skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
when you subsidize something you get more of it.

we need to stop all aid to third world countries. not only is the vast majority of the money absorbed by corruption and armed conflict, even the money that gets through doesn't help.

of course, this fails to account for the fact that we want those countries in armed conflict and hanging on our every welfare check because it means we can take their resources for way below market value. can you imagine how expensive things would be if the african nations were organized enough to have business infrastructure?
I budget two minutes per page for books, and three minutes per letter-sized page of text.

Stay away from speed-reading products.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Speed_reading
Cash scarcer for new technology firms
Looks like it's pounding the server enough as it is.
i prefer to read word by word so i don't miss anything. if something isn't worth reading that way, i usually read a couple sentences at random places that way then leave.

i think a large majority of arguments would go more smoothly if people would actually read all the words instead of guessing what the other person is saying.
thanks for sharing that link. I'd like to try that out.
Should you have your swap file enabled while running MySQL?
Why lame? Physics aside, he seemed to be an extraordinary individual based on accounts of him by other people, not just his auto-biographies.
A negative income tax seems to me like a generally good, if naive, solution.

Of course the problem is that a straight forward negative income tax creates a resistance level where each additional dollar earned is worth less and less. The simple negative income tax leads to the situation in the 1970's study mentioned in the article (people are discouraged from working).

I think the solutions lies in creating support levels, or income targets. I.e. $15k or less is taxed at 0%, $15k - 20k at -5%. This would establish a support level at $15k.

I can even imagine a system where meeting an "income goal" (support level) one year triggers a higher one for the next year. I.e. if you make $16k in 2008 and are taxed at -5%, you must make $20k in 2009 to receive the -5% rate again, otherwise you'll be taxed at 0%.

Eventually, if the person keeps meeting income targets, they'll no longer be poor (by definition).
I agree. "Death" is not the right word; maybe "miscarriage" describes things better.
The diminishing marginal utility of money would imply that the difference between $10k and $15k is quite large. Much larger than the difference, say, between $100k and $150k.
I've been impressed with this library http://extjs.com/ check out the menu example for the color picker...

http://extjs.com/deploy/dev/examples/menu/menus.html
This is actually proven to be true.

On the topic of terrorism and small probabilities, over 40,000 people die in car crashes per year in this country. It's essentially as if 9/11 has been happening every month for decades on our roads. But which do people care more about?
Ah, I never realized that. Thanks for the clarification.

I do think that analytic philosophy is a useful point of view. It just frustrated me that at my school, it was the only point of view offered.
I've used JMeter (http://jakarta.apache.org/jmeter/) for a few years now. It's easy to use and extend. The only thing I don't like is it doesn't play nice with AJAX.
Mathematica's Google Aptitude
I can't name names, but for one of sites we manage (1m+ uniques/month) compete only accounts for 79% of our traffic.
Sadly, in my experience, they will harass you for leaving the 2 dents behind and then demand that you pay for the flowers you stepped on while using your dent-puller.

A few days later you'll get a summons for small claims court indicating that you owe their brother-in-law who is a part-time mechanic $750 to fix the dents "right".

Does this guy not watch Judge Judy?
Bellkor breaks 9% improvement in the Netflix Challenge (as of 4/1)
So Star Simpson from MIT gets arrested as a terrorist for wearing a jacket with leds on it to a Boston Airport, but this guy just gets sent home by the cops for driving a tank down the roads in his neighborhood in Michigan?!

http://www.boingboing.net/2007/09/21/mit-student-arrested.ht...

Methinks the Boston authorities are wound a bit too tight, or that Michigan is one laid back place.
Meanwhile, Intel looks into taking in nvidia...
Any chance to see it used here? Another menu at the top: recommended?
I don't mind it being announced, it is just that it has already been announced. Repeatedly.
We inherit a great deal of wealth opportunity (or lack thereof) from our local economy. Credit is a social phenomenon, so wealth and poverty can become infectious. If you're able to easily work and pay for necessities (because of opportunities largely provided by market climate), then you have the money to get every bee sting looked at. It becomes a matter of generating sustainable wealth production, which boosts the pool of potential solutions avilable.

I think the communication potential of OLPC-style laptops is a much bigger draw than the educational one. Could be the infrastructure needed to leapfrog over major industrialization in regions seemingly rich in natural resources and workforce potential, which are squandered by maligned markets. What happens if children in poor markets have laptops? It could provide a means of overcoming parental (and perhaps governmental) problems bottom-up.
Thanks for being my first replier. You can't have privacy when you want to socialize. Philosophically, I find the "social media" ironical - they work to avoid people meeting each other.

By far the biggest opportunity for loopt is in dating. Dating, like mating, requires "signals". Suppose a guy going to a party, and receives a cell phone signal that a girl in the room is in dating mode, how cool that will be? $3/month is probably too cheap for sending and get those signals.

In general, an ice breaker is always needed in socializing (dating is the biggest subset). Loopt can be it.
Upmodded for pointing out that Yegge is always a little too sure of himself. He's an engaging writer though and ultimately he does a good thing by being an effective cheerleader for good (or at least better) languages.

A lot of people had the wrong idea about Javascript, the runtime environment (coupled with the unfortunate scoping) really obscured the genius of the language. Now with Rhino 1.7 you got almost all of the cool modern features of other structurally-typed 'scripting' languages (comprehensions, generators, Scheme-style lexical scoping, etc.) as well as access to what is arguably the largest body of useful library code on the planet. The only real problem is the lack of a first-class package mechanism, but it turns out you can add that too if you're a little tricky ;)

The JS 'object' is IMHO the 21st-century cons cell, in the sense that is an extremely simple atom from which you can build just about anything your heart desires. Javascript scopes are basically just objects, and methods are just (first-class) functions that have been stuck into objects. Add to this the fact that you've got a well-considered API into the interpreter itself and you've got basically the most kickass thing to happen to the JVM since...ever.
Not at all. I'm not saying that I want my customers to use FreeBSD -- I'm saying that I don't want customers who use Windows.
Very nicely done. I like the cause, and it's very well designed. I posted it for my Facebook friends as well.

The footer overlaps the content a little, making the bottom of the page difficult to read. That's using Firefox2 on XP.
I wouldn’t be surprised if Comcast is using their service.

This is at the top? Somebody's "I wouldn't be surprised"? Okay. I guess that's what I get for tuning in after midnight.
Google Trends shows most language searches declining
I'm always curious about what languages are gaining or losing popularity. I queried google trends and got some surprising results. Just about every language appears to be declining. I'd be interested in hearing some possible explanations.

http://www.google.com/trends?q=ruby%2C+python%2C+.net%2C+perl%2C+lisp
http://www.google.com/trends?q=java%2C+c%23%2C+c%2B%2B%2C+html%2C+javascript&ctab=0&geo=all&date=all&sort=0
i don't have any direct from experience suggestions, but there are several plugins under jquery's plugin page:

http://plugins.jquery.com/search/node/color+picker
The Netflix prize algorithms rely heavily on large amounts of data (thousands of votes per movie). It might be useful for Reddit and Digg as each story gets votes in the 3-5 digits, but not so much for this site. Of course, it would definitely be something, but I don't think it would be as useful.

Not to mention, the Netflix data has a scale of 1-5. Digg-like sites have scales from 0-1 (no vote, or vote), so that might further dilute the quality.
I used to work for a company that hocked speed reading training software. As a kind of side effect, I learned how to speed read.

The thing with speed reading is that you can increase the speed at which you read fairly easily, but your comprehension and recall will suffer greatly. I can probably read 500 words per minute, but comprehension is pretty low (~60%). At that point, it generally isn't worth it.

Speed reading is kind of a stressful activity, and there's only a very narrow set of situations in which it makes sense to speed read something. 95% of the stuff that I read, I read for pleasure, and in order to enjoy reading something you have to read it the "old fashioned" way.

If you want to teach yourself to speed read, books and the like won't really help much. It is kind of like learning to drive- you really have to just try it yourself. To start, sweep your hand over the words in an "infinity sign" pattern, with the height of each sweep being about 3 or 4 lines high. Don't read the words to yourself, just focus on the words above your finger. After awhile, you'll be able to detach your eyes from the lines, and you can stop sweeping your hand over the page. The key is to take in as much as possible with your eyes, and let your brain assemble everything in the background. You'll eventually get pretty good at associating key nouns with the verbs and adjectives around them. That's pretty much all you need to get 50-80% comprehension with most things.

(P.S. I'm not aware of any speed reading methods that don't come with a reduced level of recall/comprehension. I think it is just the nature of the beast.)
Developerlife - Tutorials » Task API (1 of 5) - Quick Start Guide
Native font rasterization in Java
What has actually been accomplished? Details please.

(edited, brevity.)
Popular stuff is easy to predict, it is the users with little feedback and less popular movies that make all the difference. Digg doesn't need a recommender because it is all about popularity, and if you do not like it - do not go there. I also want to go back to see the best stories on news.YC before I joined and I do not see a way to do that.
Comcast monitors Twitter
Formula 1 racing and Microsoft (and Java)
The biggest accomplishment is the algorithm - when applied to other useful noisy datasets, it can make all the difference between winning and losing (e.g. financial markets)
I've used grinder with amazon ec2 to load test one of our sites before. It worked really well once I sorted out some issues with the clients communicating with my console but it made it very easy to keep adding machines until the load/speed was an issue.
Without claiming myself an expert in research on reading, and not a "speed reader" myself, I am probably able to deliver something of a lecture on this topic. Disregarding my lack of credentials, here's something you might find interesting in an unstructured manner. I apologize in advance for lack of sources; you can question me on anything I write, and I assure you there are sources but I won't bother digging.

Generally, proponents of speed reading don't know their stuff. Speed reading is based on the notion that the brain is underused in comprehending text; training would supposedly untap this potential. Don't count on it. Some say that if you read faster, you force your brain to focus, and so comprehension goes up. This works to an extent, noticeable, sure, but far less than hyped. And it is not a technique problem: it is a discipline problem. If you're generally focused at what you do, you're probably among the faster readers.

So most people read at about 250-400wpm, and this is related to the speed of the "inner voice," aka "subvocalization" (or, better, the phonological pathway/loop). So the idea is that if you reduce, or eliminate the inner voice, you can read faster. Programs that focus on these will claim 1000+ wpm. There is some truth to this, but these programs aren't all it takes.

Now when your eye sees text, it the brain takes time to parse it and register meaning. Conscious meaning, IIRC, happens after a 350ms mark, which means it is biologically impossible to read word by word, line by line, beyond the speed of the inner voice. This means that if you want to read faster, you're reading in blocks of text .

What does this mean? It means that when a normal reader sees a word, you're seeing a sentence or paragraph. Peripheral vision? Not necessarily. Peripheral vision doesn't have enough acuity to support parsing at a level required for detailed reading. IOW, most of the peripheral vision talk by these programs is BS.

The cases where PV is useful is when you have good familiarity with the text contours. How do you train this? The hard way: build your vocabulary, and read a lot. Reading is a "self-bootstrapped process," if you will. This is, AFAICT, the ONLY fool-proof, non bullshit method.

FYI, I recall two speed readers, who both read very fast but in different ways. First one reads blocks of text in a glance. He would see a paragraph and understand it in the time you read a sentence, in a kind of real-time, bulk-parsing process. The second one would read text in a "serial" fashion without regard to the meaning, into some kind of buffer, then think about it after he's done. The catch: both are geniuses.

The bottleneck in deciphering meaning from text is not at the text->parse stage (this is what SR programs focus on). It is from the parse->meaning stage. IOW, brain power. Fortunately you can train this, but probably not with some book or some program.

This is pretty thoughtstream. If you have other questions I'm happy to discuss.
AFAIK Google trends normalizes to total search volume. Therefore, it probably means that more and more people who use Google don't care about programming languages.
The solution to the barriers imposed by regulation is regulations?

I'm reminded of the "danger, low sign" sign.
its not necessarily that the languages are declining, its that google is becoming more mainstream. the amount of language searches could be increasing, just increasing at a slower rate than non-language searches.

"Google Trends analyzes a portion of Google web searches to compute how many searches have been done for the terms you enter, relative to the total number of searches done on Google over time. We then show you a graph with the results -- our search-volume graph -- plotted on a linear scale."
I'm generally a pretty fast reader. I've never done any speed reading courses, but I gre up without a TV so I read a lot when I was young.

I can read at somewhere between 575 & 600 wpm with http://www.zapreader.com/ (I hadn't tried that before - interesting idea). That's not comfortable, and I need to concentrate to do it, but I suspect I'd still be getting close to 100% recall. I'm not a reading technique expert, but it seems to me that the zapreader software is specifically designed to stop people using skimming techniques, so if you can read at a good speed on that you are doing pretty well.

When I'm reading a novel I generally read at 1 minute per page. On average that's probably around 250 wpm, and I find that relaxing and easy.
Take a look at the Open Clip Art Library, the Creative Commons search engine, and the lists of lists that Smashing Magazine is well known for.

http://www.openclipart.org/

http://search.creativecommons.org/

http://www.smashingmagazine.com/category/graphics/

By the way, you haven't told us what type of website you've got. That's important when, for example, you find clipart that has a Creative Commons Non-Commercial license.
Thanks. That does explain it. Now for the better question: Is there an impartial source to quantitatively show what languages are gaining/losing popularity?

I found this:
http://www.amazon.com/gp/bestsellers/books/3952/ref=pd_ts_b_...

and this older link:
http://radar.oreilly.com/archives/2006/08/programming-langua...
Eye movement isn't the bottleneck. I mean, reducing fixations will not increase comprehension. Sure, your eye takes time to move, but each saccadic jump takes less time (and is immensely precise with its jump, so it's a pretty optimized process) than that of text recognition to comprehension in your brain.

Peripheral vision serves as priming mechanism. You can better prepare your mind to piece together relevant words and form meaning, but don't expect it to support reading like the center of gaze.
Yeah, I've often thought that the ability to see historical YC news stories would be very useful -- both for the period before a user joined the site, as well as when you miss a week or two because of vacation, illness, etc.
how about - using google code to establish a base.
"... This is exactly the reason I became concerned and ticked off when learned of this RoHS regulation when buying electronics components for hobby projects. ..."

I first stumbled across this problem looking at the whisker site nasa has ~ http://nepp.nasa.gov/whisker where there is some serious "whisker mitigation" going on. There are lots of interesting images showing why this is a real problem.
Startup's gadget helps guitars get pitch perfect
For those interested in these kinds of applications, this is an RSVP (rapid serial visual presentation) device. Its chief benefit is most likely forced self-pacing (and thus, forced concentration), but I highly doubt it will assist your comprehension. For one, it is ludicrous to read "the quick red fox jumps over the lazy brown dog" and "scientists discovered more CP-violation than predicted by the standard model" at the same speed. For two, this RSVP method obliterates benefits of peripheral vision. Sure, you can do several words at once, but PV does its job above and below the lines as well. For three, it eliminates any recall aids you might have acquired by the shape of the text (ever think, "what was that word... it was at the left bottom corner of that page"?).

Otherwise, it's an interesting thing. I would play with that kind of stuff, but for experimentation.
I think all models need advertising - in the act of advertising your , freemium, subscription and affiliate products. (but yeah banners degrade a site more than the profit they generate)
Damn, I totally missed out on this lecture. I only heard about Knuth's "Christmas tree lecture" in December at the last minute, as well. There needs to be an aggregator for interesting public lectures in the Bay Area (or $area of your choice).
we get 6.5k, they show 1.75k - Probably due to the niche of my site.

- similar question - anyone want to share google traffic estimator traffic (clicks per day) vs actual clicks in top 5 organic rankings? (basically what traffic goes to ad vs organic)

-- Google says 120-240 month I get 400-700 @ avg position of 4
(40% to #1 /
25% to #2 /
20% to #3 /
15% to the rest.)

*as per AOL user data
These deaths are just anecdotal evidence. Startups were dying 6 months ago too.

I'm not saying funding won't get tighter, but I have yet to see it.
The point about using 3x5 cards to keep track of stuff you actually get done and then to make a quick hit list for tomorrow seemed especially useful to me.

I just found out about http://gootodo.com/ which allows you to use email to manage your lists, too. Gootodo lets you send it emails using specially formatted recipients that determine where in your todo list the email item goes. Then you just have it mail your your list in the morning. It might not satisfy the "where did all my time go today" itch but it sure seems to do the trick for tomorrow's tasks.
Admittedly this is a lame essay. But not all essays about what to do are a waste of time; I've learnt from a few. And certainly it doesn't matter whether they're "on the internet." Practically everything is, now.
This sort of thing is a bit more sneaky than that.
The Müller Formula: Predictable color preferences
I am very curious how do they track blogs about them: special software? subscribe search result as feed? or simply do manual search every x minutes?
Lua's tables go further in a few respects. one is that anything can be a key, including other objects, which makes certain things much easier

another is Lua's metatable system, which lets you specify the behavior of the table under various operations. one of the interesting ones is the operation of accessing an index that doesn't have an entry in the table, which leads to straightforward ways of implementing inheritence and memoization, among countless other things

Lua's tables also entirely subsume arrays and other key-value pair thingies at minimal performance loss. tables are also used across the language in various places. for example, you can set a function's variable environment with a table, which is how modules are officially implemented

not to make an offhand comparison, but because Lua and Javascript are quite close
Here's one I like:

http://www.tiobe.com/index.php/content/paperinfo/tpci/index....

The index checks three search engines for references to each of 100 programming languages and tracks the number of hits. So, it's a measure of buzz. Popularity could mean a lot of things, but buzz/hype is probably the easiest one to gauge.
Took a speed reading seminar, best method i found was to use a ruler and just slide it down the page, and you try to keep up.

Also, do not vocalize the words externally, it should just be read naturally.
Moving to Europe is a sensible alternative period. ;-)
True. Another problem is that the rest of the world uses GSM, so if you ever want to travel outside of the US you need a GSM phone.
I think from the context this gentleman just has a few RSS feeds going on, and scours the web just like you and I to see what people are saying. Doubt there's any sophisticated team of people who just sit on the web looking for the phrase "comcast"
Procrastination Calculation
Most media monitoring companies offer an online component these days. To answer your question - all of the above and more (including the Mk I. Eyeball.)
Interesting discussion on how to better measure the quality of recommendation systems, from the Netflix forums.
The reason to find shortcuts is that there is a vast amount of information out there and limited amounts of time you can devote to learn it.

I am not trying to do it less carefully, I would like to do it more efficiently. To put in perspective: I know people (mostly English PhD students) who read 2x or maybe even 4x as fast as I do AND retain and understand what they read better than me. Of course, this doesn't apply to them trying to read SICP, but it does when reading Virginia Woolf. Specialization and practice have something to do with it; but, the point remains that there is something to be gained by making the process of information intake as efficient as it can be.
I will try this next time I'm reading for leisure.

BTW: good luck on your YC application ;)
There's also http://www.spreeder.com/