skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
The example seems to miss something critical. If the dollar amount of the first envelope is odd, then it can't be the doubled sum...
Note that the pilot program described in the article included fairly intensive support by a team of social workers. I think Gladwell mentioned one caseworker for every 10 clients?
Am I alone in thinking Americans might need software like this if ISPs are allowed to throttle certain types of traffic?
It's a shame that such an index-based encoding scheme will use more bits to store the index than the size of the document itself.
How about a world with no patents at all and let's just see what happens.
That's always been the difference though--American equipment is more advanced but with tighter tolerances and harder to maintain, Soviet equipment is less advanced but more fault tolerant and easier to maintain. So you end up with stuff like the M16 jamming in Vietnam or the Apache completely crippled by sandy conditions in Iraq.
It's also annoying that there isn't a way to turn of the mandatory delay before I can get an attachment while they're "scanning it for viruses".

I don't use Windows, I don't care if it has viruses.
Hah, interesting. The little that is included is stuff I've never heard of anyone willingly using for Windows programming.
Loving friends and family and caring for people is good for your brain.
In Lebanon, they think Cheese slows your brain down, while Zataar speeds it up.

This is Zataar: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Za%27atar
A System Hardening Process Checklist
A couple of ideas:

1) You could join a project mailing list or two. Say Ruby on Rails, or Mongrel (even though - yeah Mongrel isn't a framework). Talk to them, make friends, and then get those people into IM. That way you a) have people to talk to when you're stuck on code b) have people on hand to bounce ideas off c) get to know cool people - top notch people who work on these projects for fun, period.

2) IRC. Always a good place to hang out at when taking a break. (It's like Twitter, but for geeks!) Again, the plan is to meet people and make friends long enough to get them into IM. No shortcuts here!

3) Ask around on stackoverflow. Make friends with the people you meet.

4) Start a blog. I think one of the commenters here said that even if nobody reads it, you still get to think about the problem by writing it out, which is always a good thing. But more importantly - having a blog is having an online presence. (Having a blog with interesting unsolved problems makes for an interesting online presence. It also makes it easier to get to know people when you're chatting with them ("Hi, I'm x, here's my blog!") or ("Hi I'm x, I'm dealing with this icky problem, I talked about the issue on my blog; here's the link!"). Whenever someone comments - respond immediately. You'll have community - and relationships - say with other Ruby bloggers - soon enough.
I assume it wasn't your intention, but your comment implied that he dropped out because he was academically weak, which is why I presume people are upset.
I read this article a while back and found it interesting.

22 ways to overclock your brain - http://ririanproject.com/2006/11/03/22-ways-to-overclok-your...
I guess the paper is using merchant fees to just refer to the transaction fee and base transaction %. Rewards is an additional % on top of the base transaction % and differs for each reward program. I would price my merchandise to cover all costs so I don't understand why this paper is making a claim about subsidy. It should just make a claim about cash customers being penalized (and maybe even some credit card customers who don't have rewards being penalized).

"... cash buyers must pay higher retail prices to
cover merchants' costs associated with the credit cards' merchant fees. Because these fees are used to pay for rewards given to credit card users, and since cash users do not receive rewards, cash users also finance part of the rewards given to credit card users."

This doesn't make sense to me at all. What merchant would gamble on having enough cash customers to subsidize his credit card customers? Merchants make the money. They just make more money on cash.
But the fatty acids in fish are good for your brain:

http://www.guardian.co.uk/uk/2002/oct/25/society.science
If I Knew Then What I Know Now: Advice for Young Creatives
Seems to work OK on VLC, no RealPlayer needed :)
How To Avoid The Idea Generation Trap
Just Launched: Hotel Deal Finder – Hotel Price Comparison Site
Tips in Dieting - Learn Your Way to Successful Diet
Microformats.org at 5: Two Billion Pages With hCards
i never thought that there are so many sites out there using microformats - especially hCards.
Agreed - oily fish in moderation is the way I try to go
1985 CNN Article: The Fall of Steve Jobs
Another reason for NIH: If something breaks, you have the in-house expertise necessary to figure out why.

Of course, this breaks down as soon as people leave the company -- but for an early startup where the founders are expected to stick around, it's much faster to get something fixed if the author is within arm's reach.
how can you compare hosting companies when you do not have ALL server specs? Really, how?

For example, Linode does not disclose the type of disk drive they use nor slicehost disclose theirs.
Hosting compaies always have a thing or two to hide. And trust me if it is cheap there may be something hidden out of plain view.

I use http://www.servint.com and they are really transparent. They use RAID 10 SAS 15K RPM disk drives, and run their VPSes on Dual Xeon Quad Core processors. Free cpanel, free daily backups. Linode can beat them in pricing but guess what? Check the server specs. I asked Linode what kind of disk they were using in an email and they said they cannot disclose the information!!! Servint is open and they show you everything they use. Free cpanel, free backups. What else do you want.

Lots of this hosting companies, have those as addons, and you end up even paying more. People concentrate too much on base pricing. Please get the addons you will need then calculate final price.
A friend of mine told me a similar problem that he got at D.E. Shaw interview.

Person A writes random real numbers in two envelopes. Then person B randomly 50/50 picks one envelope and sees the number X written there. Then, B has to guess whether X is the bigger of the two numbers or not. Show that B has a strategy, that even if A knows it, B can guess correctly in more than 50% of the cases.

The mathematical beauty of this problem is that you can derive what are the non-trivial steps towards the solution.
Instead of getting angry at him, how about donating some money or machines to him? That stuff costs real cash you know.
Completely agree. I also completely disagree with the author that it's in Microsoft's best interests to handcuff its developers to its platform. That strategy might have made sense when Microsoft was still the 800lb gorilla lording over the entire market. Now that they have some real competition they're going to have to compete like everybody else: by making the best products they can that people use by choice.

If anything they've clung to their old monopolies so long that they've seriously jeopardized their future.
DeviantART 10th Birthday Bash @ House of Blues
Translation: damn kids, get off my lawn!
For me, what is interesting in that problem (besides the obvious flaw that people here discussed) is that the answer changes is the value A is observed. I.e. :

If I have two envelopes, one of which has twice the money of the other, you pick an envelope AND YOU SEE the money inside, then it becomes better to switch (in expected money).
Checkout my recent blog post:

http://carlosjustiniano.com/experiments-in-natural-language-...
Ask HN: List of sales/subscription startups
Which startups, launched in the last couple years, make their revenue primarily via sales/subscriptions?

The ones I can think of - pandora, match, groupon, gilt, basecamp. Which others can you think of?
Practice is good for your brain.
People who say "failure is not an option" are hopeless pollyannas. Success does not happen because you refused to accept failure as a possible outcome. Success is a product of hard work, talent, timing and luck in varying measures.

I've failed in 9 out of 10 projects I began on the web since 1995. I have been fortunate that the 1-in-10 successes have enabled me to continue trying new ventures. If I refused to acknowledge failure, would 10 out of 10 projects I launched be a success? It would be foolish to think so.
good stuff :

omega 3s

good nutrition - vitamins, protein, fiber

regular exercise

deliberate practice

meditation

regular sleep
QDRO Miami that creates payee right to recieve
Divorce mediation provides an alternative to divorcing couples to approach their divorce in a subtler way.
A scribd link would be nice for the RSS (it's de facto a PDF warning)
So bitching about it now is essential to getting it fixed in the future.
Japan's Economic Stagnation Is Creating a Nation of Lost Youths
For a first cut at "hey, have I broken anything miserably when I did this?", I don't think he has a bad approach. Obviously, if this were at the stage where he was making a final decision about which API to use we'd want to have some more rigorous benchmarks to back up the claims, but none of this is at that stage yet.
"What these hyperventilating "visionaries" overlooked is that the market pays for value added."

THIS.

Best quote in the article, and sums up the problem with a lot of trendy recent business BS.
"It is our responsibility as the tech-savvy users to educate these users." It wasn't long ago when the tech-savvy were trying to educate against "top posting" e-mail replies. It was a decisive loss, so good luck.

If you want people to use Dropbox instead, make mail clients smarter. How about when "attaching" a file, it made a copy in ~/Dropbox/Public/ and embedded the public URL in the message instead?
http://c2.com/cgi/wiki?JunkyardCoding

http://c2.com/cgi/wiki?RubeGoldbergMachine

I've seen that before. NIH can be pathological, but so can anti-NIH.
Ceph as a scalable alternative to the Hadoop Distributed File System
Smoking is good for staving off Parkinson's Disease:

http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2010/03/100310162823.ht...
Actually, it doesn't matter. If you rephrase the problem so that B picks after A and you ask the question "is B likely to pick a larger number than A" before B picks then the answer should be "yes".

However, this is another example of being misled in reasoning. But not related to timing. The important revelation is understanding that there's no such thing as a method for generating truly random numbers across the entirety of the positive integers. Since there are infinitely many the probability of picking any one integer is 1/infinity. Any concrete random algorithm for positive integers will be hopelessly biased toward 0 (since it will almost certainly have a maximum value, and thus an infinite number of positive integers above that maximum). As long as both A and B use the same algorithm then the chances are equal that A or B will pick the larger number.
The fact that companies have created software, patented it, and sued large companies that use their technology gives me pause. Without software patents the software industry will become like the consumer products industry where inventors are ripped off by large corporations.

I think the VC's who are pushing this have an agenda.
You might be interested in this project a friend of mine is running called Mind Apples: http://mindapples.org/

The idea is to look for the mental health equivalent of "an apple a day".
Ask HN: Why choose a dynamically typed language?
A few years back, mainstream statically typed languages were more verbose than Python or Ruby. But today, I find that I can make F# or even C# code (insert other lang here) as concise as any dynamically typed language.

And on the plus side, you get all the benefits of compiler type checking, better IDE support, and great refactoring support.

What are your reasons for choosing a dynamic language?
Where is this "Microsoft killed IronRuby" thing coming from? Sure, the lead developer quit, but that doesn't mean it's officially been shut down, all support removed, etc... not to mention that it's an open source project. Did I just miss something?
i think it might also be because people often conflate two types of drop-outs:

1.) those who dropped out of school due to lack of financial or social resources, or due to personal emotional problems

2.) those who dropped out of school because they had an incredible opportunity to capitalize on their natural talents and take advantage of their favorable surroundings

many successful 'drop-out entrepreneurs' fall in the latter category ... they came from middle-class or upper-middle-class homes, their parents had advanced degrees, they often attended private high schools and prestigious colleges, etc. etc. etc.

i'm afraid that if the meme of "dropping out is cool, just look at zuckerberg, gates, brin/page, etc." keeps propagating, that will give kids who aren't as advantaged (those in the former category) misguided expectations for what awaits them when they drop 'outside of the system'
That's an interesting point. Actually, Yahoo Mail does this with an API integration with drop.io.
The world of SW is largely already a world w/o software patents. Very few companies are effected by SW patents. And even startup companies generally spend very little money on patents.

And in my experience, I've never met anyone at a startup company who didn't implement a technology due to a patent. But I have certainly worked with large companies, MS, IBM, HP, who have not implemented a technology due to patents.

It seems like a world w/o patents would simply strengthen MS and IBM. And probably have no net effect on startups, except in the unlikely event they do something innovative, but is somewhat easily replicated once seen.
On the street you're likely to congregate at points where people offer some basic assistance or there is security. This means things like food wagons, shelters, drop-in health centres and places where other homeless hang-out and you can pass a little time.

In those places a lot of voluntary help is given, workers chat to you, sometimes you'll even be given some new clothes, but nearly always you get to interact with others.

I cannot emphasise how hard being homeless and without a network is. You have no-one to talk to ever except for these people who by necessity you come into contact to. I also cannot emphasise just what happens if you have too much time alone and yet live in fear, hunger and with some problem (mental health, an addiction, etc).

Some of the people I knew from the streets wouldn't have survived in a house. They needed their contact as much as they needed their next drink, it was all they had and the only thing that prevented them from losing themselves totally.

The isolation from giving them an apartment is that no-one will visit, and if they do then not enough.

And the problems they'll have are worse and will go to basics such as hygiene. On the streets they never had to clear litter, pick up dirty clothes, and clean their environment... they would just move on if it was bad enough. In a flat most of the people I knew I believe would've just rotted and allowed the space around them to become full of junk and to also rot.

They'd need to be taught how to care for themselves. How to cook safely. How to budget and make money stretch (there is little thought of the future on the street, you spend what you have pretty quick in case you lose it. You wouldn't think of bills and taxes).

And to learn those things you'd need them to have sound mental health, alertness, awareness of their surroundings. You'd need to help them to shake off their addictions, and to respect themselves. You'd likely have to counsell them and provide support for mental health problems.

And if you achieved all of that. Then they would be devastatingly lonely. They won't have what you take for granted, there are no friends for them to call upon, family to visit, money to go sit and bar and chat. They'd be alone and desperately wanting to rid themselves of that loneliness.

In all likelihood they'd go back to the streets where they have contact, interaction and community. Where they didn't have to put in all this effort to care for themselves when apparently that amounts to loneliness and isolation.

It takes far more than a roof to stop someone being homeless. Homelessness is a state that encapsulates far more problems than just the lack of a house. To solve it, you need to address all of those problems and not just the lack of a roof.
How to Write a Poems Essay
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1) a smallish hunk of cash

i dunno how much they each got in the acquisition, but i doubt it was 'smallish'. it wasn't like they sold some artwork online for $30.
yeah USENIX is great ... even in their more academically-focused conferences, industry people are given quite a bit of respect and attention
Evil?
Seattle actually put this into practice. The city funds and supports homeless housing for the most expensive homeless in the city. There is no requirement for sobriety. The project is called 1811 Eastlake (http://www.google.com/search?q=1811+eastlake) and it is not without controversy. Studies of the outcomes and cost analysis has been published in JAMA. Here is a summary: http://www.desc.org/documents/DESC_1811_JAMA_info.pdf.

My wife is an ER attending at Harborview, the hospital that sees most of these patients. Anecdotally, she has seen great outcomes out of the project, has toured it and is a big fan.

(Interestingly, Dr. Michael Copass, the patriarch of the Harborview ED and a pioneer in modern medical response calls these individuals "urban nomads")
They have been working on color e-ink displays, though at the moment it is at the prototype/lab created stage.
My favorite spice - delicious.
If this was what was happening in the majority of cases, I would agree. But it isn't - big companies frequently buy patents just to go after and shut-down/settle with smaller companies who are posing a threat. Like Apple against HTC. Like Microsoft against Salesforce.com.

If there was a shorter life span, or stronger enforcement over patent squatting, fewer people would be standing against it. But saying the VCs pushing this have an agenda, without citing a single source, and thinking that patents do anything now other than pay lawyers and slow innovation, is narrow-minded.
Lifetime employment has an outsized impact on salarymen and on Western perceptions of Japanese employment, but it is -- and always has been -- a minority of the Japanese employment market. Perhaps a third of private sector laborers were covered by it at the peak of the practice a few decades ago.

It is difficult to say with certainty, because lifetime employment is generally an understanding, not a contractual term. The lines in my employment contract which my employers and I understood meant lifetime employment reads, literally, "This employment contract shall last for three years and be renewable upon mutual agreement."

草食系男子 (grasseating men) is, like metrosexual, a term which sells many books and means rather little. It has about as much relevance to Japanese employment as Twilight does to American unemployment. ("American teenage girls, facing a reality where 50% of prospective suitors are unemployed, have increasingly escaped into a fantasy where fantastically rich hundred year old vampiric pedophiles cater to their every material and romantic need. We go to Keiko Tanaka with the story...")
Scott Olsen on: RIM-versus-UAE Kerfuffle
About 6 hours ago :-)
The majority of cases that you read on Tech Crunch?
Bizarre. It's like they took everything that made Starcraft a decade's long phenomenon, and decided to try and put a fence around it so they could control it. Mind bogglingly stupid and guaranteed to turn SC2 into just another RTS that disappears in a year or two unless they fire whoever is responsible for such a brain dead idea and revert back to a more sane model.
fyi, those maps are flipped in a weird way compared to north/south geography (I assume this was done plotting the coords on a chart, not projecting the coords onto a map). They need to be flipped vertically and then rotated counter-clockwise 1/4 turn. The bulk of the attacks are in the south-east, not the north-west.
Software patents affect small companies when they get sued by big companies or patent trolls. It happens all the time, and when it does there's basically no defense unless you have a huge patent portfolio and can countersue . . . which, if you're a small company or the other side is a patent troll, you can't do.
It's not a lot of money when you're running a benchmark on EC2 or something. A few dollars for a bunch of instances for a few hours.

Besides, that way you have a kind of neutral frame of reference on the performance.
Read this and most of his articles around 2007. Some of the best articles I've read. Unfortunately he seems to have said most of the stuff he was going to say so he has stopped writing. Ho well, too bad.
It's open source, but without a fork it might not be feasible for outsiders to contribute. Some details here: http://evain.net/blog/articles/2010/08/07/on-ironruby
Go to Ruby User Groups (e.g. LRUG in London), and other geek-like meet-ups. They happen in every city. And, as others mentioned, hang out on IRC channels, though face to face is better in some ways.
Hi - I 'm the author of this post. A few comments:

1) It wasn't my intention to create a holy war. There are good arguments on both sides. I use ifs and fors in my own code and will continue to do so.

2) Over the years I have developed a distaste for the overuse of statement branching - I find it distracting and
I feel it works against readability.

3) I wanted to catalog a bunch of (mostly well known) alternatives to present as a coding strategy

4) I realize that not everyone likes such terseness of style and what is clear syntax to one person can be undecipherable to the next.

5) Use what ever works best for you and your team

(Notice how procedural this comment was :-) )
http://ruby.meetup.com/
Automated Antenna Design
Patents are broken in implementation, not as a concept.
How we release a new version of JotForm 10 TIMES A DAY
Measuring personal productivity - the churn rate
You didn't know that America is an empire? The most powerful country that has ever existed? The one by which every other major power measures themselves? Time to do some reading I think, TV rots ur brain ;)

What you need to realize is that a minuscule percentage of economists will agree with your "saving during boom times". The money system just doesn't work like that.

As I said, my second part was reactionary to his moniker in relation to his comment, his comment is populist rhetoric and is completely incorrect from a strictly capitalist view.

People who call themselves capitalists should at least bother to get it.
Maybe it happens, but I've never seen it happen in my career. I'm sure it does, but its pretty rare. And I've never seen any startup make a technology decision based on existing patents.

I have been involved in patent litigation for many large companies, in a defensive role. And while some do blatantly violate patents, they generally go out of their way to work around the patent.

And there are some oft-requested features that don't exist in very popular products that don't exist solely due to patents.

And even patent trolls attack large companies more.

I just don't think that if you're a startup company you have much rational reason to care about patents. And if you do fear them, I suspect you'll likely fail due to that fact I doubt you're very rational.
Things A Programmer Really Needs To Know