skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Price needn't track cost, especially in technology. Services are often deployed with low margins for the provider, with the expectation that margins will drop over time as technology gets cheaper.

Consumers benefit from this if it means they get access to new technology at a lower price than they would if margins were held constant.
Wow, that made my day. Thank you.

I'm amazed they got 4 of the 9 pigeons to actually return the ping.
I'm sorry but it's difficult for me to take a laughable platform "quite seriously". (granted, Windows is a great platform for games).

I can tell you I won't support Windows and will ignore it for the foreseeable future. I'm making web apps, for fuck's sake! (And if IE wants my support, then it just has to support standards better and my site will automagically support it, for the most part).
Ok, why don't you enlighten us all on how "breeding" causes poverty.

You might want to check out something like "Guns, Germs, and Steel", which is one of the latest works to effectively debunk your assertion, pointing out, as the article does, how poverty leads to poverty.
Providers don't jack up prices just to piss you off. They do it because you will pay. The carriers are not running an SMS cartel that keeps prices high.
Yes, every time I get a phone call or receive an sms I miss the uk. There's a huge lack of choice here.
I don't think there's a single method that is optimal for all people. For example, I think there's an inflection point in your optimal strategy when your tasks pass the point where you can actually do all of them.

For myself, I like to reframe the issue. Instead of "Look at all my tasks, which one is highest priority?", which takes lots of mental energy, I just concentrate on NOT doing things that don't support my goals. This allows me to tackle small chunks and build momentum.

One of the best ways to get something done is to NOT do things that don't contribute.
I'm taking this as a very good sign. Seems for a while now that U.S. culture has gone heavily in the direction of anti-intellectualism. It would be nice for a swing in the other direction.
Sunday Conversation with Tiger Woods
Solutions to Exercises in "ANSI Common Lisp"
I'm wondering what kind of utility function is needed to make such a strange MU function...

As far as dents on the car are concerned, let me write what conventional microeconomy says. Here is the function to estimate the choices.

U = sum(F(x(t))/(1+r)^t) by t from 1 to infinity (or life expectation), where F(x) is a momentary utility function, r is "perceptual" discounting rate (sorry, don't know the English term), which means that F(x) next year is 1+r times less nice than having it now.

If you don't repair the car, x(t) will be constant, let's say X. If you do, first period it is x(0) = Y < X, but since t=1 x(t) = Z > X.

The problem is that F(Y) has more weight than F(Z)'s. The more r is, the greater the difference and more probable the first choice will win. The problem of poor people is that (1) their r is much more than that of middle class, and they don't value the future, (2) their F(x) (perception of what is good) is different.
And, furthermore, being stereotyped as a poor person will (in a statistical sense) make him act more as a poor person is stereotyped to act: http://www.sciam.com/article.cfm?id=how-stereotyping-yoursel... .

(No worries about discussing it, I was hoping to discuss it. I just get paranoid that everyone assumes that I believe every word of every link I post)
Believe it or not, some of us don't visit Digg. As for the relevance of the post, I think it is relevant enough. No one forced you to click on the link btw.
For comparison: in Uzbekistan, outgoing SMS message costs 2c and all incoming messages are free.
I didn't take that to be his main point, but yes, I think so. Though I think it would be more accurate to say "Lisp lets you manipulate the program's AST trivially because the AST is the code".

This is basically Greenspun's 10th Law again. There's no magic in Lisp that's computationally impossible in another language, but it might be simpler to just write a Lisp in that language first. Rubinius did something even tougher: they wrote a Ruby. The advantage of this is that it's backwards-compatible with all their existing code, while upgrading to sexps would not be.

I think the monkeypatching corresponds to only the front half of Lisp macros. The macroexpand part comes from making the monkeypatches log Ruby code, and then running the log.
Taking On the World - how the U.S. can become competitive again
I use Smacklet.

http://www.smacklet.com
I'm not up to date on the current Windows OS or IE marketshare. I am pretty certain it is still in the high 90s for both. If you're comfortable ignoring that portion of the market, good luck to you.
I think this is a dangerous position to take of you want to run a business.

In business it's about doing something that your customers want, and if they run IE as their browser they want your site to work on their computers. If it doesn't they will find one that does.
Structured Procrastination, RescueTime, and some tips from Marc Andreessen:

http://blog.pmarca.com/2007/06/the_pmarca_guid.html
Just buy from somewhere that is know to offer a refund on the Windows tax easily, provides their systems with no OS preloaded or something like the Dell Ubuntu offerings.
In other news, Roman Empire collapsed.
But how do I grep my stack of plain papers?

Seriously, yes I agree, plain old paper and pen is absolutely essential. They say geniuses think on paper.
Philosophy is a fantastic major, so long as you don't plan on being a professional philosopher.
You know, I couldn't understand that Lisp code snippet he presented either. He converted this Ruby:

code == data

to this:

(eq (code (data)))

What? OK, let's translate that to syntax non-Lispers can understand. That means:

eq(code(data()))

What? Maybe he was trying to write

(eq . (code . (data)))

Which is just a horrible, never-used way of writing

(eq code data)

which in that other syntax would be written

eq(code, data)

Yet another person bashing Lisp as impossible to understand without making any effort whatsoever to learn what the extremely minimal syntax means.

Another thing. He says that Perl and Lisp have a lot of power, but nothing in the way of simplicity. I take issue with that. Whereas Perl is overcomplex, Lisp is about the simplest you can get. He seems to think that "simple" means something along the lines of "understandable by people experienced in commonly-used programming languages". To that, I says pleh, and also blub.
Not sophisticated, and only a first step to get some kind of traction, but using it can make a real difference to me:

a) Define your main project

b) Choose an activity that you like and that comes naturally as procrastination

c) Choose a reasonable time ratio between them, and respect it

As an example, every hour of surfing the web has to be (sooner or later) compensated by three hours of work on the main project.
thats why i used the word "most" instead of "all".

and you can use the same argument you made to justify posting lolcats or porn. there's a line somewhere, and all i'm saying is that i think that its being crossed more and more lately, this one being a more blatant one.
What the Portland Pattern Repository has to offer here: http://c2.com/cgi-bin/wiki?IteratorPattern would probably suffice for all but beginning programmers. Much of the additional verbiage comes from their attempt to explain the relationships between the patterns they've identified (e.g. Iterator vs Visitor). Perhaps the book would probably be better if it did less of that, but I think that's more a matter of taste.
Maybe the whole software engineering subject is rather vague in my head. What my teacher told me was that there's basically two paths: traditional software engineering and agile methods. The course I'm taking on the university is about the traditional software engineering. So I'm talking about that.

What they have presented to us thus far is a lot of documents, each with a different name. You're supposed to fill each document in each stage of development, called the iterations. The teacher even showed us a table about the software development process, and according to that table coding is only a small part of it. Frankly, I always thought coding was almost all there is.

So all that got me wondering if all that bureocracy gets used in real life. After I read "you weren't meant to have a boss" I thought all that software engineering stuff related very closely to what he describes as a consequence of big companies and lots of people working together.
I keep a todo list in my text editor and work on high priority items on the list until they're done. That's about it.
Why We Abstract, and What To Do When We Can’t
PostgreSQL  Warm Standby Servers for High Availability
Zero to a Fully Git Enabled Rails App in the time it takes to drink an espresso
Science 2.0: Studying Collaboration in Socio-Technical Systems
I would be more than happy to do that; I had every intention of taking detailed notes already, this would just be further incentive. Found you on Facebook, I'll be sending you an email shortly.

Thanks _immensely_.
I think the authors ideas are less about time discounting, and more about non-linear relations in quantity of problems.

The authors example is a man who's car has many dents. Utility might behave like U(0 dents) = 1, U(1 dent) = 1/2, U(n >= 2 dents)=0. If a car has 5 dents, the marginal utility of repairing one dent is 0 (U(5)=U(4)), so the owner does nothing.

Of course, in real life, most utility functions behave in the opposite way. Going from homeless to a studio apt? Major gains in utility. Going from a studio to 1 bdrm? Nice, but not as fantastic.
"What choice do you have?"

Move to Europe.

On a more serious note - I think this is probably one of the main reasons that the Scandinavian countries are ahead in the mobile game. You can get cheap plans that include an unlimited amount of text messaging, most people don't have landlines anymore, and quite a few use their phone as their only means of hooking up to the Internet - you can get 7 mbit and free traffic pretty cheaply with your 3G phone.

I noticed a few of the startups mentioned here that did wireless stuff that we've seen years ago over here - there has even been a story of a startup that did a wireless location service, and was touted as super-smart and innovative. A friend of mine did the exact same thing over here back in 2003.

Unfortunately we have a small home market, a broken investment system for startups, and are terrible at selling ourselves. So we don't do well on the international scene.
High 90s? The problem is too many people continue to think that IE/Windows is still the only platform that matters.
I'm taking a computer forensics class, and the professor is an active policeman who does computer forensics. They make a lot of use of hashes in computer forensics - they use hashes to determine if evidence has been tampered with. He's spoken about this - he's aware of the possibility of hash collisions, but he does not believe anyone could practically use them in a real attack.
It's also good for people who later work in Cognitive Science or Artificial Intelligence.
Ideologically I agree with you, but regulation seems to have worked well in the EU.
I'm on a Sprint SERO plan, which is their employee referral program: http://www.sprint.com/sero

They opened it up to the public after the iPhone came out. so you can use this address to signup: savings@sprintemi.com

I pay about $34 a month for 500 anytime, unlimited n/w (nights start at 7pm), unlimited data, and unlimited texts.

Unlimited texts aren't part of the plan, but if you ask for it after signing up they should give it to you.

I've never had a problem with Sprint's network.

Details: http://wiki.howardforums.com/index.php/SPRINT_SERO
I'm just finishing up a course on the "Philosophy of Mind" and I can not agree more.
- Start work at 9am

- Work for five hours till 2 (with short break for snack), only on very important stuff, no distractions/interruptions like email/chat etc. This time is for writing, designing, coding.

- After lunch, work on emails, planning, organising, less important stuff etc for 2 or 3 hours

- Finish at 6, personal stuff afterwards

As long as there are no distractions, and I get 5 hours of uninterrupted, valuable work done every morning, then I end up being very productive. Much moreso than the old 14 hour days I used to work where all activites run into each other and blur into endless drudgery.
This is exactly the reason I became concerned and ticked off when learned of this RoHS regulation when buying electronics components for hobby projects.

You get these politicians who are not scientists or engineers making mandates that make them look good but which have terrible consequences for technology & society. I also seriously doubt eliminating lead from solder is really that important for the environment, compared to everything else we do. It's certainly not worth the problems it will cause when our already densely-packed electronics doesn't last more than a year due to tin whisker growth.

On the other hand, maybe they know exactly what they're doing. It's not enough that that TV will be obsolete in a few years - let's make sure you can't even use it after 2.

Could be good for me though: I may one day be able to pick up TVs, computers, and all sorts of "broken" electronics for free; five minutes running a heat gun over the boards to melt the tin whiskers and suck them back into the solder joints, and voila! It works again.
An old joke, re-hashed. Adds nothing to what is currently a very valid debate. Screams rampant fanboy-ism and ultimately isn't very funny. Worse (as stated before), it won't even compile.
If you think this is relevant I don't see why you'd avoid Digg.
The thing to note about Code Complete is that you can read it very profitably in small chunks.

Curling up with a big fat book and reading about whitespace for 45 minutes isn't very rewarding in my opinion.

Just glancing at it occasionally will have you dropping your jaw at code you wrote in a hurry 6 months ago.
Your list seems more tuned to hacking than the OP's, which seems oriented towards working on large teams on boring legacy software.
Here is a non advertising business model for a startup.

Make something so great most people couldn't of imagined it, don't bother people with ads they hate anyway, serve an unmet need so deep most people don't know it's there until they see your product, and make people value your product by charging a fair price with your head held high.
That's hilarious, nice job!
I have a conjecture: people don't particularly like the number 4. Archimedes, Newton, Gauss: that's 3. Euler makes 4. Who makes 5?

There's the rub: there's no clear #5 (Poincaré? Riemann? Fourier? Hilbert?). The rub-within-a-rub: why should it matter? What's wrong with capping the "greatest mathematician" list at 4?

It seems that people like 3 (possibly hard-wired); they like 5 (fingers); they don't like 4. Alas, Euler's reputation suffers for it.
An enthusiastic breakdown of Get Satisfaction
Two books that every serious networking/unix hacker must have:

1. Advanced Programming in the UNIX environment

2. TCP/IP Illustrated

Both written by Richard Stevens.
In a competitive market, margins would be squeezed. It would be hard to keep them constant, let alone increase them.
Tangler - A solution for customer support forums
Lowest paid CEO? Steve Jobs at $1. Yet at +99%, Apple was outperformed by only three companies on the list.
I use omnifocus. It will be perfect on iPhone. Now, it's only of limited use. I use it more for organizing my thinking then my day down to the hour. I find if my thinking is organized, and I know how to do what I want to get done, managing time just happens without requiring further effort. If your thinking isn't organized all the time management in the world won't help you.
I agree although...this might help too.

I assign a dollar amount to a task or just create a block schedule for a few important tasks and prioritize that way.
At Carnegie Mellon, Philosophy majors essentially do Computer Science with more of a theoretical bias.
Guns, germs, and steel actually points out how centuries of being bred in the presence of prevalent disease due to living in close quarters with domesticated animals was a huge key in keeping Europe out of poverty and helping them ruthlessly dominate the Americas.
this link sucks, but i definitely don't visit digg
I am a college dropout, but I completed all the philosophy parts of my degree requirement.

There is a divide in philosophy departments in the US. The divide is between continental philosophy and analytic philosophy. Programs strong in analytic philosophy are great. They will provide a strong grounding in formal logic. Continental programs, while they might have there own set of virtues, are full of bullshit.

This is only good news if analytic leaning philosophy departments are seeing the big half of the bump.
within philosophy's "core areas" (epistemology/metaphysics/ethics) and popular subtopics (philosophy of mind/science), there's a lot of really great work (and really smart people) to learn from. You see many intricate, well-thought-out arguments, conversation with other fields, and in ethics you have the "applied" versions and political philosophy. outside of those, it's a little more of a crapshoot. philosophy of language is dropping off the radar, and logic is branching off into a field of its own. further out, intelligent and rigorous work in, say, aesthetics or ancient philosophy is uncommon.
It would be interesting to see what the path dependence of poverty is.
I just read an article with the word "freemium" and my bullshit filter blew a fuse.
Absolute Moron's Guide to Forms in Rails
A single neuron in the human brain can respond only to what the neurons connected to it are doing, but all of them together can be Immanuel Kant.

That's a lamentable example, though oddly appropriate given the recent "more philosophy majors" story. As the Harvard Lampoon's A Harvard Education in a Book wryly observed, "Immanuel Kant is most famous for his great contribution to the study of ethics, which is: 'What if everyone did that?'" A better summary of the Categorical Imperative, I've never seen.

I'll take the ants any day. At least they wouldn't turn me in if an axe murderer showed up looking for me.
I must have one.
I'm not your guy, friend!
Tel Aviv may have a concentration of startups, but it's as unrelated to Europe as Silicon Valley is.
Oh where's Pragmatic Programmer ? That's a must read for every hacker.
That's not true. Tel-Aviv has a lot in common with European cities.

But maybe you meant there can only be one Silicon Valley?
I don't see having to "get rid of" vista as that big a deal. It's probably not that hard to install whatever operating system you'd rather have. If you were objecting to paying for it, that might get you a little more sympathy here.

Lenovo offers some[0] Thinkpad models with SuSE preloaded. Apples all come with OS X. Those are probably the most popular laptops among news.yc members. Dell offers Ubuntu on certain home models and Redhat on certain business models. I think a few other manufacturers will sell you a laptop with something other than Windows. It's also still possible to find XP on a machine or two.

[0] Unfortunately, it's only a few specific models.
same here. I don't go to digg.
Sad but true. Unless your market is extremely computer-savvy, you will lose business by not supporting IE. You might be able to get away with "for best performance, use something else", but if major features don't work, it will hurt you.
crux_ makes a very strong argument that deserves to be addressed rather than dismissed without comment.
MySpace to Offer Streaming Music
Keep your domain simple with PHP
StumbleUdon I am Done!
On the plus side I rather like the fact that in the US the person with the cell phone is charged for the mobile part of the cost.

E.g. the call cost is made up of core+wireless component. The caller pays for the core cost regardless of number type called (excepting premium and free). The person who causes the extra expense of the wireless hop has to pay for it.
cmon guys, lets not start mutating into digg. i started frequenting HN because the content and community is much better. lets try and keep some standards.

Oh, let's.

cmon ... C'mon,
guys, ... guys: or guys.
lets ... let's
i ... I
lets ... Let's

But who am I to criticize? Obviously, 21 people and counting upmodded your rambling complaint, and ultimately it's the community itself that decides what is or isn't good.
Yet another view would be that to remove one's self from political discussions with one's peers based upon other, unrelated criteria, such as one's perception of one's self as a hacker, only serves to underestimate the broad capabilities of the human mind.
people who care about security probably aren't using Windows anyway

I can assure you that the DoD cares about security. I am curious about why Windows would be "too expensive" to support.
This is the cell phone plan to get.
Things haven't changed much. I grew up in Trafford (it's not often I can expect someone to know where that is) and inevitably find myself at Monroeville Mall every year during the holidays.
I saw this a while ago, but it didn't look like it was quite done then. Has anybody used it that can report on its readiness for a production environment?

I really liked SCons for a while, but sometimes it can be a bit quirky. Hopefully this will be a viable replacement.
In Web World of 24/7 Stress, Writers Blog Till They Drop
- when something is touted as an anything"-killer";
- the standard issue 'web 2.0' look of a webapp that has a shallow reason to exist;
- Blog posts that have a list of N (1 <= N <= 10) things of interesting factoids that makes it easy for people to vote up on social news sites
This according to me is the only way of getting any useful work done...get 5-6 hours of solid work done before lunch.
Is there actually a 'divide'? I was under the strong impression that analytic philosophy completely dominates American universities. Continental philosophy is mostly discussed in English Lit., Cultural Studies, etc.

For instance, Harvard has a 100% analytic faculty, MIT has a 100% analytic faculty, Princeton, Stanford, ...

Analytic philosophy seems boring and pedantic to me. For example, in one class we discussed Lewis' theory that "properties" are any subset of the set of all possible entities. So the property of being red is the mathematical set of all real and possible red things. This basically strikes me as "how many maths can dance on the head of a pin?"
A down-vote button would have been useful here.
I know you can only comment on your experience at your own school, but just so nobody generalizes: I've taken many English courses at my college, several of which incorporated critical theory, and wouldn't describe them as bullshit at all. Equating critical theory with bullshit is probably a common pitfall for students and professors alike though; like philosophy more generally, critical theory does a lot of telling you how little you know, without necessarily giving you a new means to know. In my personal experience, writing off critical theory or postmodernism as bullshit is usually due to frustration with the complexity rather than a reasoned critique, but it's up to the individual to judge their own motives.
I think the only common thing, is that somehow Isreal in soccer and olympics competes with european teams. Mainly the reason is that all the countries around Isreal hates its guts. That still doesn't make you any european.
Flagrant racism and human rights in isreal are just appalling, and very anti-european.
I don't see people want to move to iseral (unless they are jewish), for a startup.
What an interesting read! It was published in 98. I wish there was a newer version including all lessons learned in the last 10 years.
Philosophy is a fantastic undergrad degree to apply to higher learning or practical work.

If it's philosophy for philosophy sake...well...have fun.