolutionary product, in terms of impact. I doubt, due to imperfections in the manufacturing process, that we will ever be able to store a continuous analog signal with perfect fidelity. In fact, Shannon's law forbids that if it has to be sent along a channel, which it does.

Analog computing has been with us forever, we'll see if this makes it commercially viable for some applications. Good news, in any case.
Ghetto tech FTW
Because TechCrunch thinks our industry is so great that it deserves its own National Inquirer. Seriously, these people should be marginalized and put in the spotlight for the trolls that they are. I'm so sick of the bottom-feeding rumour mongering that scrapes by as journalism these days. Seriously people, stop reading TechCrunch and go checkout a book on O'Reilly Safari or something...learn something worthwhile with your spare time.
Little tweaks, huge impact
Currently: 500 Internal Server Error.

(With an HTTP Status header being dumped to the screen instead of, you know, sent as a header.)
haha I actually make 40K... i think its significantly higher than that. All told I think i'll be paying around 12K. (MI.)
Your both either single or sleeping in the other room tonight.
It actually makes sense since women are so risk-averse. Wives should support entrepreneurship by making it easier for their entrepreneurial husbands to take risks. And that means bringing in a steady income.
According to various scalability articles on FaceBook, they continually rewrite their software. It's probably been rewritten far more than Twitter has, you just never hear about it because TechCrunch doesn't have a source inside.

In my experience, that's really the only way to do software. It's completely unrealistic to think you'll get it right the first time, and yet completely destructive to go and start from scratch. So you pick your worst problem, rewrite it, then hook it back into the working system without touching the rest. Then pick your next-worst problem, rewrite it, etc.
Applesoft BASIC Interpreter in Javascript
Universities Baffled By Massive Surge In RIAA Copyright Notices
A dozen accomplished people tell what works for them.

If having a life like those folks is what's called "accomplished", I want to be a failure.

To answer the question though, I do my best (most productive & efficient) work when I'm working 6 to 9 hours a day in an office with a few other smart caring coworkers, no travel, a good amount of sleep, and doing nearly no email / IM / etc.

My best ideas come from the shower and sleep.

I think the number of people I have a discussion with in a day has an odd relationship with the quality of my work. The peak is somewhere between 2 and 9. I think that's even true when I'm managing large numbers of people.
why would the author use dreamweaver for php? try zend, or phped. for js, there's aptana. the author is misinformed. that article was a big waste of time.
Do you obsessively check the headers for proper status codes whenever you land on a page? I'm always amazed how people find out header problems like this just by browsing.
I'm sure there are enough skilled C hackers out there; but for them to bring in a new face to re-architect the system now (which is to say, after all the scalability problems have started) seems risky.
Court Hits AOL, Yahoo, Real With Staggering Music Royalties Tab
OK, once again - what?
Social media's future looks bright, apply sunscreen
Electronic Border Searches: An Open Letter
For them to not do so is riskier.
You must be really down on the dollar. But, yeah, I've figured that the options are basically worthless. However, I really like the product and I got them to up the salary significantly, so I said yes in the end.
iTunes U - it has great resources from many top Us - not just classroom material, but great talks, etc.

Be sure to checkout Stanford's Entrepreneurship section! Also, research channel (also on iTunes) exposes some incredible academia work - kids, this is a great place for your idea hunting on the next big thing (why read when you can watch them present?)
If stocks really grew faster than bonds (outside of risk), wouldn't it make sense for investors to take some of the money they have in bonds and put it in stocks, thereby increasing their total return? That'll drive the price of stocks up and the price of bonds down, driving total returns for stocks down and returns for bonds up (since you can get the same bond more cheaply). The process should only stop when investors are indifferent, on a risk-adjusted basis, to stocks & bonds.

That's what the grandparent means by "inefficiencies are arbitraged away".

As for equities funding more high-growth areas of the economy - you need to make a distinction between primary and secondary markets for capital. The primary market is where actual, producing firms offer part of their capital structure (either debt or equity) up for sale. This is often associated with entrepreneurs, investment bankers, venture capitalists, and private equity. The secondary market is where financial firms trade securities of existing companies - hedge funds, mutual funds, and retail investors.

In the secondary market, investors always have the option of bidding up the prices of securities that they really, really want. As a result, it doesn't matter how well the economy does, it only matters how well the economy does relative to how people expected it would do. If people expect the economy to shrink 10% but it really shrinks 5%, stocks (in the secondary market) will jump. If they expect it to grow 20% but it really grows 15%, stocks will crash, even though absolute growth rates are significantly higher. That's why only unexpected earnings have an effect on a company's stock price.

The primary market is much less liquid and hence less subject to arbitrage opportunities. If a company is growing very well, it will be able to charge a higher price for its securities, and the proceeds will go directly to its balance sheet.

So, the fact that high-growth industries tend to be financed with equity rather than debt means a lot for entrepreneurs and venture capitals, but very little for investors in the public markets. For that matter, a number of studies have found that "growth" stocks do significantly worse than "value" stocks, because investors consistently overweight their growth prospects.
Ballmer Tells Microsoft Troops He's Not Insane: Willing To Walk Away From Yahoo
I wonder if 'too' here is an ordinary typo, as I'd want to claim it, or it's genuinely true that my fingers don't understand the distinction late at night.
OQO: The world's smallest Mac
The bottleneck/stress-point is almost certainly the unique IO patterns and latency expectations. I doubt CPU is the issue or that C is necessary; instead they need to figure out the right fanning/batching algorithms, and buy gobs of RAM and use it efficiently.

With their recent fundraising, they might even be able to run a couple parallel fixup projects in competition, and let the best win.
I just took a look at your website and I have to say I really like the idea of what you're doing and I would definitely consider using your product in the future (beats having to spend couple of hours trying to get something running myself).

Here something I couldn't easily figure out from your site:

what OS are the VMs running?
what virtualization software do you support?
If the entire width of the element is clickable, not just where the text is, then the targets will be larger which would address your concerns I assume.
Keynav: Keyboard based mouse control (that works)
I think what you're trying to say is that is in the long run, equities (relative to debt securities) will contain an increasing share of the total wealth in the whole economy. That may or may not be correct, but it's irrelevant to Warren Buffett's original statement or the equity risk premium. What we're discussing here are the returns an individual investor should expect to receive from stocks in general.

Buying and holding individual stocks is a bad strategy for a long-term investor. Eventually a lot of those stocks will go to zero. In most cases you'll be better off with a passively-managed index fund which periodically rebalances based on market capitalizations.
I'm pretty sure I agree. Certain problems require too much headstate to solve in smaller time quanta, and that at a certain point, when I'm bleary eyed, I lose enough caution to think daring thoughts.

Part of it's just the adrenaline, too. And if you have friends goading you on, an allnighter can be pretty fun.
Digg Does Data Portability: Is This All We Get?
Adobe lifts licensing restrictions on Flash (SWF, FLV)
A bike shed (any colour will do) on greener grass...
Asians' bizarre thing for long hours was a big factor in race riots in the American west in the 19th century. Several times in a few cities the whites torched businesses employing asians and tore asians from their homes and marched them to the docks. People didn't want to compete with that shit.

It's not impossible to sympathize.
Actually it will be hard to get that kind of return in emerging market stocks for three reasons.

1) Emerging markets tend to be riskier, so if you look at it on a risk-adjusted basis the expected returns don't look as good. What happens to your assets if China has another revolution?

2) As a practical matter, an individual US citizen just can't buy equity in many emerging market companies. Either they aren't listed on US exchanges, or are privately held, or national goverments have ownership restrictions in place. There isn't even much in the way of mutual funds to do it indirectly.

3) The few stocks in the BRIC markets available for direct purchase by individual outside investors have already been bid up to ridiculous levels by dumb money who think they can't afford to be left behind. You may be waiting a very long time to see much significant upside.
This american life.
Which means there was a lot less competition.
>This might be better titled "Chronic sleep deprivation is not a badge of honor"

The original title is better. It makes perfect sense. It expresses the same meaning. He is clearly referring to the phenomenon of sleep deprivation and not to a single instance. It's clear from the title, and the article even explicitly points this out.

He isn't writing legalese. He doesn't have to gird every sentence against being taken out of context and nitpicked. To do so would be bad English (as your example demonstrates).

I know we live in a fast food, sound bite time. I know we expect headlines to be clear and to the point. His is. And it uses better language.

The last thirty years have placed a tremendous strain on the language. We have lots more to talk about and not many more words to do it with. The solution isn't to pile on more and more qualifiers. You can never attain absolute precision. The solution is to realize that as the number of things we have to talk about increases, the expressiveness of the language expands to account for them.

You can't fit everything into a sound bite. If it's worth talking about, it's worth explaining at length. And if it's worth explaining at length, you might as well use good English.
Am I somehow not seeing GE, or is it just omitted? I would have to think it would be a giant blog in the center with lines to almost everywhere.
Entrepreneur, Average Age, and Schooling
Pavlina's site feels like one big informercial. Is there a term yet for blogs like that?
Because he's smart enough to ask?
You've got a point regarding the inside scoop however, Facebook doesn't suffer a global outage on an almost weekly basis either.
We are not able to get rid of the statement "this sentence is true" no matter which way we toggle it.

I think the problem is in the acceptance of the if unconditionally without merit. That automatically couples it to the condition of the second, which essentially merges symbol A and B into a third symbol which is necessarily itself, but has been defined as conditionally itself.
" Taking random shots like this article does is like a blind man trying to grope an elephant."

Groping an elephant seems like a bad idea even for the sighted.
I disagree. Korean society idolizes the English language to the point that it's usually taught as a main secondary language starting from elementary school, and you pretty much can't get into any half decent Korean university if your English sucks. Of course, if you don't get into a nice university, you don't get a nice job because no big company paying the big bucks wants to hire you.

It's like the equivalent of saying "if you don't know English AND Spanish/French you're not getting into any university but the local shitty state/community college, which means low paying jobs for you!" in the US. And the society overall is so obsessed with English that they're using it as the main language in a lot of places (works great when half the audience doesn't know the language well, right?). I heard a broadcast of one commencement speech at some Korean university where some guy just talked in this horrible broken English that even I couldn't understand beyond a word or two (and I'm a native speaker and can usually understand people with heavy accents). Way to go! Isn't the point of a language to um, like, communicate? Not to alienate your non-English speaking but all fluent-in-Korean audience for the sake of attempting to look trendy by speaking English (but making a fool of yourself in the process..).

Of course, unless they get a job requiring English, or move to an English-speaking country, most people forget all they learned about English.

To top that off, given that I'm Korean, I get to deal with these (mostly) twats with no lives with a horrible command of English waay too often. Too many times I've been asked by friends of my mom who want me to tutor their poor kid cause I was in gifted programs since forever and have spectacular SAT verbal/writing scores. And I don't see anyone making any comments like yours about my excellent command of the Korean language (complete with slang) despite having been born and raised in the US. Or conversational French and Spanish. And Java. And Ruby. And C++. :p I respect any and all polyglots, regardless of where they were raised and what they know. But I just really felt the need to point out a couple of things.

Honestly, I should quit my job and give up coding to go teach English to the kids of the rich overseas. A couple hundred bucks an hour? Sheeeeesh. I already had to teach English to a couple of my cousins that came over last summer...the older one was considered to be one of the best English speakers in her expensive and elite private middle school but I honestly couldn't call it anything more than broken English at best.
This is his sole steady source of income (the other being speaking engagements), so the marketing is understandable.
Silicon Valley Fight Club
It depends on the person. I know too many (see long rant of a comment on this same topic) who've gone the route of study study study study study go to ivy. One's committed suicide. Some work themselves as usual..until they get burnt out. Others figure out this wasn't what they wanted to do and they were doing it just to make their parents happy, and then go study something else that interested them.

I actually haven't heard of very many that go on to have stellar careers. Unless you define "stellar" to be something that is stellar to them...then some of them do.
I take a more practical definition of "paradox": anything that throws a Prolog interpreter into an infinite loop ;)
Pilates and biking are my two favorite forms of exercise.

The problem with running is that by the time you realize you're too out of shape to run, it's too far to walk back. (re-joke)
Lack of physical existence for one.
Report: Yahoo getting serious about Google ad deal
YES!

I absolutely do not understand why parents make their kids go through this torture. Thankfully I have very open minded Korean parents and grew up in the US, but right now I am in such a better position than half my parents' friends kids that it's not funny. I slacked off, did just the bare minimum until the subject interested me, I go to parties, I go to events, I have fun. I don't study until 5 in the morning unless it's a final I'm screwed for, or if I procrastinated way too much. In fact, if I ever stay up that late it's almost always because I've been spending too much time talking to the people on the opposite side of Earth on IRC while idly doing work or playing a game.

And well, I'm going to a better university than most of them, studying what I want to, earning well more than pocket change doing some coding work, and still having fun (and yes, a relationship! with premarital sex!). What did they do in the same 10 years? Study their asses off until they get burnt out constantly, and then go to some university studying what their parents wanted (half the time) or something socially acceptable (the rest of the time) where they still study their asses off, and then do the SAME thing at whatever job they get post-graduation.

I'm not being entirely fair here, but I'm not that far off. :\ It's quite depressing.
From a narrow, self-interested perspective, I wonder if this will end up having any impact on how computers look to the programmer.

As far as I can see, the most likely case is that you might wind up with a single, huge, fast chunk of memory replacing both your RAM and your hard disk. That should change things somewhat from the programmer's point of view.
Another good one:

"Arrogance in computer science is measured in nano-Dijkstras"

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=s7ROTJKkhuI
"Beware the glib helper who fills your head with fantasies while he fills his pockets with fees."

Timeless WB wisdom.
"Handing a sniper rifle to someone does not make them a sniper. Snipers have personal qualities and training that make them what they are; their weapons are just tools that help them realize their inherent abilities as well as possible."

This is a good point. But, in the interests of balance, the twitter situation could also be compared to arming a sniper with a broadsword and then being surprised he fails. The choice of analogy makes a surprising difference in how you think about the situation.

"Why are you and other TechCrunch people so eager to assign blame when you don't actually know anything about what you're assigning blame for?"

I would rephrase the question to "what do you and the other tech crunch folks know that gives you confidence in your statements about decisions at twitter".

Point being no one knows what the folks at tech crunch know (or not).
Regardless of the reason, if something doesn’t work for you, you need to identify the root cause of the problem and don’t be too arrogant to move forward even if it questions your core beliefs
Having known graduates of both Daewon and KMLA at several elite colleges, I can say that their performance is comparable to most of the other students at their respective colleges. There are those who continue in their study habits and graduate at the top of the class, those that relax a little to explore their options and enjoy more of their college experience, and those that put more emphasis on socializing than studying. There's no real stereotype of a typical graduate from one of these schools, other than being smart, Korean, and communicating in fluent English. Most of them seem to be happy to be going to college in the U.S.

The craziest thing about most of this is that it takes just as much (if not more) effort for kids in high school to get to one of the top 3 Korean colleges (Seoul, Yonsei, Korea). In fact, both KMLA and Daewon also have a track for students who want to attend Korean universities that is just as intense.

It's hard to say whether this is the best way for a person to spend their high school years, but in places like Korea and Japan, this is the way that any college-bound student spends their youth. Everybody who wants to go to college either attends a college prep school or a private prep program from about middle school, because that's the way it has always been.
The Decline and Fall of Quality on Digg
There's certainly a psychological/selection bias aspect to it. If they bought in early they're more likely to have a rosy vision of the future prospects than your average spectator.
a short subset of my podcast list:

this american life

security now

TWIT

TWIS

the sound of young america

jordan jesse go

never not funny

car talk

they're all a little more entertainment-centric, but i like to split my mind like that when working.
how does colonizing help relieve population pressure?

you send out 10,000 colonists to start a new planet. great, that's a blip in terms of population growth.

send out 100 ships, that's just 1 million people.
splog.
OK, I've finally finished reading the Nature paper. To me the interesting, yet bothersome, thing about this design is that in contrast to the past fifty years of trends in electronics, it actually has moving parts. We're not just sloshing electrons around the place, we're actually moving dopant atoms through an amorphous solid, by applying ridiculously enormous electric fields. My worry is whether this will wind up being durable, or whether the response is going to change after these atoms have been yanked back and forth a few billion times. The paper certainly doesn't say anything about extensively testing these systems.
"I generated a graph from the 400 largest companies by market capitalization. What’s shown here is the largest strongly connected component, which has 212 nodes."

Perhaps technology companies have more interlocked boards because many of them were funded by VCs. 100 years ago, GE would have been connected to all the other Morgan-backed companies.
Probably the most startuppy podcast I know is GigaOm's:
They're way too short..but often worth watching:

http://revision3.com/gigaom/