skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
53:30 "I would not bet on anything that depends on the restriction of information"

For some reason, "The Fridge" came to mind when I heard him mention restrictions of information flow. Can someone comment on how The Fridge does or does not fit this description.
It's also possible they were referring to Microsoft, which also is about 850 miles north of Redwood Shores.

Edit: After looking at the quote in context, this is supported by a comment three paragraphs earlier, where the author says, "Oracle has managed to move into the role formerly played by Microsoft."
No, a balanced portfolio aims to balance risk and return. If you put all of your cash into one (or many) high-risk-high-return securities, you run a meaningful risk of losing a big pile of your cash.

There's a pretty well-understood playbook for wealth management. You SHOULD be willing to take risks (with a very specific % of your portfolio)... But at any given time some of these risks will have gone south, some will have gone north, etc. Feel free to find me a wealth manager who offers big double digit returns over multiple decades.
Hmmm. I pasted the RadioLab link in my description (I just listened to it yesterday) but I guess it didn't show. RadioLab is great! I'm just getting into it and I have 4 years of episodes to catch up on!
> To observe free will, you must have a really big picture view.

why? can you justify this statement?

beyond that, that is not how the scientific method works. you make conclusions on observable data, and if more data becomes accessible, you reconsider conclusions. you can't dismiss conclusions you disagree with by simply saying "you don't have enough data yet to justify my conclusion".

> Again, it is all about having an appropriate instrument to observe Him.

could you elaborate on an appropriate instrument to appropriately observe and identify him in a way that is reproducible for others to also observe objectively?
Anyone else think this is the shot in the arm that kids need to start caring about privacy controls? Who cares about the government or corporate interests, after all, but Mom on the other hand....
Full release notes: http://lists.rabbitmq.com/pipermail/rabbitmq-announce/attach...
...and Monk to Monkey
For mega-corporations, "open" is just a marketing buzzword to beat their opponents with, so it isn't surprising that Adobe writes about "closed minds and open source".

For Google, open source is a neat technique to assert Android moral superiority over iOS (even though Google's core assets - search, ads - aren't open-source, and Android apps such as Google maps aren't open-source)

For Sun, it was a good stick to hit Microsoft with. Making software free and open-source was their way of competing with Microsoft and making money from their hardware business.

Adobe is now clearly in the anti-Apple/iPhone camp and needs to ingratiate itself with Android/Google. It looks like they're the latest company to discover the magic of the "open" buzzword. Sadly for them, I don't think it will be much effective
'Freedom evolves' by Daniel Dennett deals with this.
http://www.amazon.com/Freedom-Evolves-Daniel-C-Dennett/dp/01...

Our future may be fixed, but our nature is not. We don't have a 'God's eye view' that sees all our past and future laid out before us. From our perspectives conditions change and we change to adapt to them to the extent possible.

It seems to me the confusion mainly arises if you consider your mind as being not subject to nature's laws...
But civil rights is not "black rights", do you see?

-isms, generally, exist to advance the interests of their sponsors, to the detriment of society as a whole.
Redis weekly update #7 - Full of keys
You're welcome. I generally prefer text to video myself (one reason I always, always ask if I can write a transcript for interviews/talks/etc I give) because of the higher bandwidth and ability to go into more depth, but there are maybe a half dozen people who I'm happy to watch for an hour.
> Money is a medium that has been designed so that it can hardly be read let alone written. We need to redesign money. Money is a medium like all other media and it can be redesigned.

I have no idea what that means. When was money designed? Who designed it?

Money is just something we use so that we don't need to directly trade chickens for laptops. The current financial structure has some problems, but humanity hasn't come up with any better method for exchanging wealth.
Name them and maybe some piratical paywall activist will share them for us all.
Why Facebook Spam Could Soon Rival Email Spam
They just said they do, to the tune of 20 million dollars.

The obvious fit within their existing lineup would be for Motorola to relaunch-their-existing/make-a-new phone OS with superb Cappuccino support.
Yes it is cheaper if it's other people's taxes. That's why no-one campaigns for tax cuts so they can afford childcare.
Is she available for contract work?
My sister made it a requirement for letting her daughter go on facebook, that she be friends with her mom & dad. If she unfriended them, they'd just block the domain (which would likely cause some howls of protests). Obviously non-computer-savvy parents would have more difficulty controlling their kids.
I read something recently saying that study was a load of bunk, but I can't find it right now. Anyone else see that?
" Just be sure to set high TTL for the records so your DNS server does not collapse under the enormous volume."

The attacker, noticing your round-robin approach, decides to drop the DNS server and then only has one host to deal with.

There are a lot of weak points that can be attacked. Certain sites will have features that can be taken advantage of. If you have a long timeout/keepalive, the attacker could launch lots of quick requests with no proper tear-down. If you have a zillion servers setup like this - perhaps they can take out a major link before the traffic even gets to you.

I also don't think this is a new approach - unfortunately it is much harder to stop attacks than to create various approaches. The number of compromised machines is just too high - that is the ultimate solution.
To me the difference is the amount of effort one puts in. Originally a blog post, as the name "web log" implies, was something one wrote that day-- a log entry. Whereas essays sometimes take weeks. The distinction has gotten blurred, but insofar as there is a distinction I think that's the root of it.
Learning Amazon FPS is a hassle, should I create software to make it easier?
I've been going through the API to integrate Amazon Flexible Payments for two days and it's been much more difficult than I originally expected.

Is there a website that makes setting up Amazon FPS easier?

Is there an opportunity to create one once I finish learning how to implement it.
People look at successful companies, see that they have a Facebook page and are posting on Twitter, and assume these things will make them successful too. It doesn't quite work that way round.
All words are cool if you don't know what they mean. If the reader knows what it means but the writer doesn't, the effects are less predictable and desirable.
Once upon a time there was a fox strolling through the woods.
He came upon a grape orchard. There he found a bunch of
beautiful grapes hanging from a high branch.

"Boy those sure would be tasty," he thought to himself.
He backed up and took a running start, and jumped.
He did not get high enough.

He went back to his starting spot and tried again.
He almost got high enough this time, but not quite.

He tried and tried, again and again, but just couldn't get high enough to grab the grapes.

Finally, he gave up.

As he walked away, he put his nose in the air and said:
"I am sure those grapes are sour."
Ha ha, a little while ago The Times did a reader's questions interview with Belle du Jour and all anyone wanted to know was if she'd paid her taxes. Yes, she said, her accountant does it as any other professional services.
Free will and randomness are both terms that are really tough to define. It is more the absence of order than a definition of something.
Most Common Toenail Fungus Cures
It depends how you define free will. What would scientific evidence of free will even look like?

I do what I want, so that's all I care about. I may be part of a deterministic system, but that's what defines my will.
This post is just wrong. He says that their site does not have social features - and he says it in a strangely proud manner. Have you TRIED social features and after comparing the two, discovered that the version without social features was better? The site in question looks like it would benefit from social features - if you are not motivated to add features, then don't retro-explain them as if it were a tested and proven hypothesis. You guys just don't WANT to add social features - done proper, it could male the site better.

Now, regarding the statement that social media is not useful - that's just not true. Used wrongly (follower chasing), it's wrong. If you treat social as a metric, then you are doing it wrong. Social is about people and relationships - an you don't need many followers to have great and profitable relationships using social media. It's really all about using these tools right, and Spencer does not seem to be doing so.
Whenever I hear someone label social as "echo chambers in which nobody is listening", all I can think is that they must be doing it wrong. Seems to be a "tell" for when someone's awkwardly using the medium as a write-only marketing channel, which explains why they aren't getting traction.

You get what you give.
Incidentally, we don't call it a "no asshole rule." I think what I originally said to Robert was that we try not to accept jerks, and since he'd heard the phrase "no asshole rule" he used that to describe it.

Our criteria aren't the ones listed in this article, either. We're not trying to avoid people who make other people feel bad so much as those who are bogus, or dishonest. That's what we mean by a jerk: someone you can't trust.
I'm not sure if that's what you meant, but possibly an explanation to the downvoters: a Ph.D. is a specialization; "specialization in general knowledge" doesn't compute.
This is because monads are terrifically useful for doing a number of things, but each thing is most easily explained in different, seemingly inconsistent mental models. Monads are an abstract, complicated category theory thing (it's a monoid on the category of endofunctors on the category of Haskell types, obviously!) and trying to explain the concept directly is too hard, so people talk about burritos and E-mails and other things that more reflect specific uses of monads than the general thing.
In the UK Council Tax is based on the value of your property, based on some fairly informal assessments done years ago.

Challenging your Council Tax band is possible if you think the value assessment is incorrect.

It's not a direct tax on the wealth embodied by the property, but it is a way by which the wealthier pay more tax.
How real is the insider threat?
I think that there is a distinction to be made here between /politically/ expedient solutions, and expedient solutions with regards to actual goals.

The war on drugs, high incarceration rates, and trumpeting an ideology of low taxes are all politically expedient, but not necessarily expedient with regard to what we actually want to achieve.

In an optimization problem, a nearest neighbor algorithms will generally produce a sub-optimal, but okay result.

This is only true, however, if your nearest neighbor algorithm is using the correct selection heuristic... Garbage in, garbage out.

Our political system needs a new heuristic.

(Assuming P!=NP, and that the governance of California is an NP hard optimization problem...)
Fair points. Regarding the 5%, that's my conservative # based on my personal feelings about the economy. The math holds up just fine if you nudge that up to 7%. You still go broke (unless you cut your spending, which I certainly would-- I've no need to live rich). 7% is pretty solid for a balanced portfolio.

I personally opt for a riskier portfolio than most (I have a few rental properties and assorted mutual funds), but I don't think you or I can pick 'em like Buffet! :-) It IS a hedge against ignorance, which I happily admit that I am (compared to buffet).

Interesting stuff, regardless-- I've actually never crunched the #s on big apartments. Thanks for doing it!
Step back a few feet from your monitor.
Where did that question come from? This is about Twitter, so the more relevant question is "What's the difference between an essay and a tweet?"

I'm not sure how to define that difference without something weak like "essays are longer", but even abstracts are typically expected to have more words than a tweet has characters.
You have to pay 200-300€ for health insurance in .nl (or is this just a tax taken out up front)? Wow, my complaints about the UK are ratcheting down a notch, I don't pay a bean, except for dental (as and when).
TIME's 50 Best Websites of 2010
>Seriously? You want to get into real estate in the middle of the biggest depression we have ever seen? When property values are still way over-inflated?

Depends. In general when everyone is panic selling you want to be buying. Obviously you never want to be buying crap (bad stocks, bad property, bad anything), but the panic times open up great opportunities for those with cooler heads.

Looking specifically at property many people still need places to live, but again it comes down to good versus bad. Should I invest in an apartment complex out in the middle of the desert, probably not. If I find a good deal on a complex in a city near a college, now we're talking. Rates are currently low and a lot of people are being forced into selling which makes many prices low. You can also look at the financials of a rental property and value it much easier than say a residential house. Examining a rental property is much closer to examining a business than pricing residential.

Now, the above ignores the work that goes into owning rental properties. Depending on the income level your property targets you may end up spending a full day in court every month throwing people out. Does the owner of the property have the stones to throw out a mother and her kids because they don't pay? Then you have repairs and other complaints. You can get a company to handle most of this, but that does cut into your profit.
Ask HN: How to earn on freelance sites if I have no professional experience
I am quite good in programming (C, C++, PHP, Java) and have knowledge of quite a few frameworks and technologies (J2EE, BB, Android etc.). However, I have very recently graduated and have no professional programming experience.

Would it be possible for me to earn on freelance sites like elance.com and odesk.com? Or given my lack of professional experience, would I have a very hard time getting my bids accepted?

Also, do you think it would be possible for me to earn at least 3k USD per month if I work full-time through these freelance sites? What is the average income I should expect?

Finally, which of the freelance sites would you recommend?
I'm really interested in the opinions of those that read Hacker news. I'm challenging one of the highly accepted views in information security, please let me know if you agree or disagree and why. Thanks
Isn't it against Digg's terms to attempt to duplicate their algorithm? And, he is using their trademarked name in his URL? If he were smart, he would take this down ASAP before he receives a lawsuit from Digg.
I love that Etsy and Vimeo made it on this list
Penultimate has this in common with "literally". It's most often misused to mean the opposite of what's intended.

Cue Inigo Montoya.
This is roughly the same approach used by the DDoS mitigation services; you run your servers on an unpublished address and front it on their address space.

I like that they've got the ghetto version of the technique documented. Better that you should rig this up on a couple VM hosting providers for a few hundred bucks than that you spend tens of thousands of dollars to get the same level of service from someone with slick marketing.

The obvious problem here is that it's hard to keep a determined attacker from finding your real address space, and as soon as that happens, you're done; attackers just skip the DNS and whack you directly.

This is a useful trick, but it's not the end of the story.
I disagree. I don't know what "venial" means, but I don't think it sounds as cool as "penultimate" :-)
Ask HN: How do Tumblr & Posterous make money?
Both are free blogging services, no price plan, no add-on charges, free support. And I'm not aware there is ads too. Where do they get their income? Consultation fee? Writing a book about their platforms?
You can also try OpenLazslo
"There is one labour market women have always dominated: prostitution."

Uhm. No. The most common prostitute is a man selling sex to another man.
Are people actually seeing their DNS servers collapse under load? DNS servers --- even BIND, which, don't use BIND --- are very, very fast.
Some records are easier to break than others.

Of course, if I read more I'd probably have one by now, at $190 for the free 3G model it's very tempting.

Relatedly, has anything come of the SDK?
Or teaching their kids that producing or saving a dollar can be more rewarding than spending one.
probably unrelated, but on Tuesday I saw a music video on TV. What do the two have in common? Well, they're both fairly regular occurrances that are usually not note-worthy.

Unless of course, you are an ardent devotee of Dimitri Soudas' propaganda.
That's hardly retirement. You should re-title this to "How to invest $1 Million in multifamily real estate at 2010 prices". Doesn't quite have the same ring to it, but it's a lot closer to the truth.

It's a shame that even intelligent and knowledgeable people like Ryan and Tony choose to write articles with linkbait titles. There is clearly some interesting and valuable stuff in these articles, but they would be better if written more honestly without a pre-determined conclusion.
Tweeting, Tumblring, Facebooking, blogging, etc., are all routine tasks that can be performed by any person out there with basic English skills and a friendly personality.

Precisely...and this is why so many programmers, developers, executives and any other kind of "specialist" can justify hiring someone for this position.
Unless he retired 20 years ago he's also talking in the context of the biggest property boom in history.

Even after the current crash they're still significantly overvalued compared to their historic prices, once you take into account inflation.
Something of a counterpoint: http://leoville.com/buzz-kill
The style ideas you have for essays almost certainly don't match what Paul Graham sees an essay as. Read http://www.paulgraham.com/essay.html for details.
1. The idea that we are capable of freely deciding between alternatives seems to be built into our psyches. Absent compelling evidence to the contrary, it is rational to believe this intuition.

2. While there may indeed be scientific evidence against free will, the article that you linked doesn't seem to provide it. Just because decisions happen at a preconscious level doesn't mean that the decision was unfree. For instance, if I'm playing a very intense video game, I tend to make split-second decisions with no conscious decision making. That doesn't mean I didn't choose what to do in the game. It just means that discursive thought isn't essential to free choice.

3. If you're religious, then you could consider God a sort of "guarantor" of free will.
Peter Thiel Backing Another Social Network For College Students
Given that the choice is a form of insanity vs a way of dealing with life that may lead to greater happiness, I agree. But we are, after all, discussing "free will". :)

It is also interesting to note that scientific studies may show us things that influence or make some of our choices for us, but this will not cover all kinds of choices. We are running into areas where we do not yet have the right tools to study this stuff.
Traveling != Living
It's not being pedantic. The word was used incorrectly, as that word often is. It's worth correcting so the author and others are made aware.
You know all those business-books-digested which they sell in airplanes to extremely busy executives and professionals who don't have enough time to get through Malcom Gladwell's latest but want to sound like they did at the board meeting? Take a look at the pricing for them, then adjust $3.99 a month by shifting the decimal point to the right a time or two.

One of my periodic crusades: getting HN to understand that there are people in the world who are not poor college students living on ramen noodles.
I was pretty anti on the Kindle as well--I don't like the idea of my book running out of batteries--but the cheaper price (plus, for whatever reason, graphite) had me within one-click of buying one the other day. Right then I read a very convincing case that it will drop below $100 in time for xmas (http://www.slate.com/id/2263787/pagenum/all/). FYI.
Why do you need integrations to sell your software?
Actually she does often do this for YC-funded startups that are hiring people.
Yup, and I'm fine with being "wrong some % of the time" as long as I don't have to use Java. (C++ and PHP are also on that list.)

If I need to write something that's fast and portable, I use Haskell. If I need to write something that is gluing a bunch of libraries together, I use Perl.

(Java does have a lot of libraries, but the problem is that the libraries are not well-designed. Perl has a lot of well-designed libraries, and when there isn't a well-designed library, it's easy to find the right balance between rewriting, fixing, and working around. That has not been my experience with Java.)
Assuming $2,000 speaking fee for a 1 hour talk, and say, 2 hours of prep and 1 hour of travel - that's $500 an hour.

Your assumption is way off. I have read from professional public speakers that for every minute of a speech, they will prepare on average about 1 hour. A 60 minute speech would have about 60 hours of preparation behind it.

I am practising public speaking and while I haven't done longer speeches, my experience shows about the same ratio.
I have no choice but to believe in free will.
No, but in Australia I routinely had my Visa and MC turned away along with my Amex. Who cares? I don't live in Europe or Australia.
I have a similar background, and I thought this book was good:

http://www.amazon.com/Molecular-Biology-made-simple-fun/dp/1...

You might also check out the MIT OCW Intro Biology videos:

http://ocw.mit.edu/courses/biology/7-012-introduction-to-bio...

Eric Lander gives the Molecular Biology lectures. He is a great lecturer.
My reading is that they raised $105 million via convertible notes and promissory notes "in connection with the acquisition of substantially all of the assets of Id Software, Inc.". Traskjd has it right--this might mean they spent $105M on id, or it might mean they only needed to borrow $105M of whatever they spent.
Why Airlines now Charge for Same Day Standby
He's right in that some sites should be 'social' and some shouldn't...

But for the life of me, I can't think of any sites that shouldn't be and are. That portfolio site that he says shouldn't be, isn't, and that's correct. It's not to talk about the art, it's to display it. The site correctly knows it's niche and it's acting appropriately.

However, if that site had been DeviantArt and tried to avoid having 'social' features, it would be devastatingly wrong.
Ask HN: Good examples of social networks with a game mechanism?
Rewards, achievements and game mechanisms in social networks is a strong force to get people engaged. Foursquare and Gowalla are two great examples of this.

So, I'm currently looking for more examples of this and how you can make this type of mechanisms to work. Any thoughts or examples out there?
I've never even heard an adequate definition of free will, and don't think one is possible.