skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
These claims about where evolutionary methods are useful need to be qualified.

1. They need to have a domain where a given candidate solution can be quantitatively measured, or alternatively where you can induce a relative ordering. This could possibly require human input ("rank these three pictures from best to worst"), but you need to at least have the ability to say that one solution is more fit than another.

2. A candidate solution's fitness needs to be at least somewhat continuous. Ideally there needs to be a gradient of success and opportunities for incremental quality improvement with corresponding incremental fitness improvements. Evolutionary methods cannot solve needle-in-a-haystack problems.

3. They're of greatest utility where human ingenuity is of the littlest value: i.e., where the problem domain is little understood. For example, finance, and, apparently, things like radar design: black arts where no one really knows what the fuck. Ths should help mullify claims about human verification and the human element of design: these things work best where a lifetime of experience doesn't buy you much and you kind of have no other choice.

4. As with any search heuristic, you face an eternal battle between exploration of the search space and exploitation of it: you can exhaustively explore one part of the space, but that will generally come at the cost of ignoring alternative solutions. This manifests itself as a struggle against premature convergence. Depending on how much domain knowledge (an often-overlooked component) you can incorporate in, this may not be a problem (you can modify your fitness criteria to automatically avoid settling upon certain undesirable parts of the search space).

5. Finally, always keep in mind that this is not "AI". This is not trying to model human cognition. The stuff about being inspired by natural selection is true at first, but when you get more sophisticated you'll deviate more and more from this. Hybrid solutions are common; for instance, you may have a normal stochastic evolution scheme at first, but then at the end greatly slow down the rate of learning and at the end when you've settled upon a satisfactory solution you may wish to incorporate traditional local search methods, which really have no biological inspiration, it's just that they just freakin' work, so you use it because you care more about solving your problem than constantly aping nature.

Biological or natural inspiration can be useful, but only in the context of practical problem solving, which is what evolutionary methods have always been about. The first widely read book on genetic algorithms was written by an oilfield roughneck with a PhD in civil engineering and the field is still kind of a pariah in academia because of its relative lack of formal foundations. All this is disregarded in the name of practicality, which is an attitude, flawed or not, much closer to what prevails in the real world.
Speediest browser with Adblock+, anyways
I came up with the idea of evolutionary algorithms when I was 15 or 16, and was quite annoyed to find out the idea already existed. Of course, if it hadn't existed, if wouldn't have mattered, because I sure as hell wasn't going to implement it.
You can argue with the numbers themselves all day but the point in the end is that Apple is making a ton of money focusing on an end of the market that everyone else is afraid of.

Another aspect of that is that most of those sales were through Apple's own retail stores -- which other PC manufacturers have consistently failed to succeed with. Again they're succeeding by not playing their own game.

(I find it strange that so many people devote energy to thinking about what the numbers don't mean rather than thinking about what they do mean.)
Microsoft Is Moving Towards Checkmate
Google mulls Microsoft response
It would be cool if they could go out to the "floating garbage continents" and make use of the plastic to build out their colonies.
Jannat 2008 Hindi Movie Watch Online 
Producer : Mukesh Bhatt
Director : Kunal Deshmukh
Release Date : May 16, 2008
Language : Hindi
Genre : Drama, Social, Sports

Casting In Jannat 2008 Hindi :
Emraan Hashmi...... Arjun
Samir Kochhar
Sonal Chauhan...... Zoya
Vishal MalhotraJaved Sheikh (Pakistan)
Vipin Sharma
US begins to break foreign oil ‘addiction’
I am planning a move to the area but I have concluded that you need to live in SF. Even if you have to work in SV, this is one of the few parts of the country where it is really worth it to just suck it up and handle the commute.
Cloud may squeeze margins, says Microsoft exec
The reason there are line-ups in the short-term is rarely because of the pricing mechanism, but because the degree of control required for effective rationing requires fewer points of distribution. If you could vote at the convenience store, you wouldn't need to line up to vote either....

The supply and demand argument isn't tenable in areas with both inelastic supply and demand. The possible solutions all involve tradeoffs, and there are good and bad ways to implement them. The good news is that rationing doesn't necessarily require price controls, and there are effective and ineffective ways of sending price signals and otherwise encouraging/discouraging production.

My personal preference is subsidization for the poor - an approach which prices scarcity by trading cash for convenience. Telling the starving that a big of hunger is good for them in the long-run is silly. A bit like arguing the Great Depression was nothing more than a purge of rottenness from the system. When all the banks have collapsed we'll all be better off!
Google Backers Back Aster Data Systems. It’s All About The Clusters.
Typical engineering job is pretty lame? That's very American, if you ask me, because you're measuring everything around youself in dollars. I've become an engineer because I create things: every day something starts spinning, cranking, rotating and pumping because I build it, while 100% of lawyers (without exceptions) are useless parasites eating off our own deficiencies.

Having an average engineering job isn't lame, your (and Greenspun's) line of thinking IS lame. In fact, it's pretty disgusting. That also explains why there aren't many women in the field: generalizing, they're simply more bottom-line oriented, as numerous studies have proven: they don't spend 6 years to get a Master's and build robots in a garage in their spare time for free, instead they'll "wipe ass" overtime in a nearest hospital with an associate degree, because overtime pays double rate.
Franz Unveils AllegroGraph v3.0 - A Web 3.0 Database
I heart Zappos:   Customer service 2.0
No Deleterious Effects of Increased Atmospheric Carbon Dioxide - 31,000 Scientists sign Petition
or they might just add a hyperlinked "[pdf]" or "[scribd]" after the original link, pointing to scribdified version.

internets ignoring my choice of pdf viewer -- that sure feels wrong.

oh well, greasemonkey to rescue.
Older Brain Really May Be a Wiser Brain
The prices at Zappos are very close to MSRP... at least for current sneakers. I've been tangentially involved with the action sports industry for years. My friends own shops and apparel companies and I've done web and video work for them. Zappos gets stuff for lower cost than the shops because they do so much volume. They also cut out the distributor and don't have to pay for retail space, which are the two points where other retailers lose. Even with returns they are making a killing. An $80 sneaker probably only costs them $20.
Web 3.0's here already? Awesome.
Is scribd an improvement for windows users or something? It seems that for most people here it's an anoyance and a worse user experience than just linking to the pdf. Does it solve some problem I'm missing?

edit: Try zooming all the way in. You're in for some hideously unreadable fuzzy font rendering... why oh why.
Lieberman Calls On Google To Take Down Terrorist Content
Well, if their markup is that high, then I suppose even a couple $15 shipping labels still leaves a profit.

I'd love to know the ratio of returned shoes to ones kept. I bet it's greater than 1:1.
It does not seem to improve matters on my Ubuntu, either.
Well, I bet they return shoes a lot. Not as much as I did (and that was only due to 2 different brands having odd sizes) but I'd not be surprised if half of their orders end up returned.

It's not a hassle at all with Zappos, it's trivial. I'm the kind of guy who would just eat the $50-$100 if it required more than 10 minutes of my time. I've got boxes full of crap to prove that.
Lots of thought fodder, thanks!
That's what I thought. Either they do not care, have a back-up plan or they had hoped to rely on security by obscurity.

Incidentally I just read "Built To Last" and they also talk about tightness of (cultural) fit.
Much appreciated; the neilsenmedia statistic is cited on the first Google hit, so I was being anal. Interestingly, some sites are quoting nearly 5 hours now, based on the 2007 stats: http://findarticles.com/p/articles/mi_hb267/is_200706/ai_n25...
for Israeli startups

http://www.startupisrael.com/
I could not possibly disagree more. I will never again commute more than ten minutes each way. An hour a day is over 6% of my waking life...and the SF to Palo Alto or Mountain View commute is over an hour each way during rush hour (and about 50 minutes any other time). So not worth it.

When I lived in Austin, I had a pretty long commute to the office and hated it. I treated the symptoms of the disease by buying a 350Z, which I figured I would love to drive. Guess what? After a few months I didn't even like driving the 350Z. If that aint a shame, I don't know what is. When I moved to the valley, I sold my Z. I don't have a car now. If I can't walk or ride my bike or catch a train or hitch a ride, I don't go. And it's proven to be a very nice year and a half.

Of course, in a startup, you can choose where you work, and if I didn't have other reasons for being in Mountain View I would choose to work in SF (my girlfriend also refuses to commute a long distance and she works at Google...a five minute commute from here).
My problems with performance has always been bad scripting technique that I picked up from code samples. Have some friends all use your web app at the same time. If your system can handle 5 to 10 people at one time without slowing down then likely you are going to be fine with more people on. I used to have performance problems all of the time. Once I finally got tired of the problems I had a friend review my code and he showed me what I was doing wrong. Now I have about 300 people on the system in any given hour and no issues.
Holy... Eliezer Yudkowsky? Why, hello...!
Santana Row is bad relative to a real city, but it's great compared to a regular shopping mall (and compared to most of what surrounds it).

For example, the linked article, http://www.theatlantic.com/issues/96sep/kunstler/kunstler.ht... (which is a good read, btw), says:
"In many localities apartments over stores were also forbidden under the zoning laws. Few modern shopping centers are more than one story in height, and I know of no suburban malls that incorporate housing."

Santana Row, however, does have housing above the stores.
State of the Mobile Web: Q1 2008
Quite a smart strategy. I wouild love to impliment this and infact, I think I could come up with a very good business case for it. As with most of you I suspect, I at first thought about the angle of "it's a quick $1k, I'll just quit in a week and be better off for it".
But of course - Zappos has already weeded out unsuitable candidates in interview/tests. That 10% figure is highly realistic because Zappos have a good idea that the vast majority of their new hires ARE right for the job, before they even start their training.
The bay area has nothing on Los Angeles in terms of car obsession. It's not even in the same league.
The startup entrepreneur's best friend - hope you will be our friend too
Right. Comparing a shopping mall to a city is almost as bad as Gladwell comparing a Trailblazer to a Boxster.
I feel so naked :-)
If by "checkmate" you mean "having the same share price for a decade" then yes, they are moving toward checkmate.
Facebook Ignites Entrepreneurial Spirit at Harvard
Do you love or hate thefunded.com?
A lot have been said about thefunded.com. What do you think about it?
High Concept Pitches for Startups
Hm... I thought we only downmodded comments that didn't add to the discussion here, but it looks like people just disagree with me. Care to explain why instead of just downmodding?
For people who love to shop for shoes, all they need is one experience with Zappos and they never want to shop anywhere again. That's worth the price of some return labels.
Webmonkey relaunches
Programmers At Work - Bill Gates (1986)
Sony, Microsoft and Nintendo are not producing 'green' enough consoles, says Greenpeace
Microsoft braces for major customer shift
I think they think about this the same way they think about their returns policy: They just assume that most people will be reasonable, and not go out of their way to abuse the system.

On a tangential note, I seem to notice more and more how this pattern of just trusting people seems to win out in all kinds of fields, even though it seems non-intuitive. Wikipedia is another example and in a sense the whole open source phenomenon is based on this. Both of these would have been considered preposterous until they succeeded and completely changed the world.
Plus the PC market is fragmented by different vendors/brands, and in Apples market ...there is only Apple.
Upgrade Your Desktop From Fedora 8 To Fedora 9 With PreUpgrade
Up north - you might just want to keep an eye on the Finns given their past tech track record ;)
http://www.arcticstartup.com/
http://www.startupbin.com/

India:
http://vijaysblog.wordpress.com/

Canada:
http://montrealtechwatch.com/
http://www.startupottawa.com/
Hmm, if Google doesn't turn up much about your niche market, maybe you have a great opportunity. The fact that it's hard to get info about these people and what they need means that market is yours if you do the leg-work (or phone-work).
Hey guys, shut up. You aren't supposed to show all those graphs. Only the hockey stick! The Scientific Consensus is settled. No questions, please.

More seriously, I'm not confident of everything they discuss here, and I think they are cherrypicking.

Upvoted because some of it is useful, however. For instance, hurricane number/intensity vs time (Katrina wasn't caused by global warming folks) and computer model uncertainty (they are crap). It's well worth a skeptical read.
Very interesting, many of his answers are still prevailing. And you also find the reason why Microsoft slept away the Internet, Gates believed in CD ROMs:

"One of the new areas we’re focusing on at Microsoft is compact-disk applications. CD ROM is the technology we’re going to use to get personal computers into the home."

During the whole interview, he didn't mention a single time the word: communication.
Thank you for that pointer. Though it's not quite what I want to analyze.

Perhaps I'll just have to write my own toy-parser then.
I wonder if they walk down Mass Ave. looking for technical cofounders at MIT.
Zuora, The Salesforce for Online Billing, Launches
Netflix Roku: Free Is Such A Beautiful Word
linus is too far down and rms is not on there. As if GNU and the GPL have't made an impact. Bad list.
he was only talking about the next 5 years or so. the internet wasnt terribly useful (at least to the masses) in 1986, nor for the next 9 or so years until mosaic/netscape came out. until the early-mid 90s you could only really access the internet by logging into a BBS or some mainframe (the first TCP stack for windows emerged around 93 or 94.)

i'd say history showed that focusing on productivity apps and the OS from ~1986-96 was a winning strategic move :)
Review of Condé Nast acquisitions and strategy
Yes. That's exactly the reason why each country can and should get rid of subsidies and tariffs on its own.
Why when house prices fall, rent increases.
It is true for most of UK and many parts of USA where friends I have are based. Is it also true for where you are?
Web 3.0 will mark the return (revenge?) of the enterprisey, faceless corporation.

Their numbers will be legion, and to be recognized by their bevelly, drop-shadowed logomarks.
Plus they're probably running Bayesian statistics on all the data they have on the interview/test results of the candidates, so they can get better on hiring those that are less likely to quit. (And if they're not, they should be.)
Wow, those scientists have balls to stand up against 'big warming' special interests...
Digg - Internet Archive: Details: H. Duthel: Irrweg Neokonservatism
"Microsoft Is Moving Towards Checkmate"

"Techcrunch Is Moving Towards Supermarket Checkout Line"
"A broad attention span may enable older adults to ultimately know more about a situation"

Almost makes me want to get older.

<Alt Tab> <Ctrl-C> <Alt Tab> <Ctrl-V>

Now what was I saying?
Good stuff.

The actual statistic (Business Links, UK) is 90% of startup businesses go bust within the first 6 months. If you can hang on longer than this, the statistics improve. This mainly has to do with cash flow, startup costs etc. which many starups don't adequately plan for. If the business model enables you to survive "indefinitely" and and you have minimum operating and living costs, this works fine. However, the other problem is stagnation - if you're not growing and no new ideas or changes are going into the business, you're going nowhere, no matter how long you hold on. Sincwe markets change quite rapidly, chances are that an idea that was great 3-4 years ago, will be stale and done by somebody else if it's not acted on quickly enough.
Improving Bug Triage with User Pain
Six Annoyances in Hardy Heron Ubuntu
Procrastination and Perfectionism
Yes, FriendFeed Will Be Mainstream (by 2018) and Here’s Why
Isn't writing - and reading - articles like this just part of the process of procastination and distraction?

Actually, watching TV, reading email, writing articles etc. indicates you are engaged with your surroundings, not trying to isolate yourself from it. You're trying to gather information you need to know, or contact and influence others.
This reminds me of an innovation by another company known for its excellent customer service, Southwest Airlines.

They would put all of the current applicants in a room and have each one present themselves to the others. The recruiters never observed the presenter. Instead, they observed the audience. Those paying attention would be more likely to care about their customers, and were invited to interview.
"But at the heart of the programs that make it to the top, you’ll find that the key internal code was done by a few people who really knew what they were doing."
I answered that question wrong. I should have stated "none that I know." But at any rate, I can rattle off far more lawyers, doctors, dentists, and for that matter CPA's that own businesses than programmers.
"I seriously question the economics of Zappos"

This is a pure numbers game. They know long before you do what percentage of orders will be returned. I imagine they stay competitive in such a touch market because of their economies of scale.
How is it possible for Visual Basic to be most popular .NET language? Lessons from past? Or?
Entrecard Stock Crashes! | Tech Jaws
The best Software Developers are in China
Unblock Myspace, Facebook and Youtube Using a Proxy
The Beginner’s Guide to Twitter
http://www.watchtheguild.com/
Money can buy happiness.

Money can buy a waverunner. Find me one person who is sad on a waverunner.
Pointlessly verbose rewrite of the Twitter FAQ? Looks like it.
Eight face fraud charges over AOL Time Warner
I think this is directly applicable to the current situation at Microsoft.

The number of contributors to the Windows codebase has risen dramatically over the last couple of years, while some other teams have remained at a fixed size (such as the XBox team and the Office team). It could be a (highly-unlikely) coincidence, but the end-user satisfaction with both the latter products is far greater than for Windows Vista.

Obviously a correlation does not imply causation, but it's certainly food for thought (even if slightly rehashed/redundant).
Damn!

I just upgraded to Web 2.5.
From M-W:

deleterious: harmful often in a subtle or unexpected way <deleterious effects> <deleterious to health>

Just in case I wasn't the only one ;-)
I wonder is Zappos backs up all this "enthusiasm" for the company with actual money paid. Typically these "fun" organizations expect total commitment from their employees but shy away from actually giving them a tangible 'interest' in the org.
More information on this prestigious institute:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oregon_Institute_of_Science_and...

Cave Junction is a beautiful area, and I'd highly recommend a detour if you get the chance (say, go down the coast route instead of taking I5 south), but it's pretty much in the middle of nowhere:

http://maps.google.com/maps?ll=42.166779,-123.646999&spn...

that, combined with their "nuclear war survival guide" stuff, makes me think "survivalists!".

I would vote "not hacker news".
America's Best-Paying Jobs
Why did you even ask how you displayed bias, since you're perfectly not-ashamed to admit it now?
Open source code examined
But the technology that was able to connect computers existed already even though it was still in research phase. Gates was surely aware of the ARPA net at that time, but he didn't consider it a technology with impact on Microsoft (by the way, that was even still the case in the middle of the 90s).
If you checkout the latest from cvs you can get a sneak peak at web 4.0
I'm getting a paywall. Is this article the same one: http://biz.yahoo.com/nytimes/080520/1194776479074.html?.v=18
As well as up arrows, can we also have [BS] arrows?
One of those 31,000 'scientists' is none other than climate researcher-turned-Spice Girl Geri Halliwell or "Dr. Halliwell" as her friends call her.
Ask Your Doctor About mod_rails
90 out of 100 .NET programmers that I know and work with use C# and know VB but choose not to use it so it's funny to see these stats to me.
Hilarious reply Matt, even more curious though is the fact that you got modded down (what no fanboy idol worship for Mr. Maroon people?)
The key line is "VB is the best language of the two for working with COM legacy applications," remembering that "legacy applications" includes Microsoft Office.
How to make Facebook useful again
Looks kind of like social bait/content text generation for the blogosphere. He's probably hoping to become THE article for Twitter noobs in Google search. Smart move I would say, verbose articles like this appeal to the 'learn from a book' people.
IBM vs. Tata: Who's More American?
Why your boss is overpaid?
Eight ways to hack the web.
Why Web privacy is impossible.
Companies that profit from your data.
Hacking without technology.
Review: Roku Netflix Set Top Box is Just Shy of Totally Amazing
It seems to me that someone expert in the fields of either a) probability or b) statistics could rather easily review the current climate models and determine whether they respectively cover a) enough possibilities or b) determine a confidence factor for the collected data, in order to determine how useful the current climate models are.

My understanding of current climate models is that they are not sophisticated enough to model even the actions of the Gulf Stream in combination with what is happening on land, much less handle the Pacific High and whatever goes on in the Indian Ocean.
Video: Who's reading your mail?
No, you are lying.

Signers "H": http://www.oism.org/pproject/s33p342.htm

There are 452 PhDs on that page alone. Each of them actually risks something by signing the petition, so this is no joke.
Most software development happens inside big companies on applications that will never leave their walls. That software is written in Java and Visual Basic.
Arthur W. Burks, 92, Dies; Early Computer Theorist