skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
If you're a professional developer, I think a slight improvement in productivity can be surprisingly valuable. When it comes to monitors, for example, I'm quite willing to pay the extra for a 30" monitor or for dual 24", as opposed to just buying mid-range (say, a single 22"). Of course, not all high-end equipment is worth the premium, but IMHO if you're spending a significant amount of time on the computer and using it to make your living, it's a false economy to not buy the best equipment.
I'm not positive because I don't really play the puzzles a lot. But i think some of them require mentally filling in a space and seeing if it leads to a contradiction.
Saying that Einstein was "recognized as crazy fag" implies that he was actually one -- which I strongly doubt is the case. Regardless, his 1905 paper on special relativity and his subsequent work (mostly performed within the next 5 years) fleshed out the vast bulk of his theory, and it remained virtually unchanged henceforth. The 20 years you refer to is mostly the time it took for experimental physics to catch up, and be able to experimentally verify the many consequences of his theory. Also, it is somewhat immaterial how long it took for him to be "nominated as genious [sic]" -- the fact that he was indeed correct in all the major components of his theory, a theory which broke so completely with most of physics prior to him, is evidence enough of his genius (which is not to discount Lorentz or Poincare in any way, who were certainly almost there as well).

With regards to your second paragraph (and your prior comment about scientists having to be >30 to be recognized as such and >50 (!) to become one in Russia), the evidence of the works produced by great scientists in the past hundred years strongly suggests that there is something wrong with that belief. Looking only at mathematics, for example, it is difficult to argue that Ramanujan, Godel, Hilbert, Grothendieck, Weil, Weyl, or Deligne (to name only a few), were not truly scientists before age 30 (by which time most of them had published some of their best works).

If the value of science is indeed going down in the US (a fact which is not at all clear to me), then there are lots of other possible reasons for it. But certainly not age.
I've been using gandi.net for roughly a year and haven't had any trouble. They don't offer bargain prices, but they're not the most expensive either.
speed and simplicity are roughly interchangeable.
Funny title. I've now been awake for 44 of the last 48 hours securing, studying, and rebuilding a multiuser public access linux system that got compromised (fully up to date Debian etch). I think I'll go to sleep instead of reading the article though.

From my stored packet and logfile analysis it went about like this:

1. POP/IMAP password driller guesses defunct account password. (Darn Canadians.)
2. 7 minutes after SSHing in, root is compromised.
3. They create a new account with uid=0, how quaint.
4. A trojan /usr/bin/ssh is installed.
5. A couple more accounts have their passwords guessed (probably from a copy of /etc/shadow)
6. The nightly backups failed, catching my attention.

Now I need to take a long think about how to detect and halt this sooner. It was mostly luck that his trojan ssh had a regression bug that tripped on my configuration files.

I rebuilt the machine as a virtual machine inside its physical hardware. I'll see what I can do scanning traffic and manipulating the firewalls of the outer machine. I have high hopes.
This isn't exactly the same, but here's something that comes close:

I have a young son, and we watch a lot of Netflix instant movies. We've watched everything from Voltron episodes to Matilda. Yesterday, we wanted to watch a new (to him) movie, and after logging in to Netflix, I found that the most prominent link on the page was "Movies for 8-10 Year Olds." I never had to tell Netflix what we usually watch, or ask for recommendations. It just knew, and provided us with a list of films that (almost, with the exception of the cheesy religious cartoons for kids) exactly met our criteria.

He picked Time Bandits, and he loved it. If more sites offered content in the same way, they'd have legions of fans. Meanwhile, over at Amazon, I get recommendations for strollers and baby toys, despite the fact that I generally buy toys for an older kid.
One part of the problem is that prosthetists are paid a flat rate for providing a leg/arm/whatever based on a set of standardized product encodings for the parts/labor.

This leads to two incentives:

1. Pick the cheapest components that meet the category requirements. So, in each reimbursement category (micro-controller knee, etc.), its a race to the bottom as there's a financial incentive to choose the least expensive knee rather than the best one. Component providers race to reduce costs once a new category is assigned a reimbursement code (another problem altogether).

2. Pick the cheapest patients. An active person like me is much more demanding than a demented old guy in a nursing home. I make appointments to get things fixed if there's something wrong and demand a functional, comfortable leg. The old guy gets a leg because Medicare pays for it even though he may never actually walk more than a few feet on it! This is actually a common scenario. So, the old guy accepts whatever leg he's given and doesn't complain. Furthermore, since the amount reimbursed for labor increases with the complexity of the system (term used for bundle of parts that make up leg/arm), there's an incentive to provide too good of a system for a patient's needs (people in wheelchair don't need a $40K leg).

Luckily, my prosthetist doesn't optimize for short-term financial gain. However, I'm told that practices like this are common. So, the insurance companies protect themselves in coarse-grained ways, often at the detriment of patients with real needs.

I don't know what to do about this problem. I think it's part of a broader issue with healthcare in the US -- we are unwilling to accept the notion that human happiness might not be maximized by providing everyone with the "best" possible medical care. We provide life support to 90 year-old people who are unlikely to live much longer no matter what we do. We buy new wheelchairs when refurbished ones would be sufficient. Insurance companies spend money one people even when they might themselves choose to forgo the spending in lieu of the cash. We expect our insurance companies to pay for everything that's "medically necessary" and (I think) mandate such care by law. So, because market forces aren't allowed to throttle demand down to rational levels, the insurance company implements bad proxies.
Having a minimum karma or time requirement before gaining the ability to post might help protect HN against this type of spam. Just a thought..
The thing I find most surprising is that the US hasn't improved at all across the different age groups where as most other countries have. It will be interesting to see if that trend continues.
Am the only one who thinks this app is pretty hard to use?
for_each( w.begin(), w.end(), []( const Widget& w ) { cout << w << " "; } );

It's lovely to know that this is possible, but if anyone who ever writes a production code like this needs to be shot on a spot. Some of the Brainfuck programs are easier to read than this ... and, yes, I have been using C++ as a primary development language for over 10 years.
1) Join Apple's Student Dev Program for $99.

2) Buy a Macbook Pro 15 inch glossy screen Penryn for $1599 from the Dev Store, with an upgrade to the 250GB drive.

3) Buy VMWare Fusion for $39 from Studica.com.

4) Buy 4GB of memory for $99 from Crucial.com.

5) Install OS X, Windows, and Linux into VMWare Fusion and break the operating systems as much as you want.

Total cost for a mobile machine you can take with you so you can break it as often as you want: about 2,000 after taxes.
I'll have all the steps up (including other things to install) at some point for everybody to see.
Countdown to iPhone 2.0
I use 1and1.com. They're cheap and I've never had any problems.
EasyDNS is one of the best registrars out there. I highly recommend them.
Consoles to “die out” in the next 5 to 10 years
Ask YC: CPM ad rates
Does anyone know a place to find CPM ad rates? Or know them offhand? We might be going into negotiations soon with an educational organization to provide a web-based productivity tool and wanted to know what kinds of CPM rates we could expect - generally - in case we need to provide the service at a discount (we'd advertise to recoup our costs).

The users will all be educators. I was going to use $10 CPM as an average.

Please let me know if I am smoking crack.
I use Yahoo so I'll never forget. Used register fly before and they lost my account.
I can't speak to thinkpads, but I've had two silvery mac laptops: first a 12" powerbook and now a 15" MBP. Both have treated me exceedingly well. The one problem I've had was that I managed to knock the shift key off of the powerbook keyboard one time. It was a bitch to get back on properly, but once I did, it was good as new and stayed put. The 12" is still going strong—I passed it off to my sister after upgrading. The 15er is a bit big and a bit heavy for my tastes, but the extra screen space is worth it.

My only testimony towards the durability of my macbook pro is this. I bike everywhere, and two times now I've fallen with the MBP in my backpack and knocked it with some force against the ground. The remainder of those rides I'm always sure that the $2000+ hunk of aluminum in my bag will be ruined, but when I get where I'm going and pull it out, it works like a champ.
There are less people in all of those countries you mentioned. Maybe you should compare them to US states.
I disagree. I have the latest Lenovo T61 14 inch widescreen as well as the latest Macbook Pro 15 inch. The Lenovo has crashed about 4 or 5 times over the past few weeks when putting it in or taking it out of its official docking station.

The Macbook Pro is incredible. I find the backlit keys and the excellent screen and keyboard are more useful or better than the little light, crappy screen, and good keyboard on the Lenovo.

The regular Macbook is actually a terrible choice. Although the built-in motherboard video X3100 chipset can run Half-Life 2 in multiplayer pretty well on Windows, the drivers on the Mac make that video card as useless as the one in laptops from 2 years ago. I don't play video games anymore, but it might help your decision to know that video on the Macbook is already outdated more than any other Core2Duo laptop on the market right now running Windows.
I think we can conclude, based on this and the tiny fixed-width margins on pg's essays, that pg's monitor of choice is an old 15" 640x480 CRT or something. (I'm kidding about concluding based on this image; I realize pg didn't draft the image himself)
The problem is that designers are, for some reason, measured by some odd metric of technical difficulty and are paid accordingly. Something about our culture doesn't let us value creative difficulty on a similar scale.

I come from more of a technical background, but I understand that high quality design is worth its weight in gold. The interface is the app, the design is the company in the minds of the customer.

Why you wouldn't want to pay for an outstanding designer is beyond me. When you pay commodity prices, you get commodity resources.
It is useless because the definition of a college degree is different from country to country.How can you compare it for example with Russia when basically they do not have a college degree ?
The basic unit of comparison is wrong, because in North America it's Bachelors and in Eastern Europe it's Masters.
Does a graph mixing feet and meters is useful ( although both measure a distance) ?
Why Seattle Startup Entrepreneurs are Good Company
You make them sound like a cheap prostitute. Good job.
Not sure what the writers point is, its just supply and demand, but the client phrased it badly and possibly undervalues the value of the writers skills
Issac Newton's Secret Manuscript
There's a very interesting point. Both China and India have nearely same population (1.32B and 1.12B people accordingly), and same education level as per the graph. Aslo it seems both countries are on same level of innovation, yet, China's GDP is almost 3 times higher than GDP or India ($10.12T to $4.12T). So, I won't call India an exception. The question is what makes China so productive or what India lacks ? The answer is mentality: Chinese ppl got used to work, whence Indians are not. And I think GDP does not corelate with level of edication and innovation.
Wake up and smell the new dotcom brew
Boulder, Boho Paradise (probably useful for anyone who might be applying to TechStars)
I currently use Godaddy but I'm moving to nearlyfreespeech.net. Why? Because Godaddy has a horrible track record of shutting people's sites down over frivolous complaints (go see http://nodaddy.com/ ) and NFS.net has a really awesome track record: https://www.nearlyfreespeech.net/about/background.php
This is similar to my stance that I took last November in my own blog. I no longer allow anonymous comments. It doesn't matter as much for me because I don't get many comments, but I have to be able to identify you through an established web site or via email as a real person before I'll allow comments.
Yes, but have you heard about gravitational collapse ? I think something similar is happining in China's economics when more workers produce more value, hence attract more capital and so on.
CPMs vary widely -- from $0.001 (yes that's 1/10 of a cent) to $40-60 for highly targeted verticals.

Educators don't have so much money to spend. It depends on how motivated and targeted your audience is, and how good of a sales team you have to leverage that audience (if you were thinking AdSense, think again. Unless your audience is mesothelioma educators). The only way to get a $10 CPM these days is with direct/premium sales.

Some reading:
http://www.mikeonads.com/
http://andrewchen.typepad.com/
http://clickz.com/experts/
http://ecpm.typepad.com/
Sold. I'll try them next time.
http://brl.codesimply.net/
That's correct - the first thing I would do with the Thinkpad is install Ubuntu, so it's more of a hardware question for me.
DirectNIC/InterCosmos are historically the largest abusers of the domain registration system for domain sniping. I still have a few domains with them, but only by accident. They are, in fact, reliable and their service is good. But I'd like to avoid supporting a company that takes part in one of the most dishonest aspects of the domain industry on a massive scale--unmatched by pretty much any other registrar.
Could it be that the "cheating experts" are actually the students who get away with cheating? They're the ones who are doing the cheating, after all.
I don't understand how you could ever recommend a macbook for "hardware to price ratio". They usually cost at least 50% more than a Lenovo, and maybe my experiences and those of my friends have been unusual, but they generally seem to be pretty poor. Battery life is atrocious, all sorts of display problems, same hard drive problems that every OEM has. Lap-burning heat. Ridiculously expensive power bricks. Poor wi-fi antenna (my Lenovo's antenna is sickeningly good.)

I gotta give them credit though, their magnetic power cord connector is nice. I haven't gotten to play with the multitouch pad either, that might be nice.
This is good to know - I also commute by bike, hence my concern about build quality.

Incidentally, I'm overwhelmed by the response rate to my question. I posted it two hours ago, expecting to be ignored as a newcomer, and went off to do some reading. I can't thank everyone enough for the feedback, although I'm still on the fence.
Themelab.com reviewed
Ask YC: AppleCare warranty ?
the extra warranty increases total cost of apple product by 20% to 30% ... is it worth paying that much? and if Apple can't guarantee its product's quality for even first 3 years then why should i buy that product in the first place?
That's true, but that's what monitors are for. The times when you can't easily have a large external monitor are precisely the times when you don't want a big, unweildy laptop. I find the Macbook screen is a nice balance.
Say that to Chinese gov ;-), there no freedom in China. Although I totally agree with your point.
All of that gives you an extra $100 discount on the MBP vs. the normal student discount. If your willing to wait, there's usually a special extra promotion (like a free ipod nano in the last one) for students starting around june/july to sept. In the iPod nano case, if you sell it, you can get a $150 extra discount. Wait for the student promo and see what it is before you do what this guy says. (Also newegg.com or ncix.com is a better deal than crucial)
None of those are true, except that the magnetic power cord connector truly is sweet. I get 4-5 hours of battery time, the wireless range is good, the Macbook Pro is quieter than the Lenovo, it gets as hot as any other laptop, and saying the Macbook Pro has the same "hard drive problems everybody else has" is a pointless argument.
Teach a Puppy to Settle
Thank you for the reply. In terms of educators, as a whole I agree they aren't the most affluent, but oftentimes they have input to how their educational budget is spent.
Really? As bad as InterNIC? I stopped using DirectNIC only because of their prices. I liked them well enough, but with 600+ domains it was getting rather expensive. I've had some great domains, and never experienced any domain sniping with them (GoDaddy and InterNIC are another story.)

I mostly use 1&1 now, but their domain management tools and interface suck. I'd love to find a cheap, non-evil registrar that has a good domain management interface and good customer service. Every time I ask around, I get new suggestions...but the people usually turn out to be shills or to have limited experience with their recommendations.

When is the Y Combinator Registrar launching, eh? ;-)
I think domain tasting is going away for everyone because of new ICANN rules...
If you get the 17inch high resolution Macbook Pro or the Mac Pro, you're talking about savings of $400-$500 by my estimate.
This How-to is missing the first step (disabling the "domain proxy") which GoDaddy automatically configured if you registered the domain in the past few years.

- log in to GD and go to the domain manager. Go to each domain individually and check to see if the domain privacy proxy is turned on. If it is, it means that your whois info is being proxied by http://domainsbyproxy.com/ (it seems to be a sister site to GD). You need to find your account number for DBP which they would have sent to you when you reg'd the domain. You need to login to DBP and disable the proxy for all of your domains.
Making appointments online
thank you for that completely anecdotal evaluation of apple's hardware. My personal experience has been different, however, unless you have some kind of defects-per-million data or some such, I'll stick with what I said, it mostly comes down to personal preference. Anyway I didn't intend to get into a useless argument. My point, as I've stated before, was that you seemed to be not considering a decent OS to go with the thinkpad
I've been using DynDNS ( http://dyndns.com ). They have slightly higher prices than registrars such as GoDaddy, but I trust their brand more and haven't encountered any behavior that looks suspicious. Also, I used to host my websites from home via a cable modem, and their free dynamic IP address services worked very well.

To be honest, I haven't ever considered switching; Has anyone switched to or from DynDNS and have an anecdote about their experience to share?
Headlines are written to draw attention, but this one is just so wrong I wonder if the writer of it felt the least bit unclean.

The final quote sums it up: "[...] some had found bugs in the Linux operating system but many of them didn't want to put the work into developing the exploit code that would be required to win the contest."

So all three machines had bugs that made them compromisable, yet no one actually WANTED to win by making linux look bad?
summary: this time things might be different!
Paul Buchheit: Ideas vs Judgment and Execution: Climbing the Mountain
List of Interesting Essays on Programming and Computation
If that were true, we'd all be writing fast, simple programs in assembler.
Strange new spam attack on News.YC
We've had a rash of spam submissions in the last 24 hours. All the sites have links to something called Entrecard (http://entrecard.com). Looks like some strange combination of MLM and SEO. Anyone have any idea what's going on? Was it just that someone mentioned this site as a good place to spam on their forums, or is there some central organization controlling this?

In any case, for now we're killing any site that has any reference to Entrecard on it, even if it's conceivably on topic.
I've got AppleCare on my MacBook.

Hard drive failure; call phone support; take MacBook into service center; No drives in stock (backordered, they'll be in stock in 14 days); Me - "Just put a larger drive in and I'll pay the difference."; Apple - "No.";

In the end I asked for my MacBook back, went round the corner to the whitebox computer store, bought a drive for $90, restored my backup and got back to work. Apple sent me a new drive in the post.

AppleCare - bah.
Ha, yeah, this subject is as close to religion as you get here. I more than anything wanted to see how far I'd get down-modded for saying something bad about Apple. Even though I think it's true (Apple's hardware really is pretty poor and expensive) based on what I'd consider a large anecdotal sample size, and just using each for a little bit, I was just curious to see what happened. I'm shocked to still be in the positive.
netfirms.com used to do registrations for 4.95 and I was an affiliate that got $2 commissions on domain reg so I would essentially get $2.95 domain reg.
Concerning this point, it is not necessarily just the mentality. It is worth noting that China has had a government imposed and subsidized industrialization program in place for some time now. India, which is a democracy, is not forcing its people to work in factories when they might be happier living in a village. This might explain the difference in GDP?
Wii shortage may finally be near an end
Relationships are complicated
Assumption? Sorry, I wasn't aware I made any any assumptions that weren't implicit in the graph.

In the U.S. a student will attend a 4-year program after 12 years of school, meaning 16 years of schooling for a "tertiary" degree. That sounds equivalent in time to a Russian education through the standard university program. The higher degree programs here and in Russia are not relevant to the graph, so the fact that a U.S. PhD can be attained before the age of 30 versus Russia's 50 doesn't actually skew anything or explain why the 35-44 bracket in Russia is higher than the 25-34 bracket (though both are higher than any other country on the chart).

Anyway, the original blog entry is here:
http://blogs.ft.com/crookblog/2008/03/the-dumbing-of-america...

The point of the study was to look at the decline of the skilled workforce in the U.S., and in light of this, the foolishness of policies that keep out foreign skilled workers. So the main question the chart addresses is, "Where can we find people with the equivalent of a U.S. college degree?" And the answer that you and the study have both given is that Russia, Canada, Japan and South Korea have educated workers to spare -- and U.S. politicians should make it easy for them to immigrate here, since we're not generating enough of our own.
Measuring broadband penetration