skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
This is merely another downside of competition within groups, where a boss or other administrative entity would compare individuals' relative performance, and as a result create a group incentive to maintain lower productivity.

When group members are directly responsible to each other, as in the case of a small startup or egalitarian cooperative, this effect disappears.

I'd imagine it would be fairly straightforward to model this in game-theoretic terms.
Even if the rate of radioactive decay does vary periodically (with a known period), you just do a different calculation when figuring out some dead thing's age from carbon-14 measurements.

Since this effect sounds like it's a small perturbation on top of the main model (a constant decay rate), I'd expect the final answer (the calculated age) to be about the same.
For those who dont know

This is an excerpt from the awesome book "Surely you're joking Mr. Feyman" The whole book is full of short anecdotes like this and is an amazing read.

http://www.amazon.com/Surely-Feynman-Adventures-Curious-Char...

Edit: spelling
Most recent comment on the story, (purporting to be) from Jonathan Heiliger:

This story is completely false. Facebook continuously evaluates and helps develop new technologies we believe will improve the performance, efficiency or reliability of our infrastructure. However, we have no plans to deploy ARM servers in our Prineville, Oregon data center.
I agree. I did not depict The Singularity itself in my graphs, because Kurzweil generally does not either. He instead shows projected exponentials as evidence for The Singularity happening:
http://www.kurzweilai.net/the-law-of-accelerating-returns

My first point is really just that the exponential is not hyperbolic. It's tempting to see an exponential graphs and think the value is rising against some invisible wall, like it is going to infinity. But of course it is not.

My second point was between the linear-exponential shooting skywards or the log-exponential rising incrementally which is "more real"? In the case of computer capacity I claim the incremental one is real, it reflects how we experience the increases.

None of this really speaks to whether the Singularity will happen or not. I'm just saying if it happens it won't be because of some upward surge in computing capacity just prior to The Singularity. Because no such surge is predicted.
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That's the main problem with this piece, it attacks a Drexler that no longer exists, his views have shifted quite a bit from back then.
My apologies. You are right. I will certainly refrain from using that phrase now on. It is a little ironic that I don't use that phrase in normal conversation, but that I used it today in my comment.

Thank you for your astute observation and comment
Yeah, true, but I still predict the creationists will be all over it.

But you could add much wider error bars to carbon dating and it still wouldn't support creationism.

Maybe something 20 million years old is just 7 million. Fine. It's not six thousand.
The creationist pseudoscience tries to demonstrate that radioactive decay is variable here on Earth.

This seems to be another case where our standard laws of physics break down at massively high temperatures and pressures.

And of course, radioactive dating is one tool among many. The distribution of soil and rock on the Earth is almost certainly the result of billions of years of erosion, earth shifts, and climate changes.
Is this guy actually talking about _Nanosystems_? I don't think he read the same book I did.

I want my 60 seconds back.
Actually the paper discussed in OP is a preprint at:
http://arxiv.org/abs/1006.4848

It uses an extremely suspicious technique to test the significance of their finding. I doubt this paper will pass review without substantial changes.

edit: The one you posted is 2 years old, but tries to explain the same effect with a different cause.
An open letter to marketers who abuse social media for selfish gain
Right, so "he said, she said" is the argument from authority that I referred to. (I'm not sure about Fox's intentions, but even they have to present their stuff in this format.) What this amounts to is that the (inherently lazy) audience picks and matches based on their previous opinions about the speakers, and on how rhetorically convincing the case is made each time. True science is fundamentally incompatible with this cognitive mode.
People also often model what you want to do in the Excel / Access / Mathmatica world first.
Why Python's Integer Division Floors
Not a chance, though I wish it would.

It was born in sin, marketed beyond merit, and has a horrible culture of bureaucracy and overhead.
I am right now used to an unhappy job!
A modern air force gives the President the ability to push some buttons and annihilate entire American cities. At his sole discretion. With no judicial review. And no legislation needed.

I cannot imagine how granting such unlimited power to the President is congruent with any rational reading of the Constitution. Do you really believe that the founders who insisted that the President couldn't be trusted with the ability to declare war would be happy giving the President complete authority to annihilate entire cities at his sole discretion?
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The "two bay areas" still dominate, though Illinois was interesting.
Ah, thanks for explaining.
This seasonal discovery is new, but it's exactly the sort of thing RATE has been talking about. The main point of the RATE project is to discredit the radioisotope dating methods. Sometimes they just send samples from the same rock formation to different labs and get different results. But they also spend a lot of time finding reasons that radioisotope decay rates might change over time.

This is all from what I remember from a conversation I had with someone involved with the project about 10 years ago. They got a lot of funding and a lot of interest back in the late 90's when they were just starting. I thought some of their research was interesting, but there was so much propaganda mixed in that it turned my stomach, so I stopped following it.
Can Orwell, Vonnegut, Austen Lead You to Love?
I've been coding this one project since 2006, on and off that is. Since then, I've switched jobs 3 times and finally landed with a company that's stable and the hours are great. My only excuse now? I need motivation. As someone mentioned earlier, my product competes with a handful of other much larger and popular sites. You know what though? I can't let that stop me. If I can make my version better, then who's to say I can't grab some of their market share?

Bottom line, my motivation right now is I have to do something, NOW. I'm 30 and I would like to start a family soon, going to get marry next year. I don't want to be in a position where I kick myself in the butt 5 yrs from now - "Why didn't I do this 5 yrs ago when I had time?" Even if I were to fail, at least I can say "I tried."
An ad hominem attack is, or is usually understood to be, fallacious and as such an invalid point. But bringing up a past record of unreliability in a given source is neither fallacious nor invalid; it is in fact extremely relevant when considering how carefully to examine claims made or how thoroughly to check sources cited.

In other words: "this person has been known in the past to misrepresent/misreport things" is perfectly valid to point out, as such a source should be taken with a grain of salt and subjected to scrutiny. Megan McArdle is one such source.
Am I the only one who thought this was going to be like those Meth PSAs? Where we see how the programmer's physical condition decays?
My default view on anything is skepticism. I imagine that most HNers, being critical and logical thinkers, have similar positions. The abundance of skeptical posts makes sense to me.
Using Analytics and Modeling to Predict Attacks
What is the history of Django?
Looks good and sounds ideal. I'll probably try it out soon although I don't have a pressing need to manage my servers from the iPhone. Has anyone else tried the other Heroku app which was released last year ( can't remember its name) to provide a comparison??
Thanks for the feedback!

a) Thanks! b) Ok we will think of something more efficient. c) Ok noted. d) No the tutorials at the front are the most recently posted. May be we can add a "Most Popular" Tab? e) It's free, you meant users comments right?
VCs will insist, as a requirement of the raise, that you change your corporate structure to a C-Corp. This is because LLCs pass-through income to the shareholders. The VCs' limited partners may have severe problems with this - for instance, a foreign entity might suddenly have US income, forcing them to file a US tax return.

In other words, if you know you're raising money, you might as well structure the company correctly in the first place, since you'll just have to pay lawyers to redo it when you raise.

The big risk in going from a sole proprietorship that you don't own to a corporation is to you personally, not to the startup. I would only consider such an arrangement if my co-founder was compelled to follow through on the deal - for instance, if you retained full ownership over the IP you created until the company was properly structured. But why set up a Mexican standoff when you can just do it right the first time? It's not the hardship your co-founder is making it out to be.
It's a perfectly reasonable question to ask. As we learn more about science we are able to unravel layers of mystery from physical phenomena and explain observations that were previously taken to be axioms.

Although the statement "mass curves spacetime" is true, I don't think it is simple enough to be considered an axiom. We'll have to dig deeper. Who knows, maybe the OP's son will do it.
Sorry for replying to my own post but I did want to touch a little further on this subject. above I stated:

So if the client wanders off, you have no way to clean up based on that event other than a brute force timeout.

A common rebuttal to this is well just sprinkle in an AJAX call. Which in my opinion is the worst decision one can make. Now not only are you supporting a server model but you also have client mode sprinkled in which compounds the complexity of you application significantly, in essence doubling your technology stack. This is the choice a lot of developers make when trying to dabble in RIA and it is my held belief that this is a fatal mistake. It doubles the required skill set and creates convolution in the sequences of application communication.
Channel Surf the Music Web
His point may have been that he already has the code, so for the existing code it isn't really an advantage.
Such devices are already possible because the scale needed is mm not nano. For example the devices to do angioplasties are pretty big because blood vessels are pretty big. There is also a lot of commercial and research work being done on "remote control" treatment delivery, esp. for cancer treatment. (By remote control I mean externally guided as opposed to joystick control.)
It's this: http://nakkaya.com/2010/08/24/a-micro-manual-for-lisp-implem...

I suspect Red Hat's gcc is aligning structure members on 64-bit boundaries.
He really did that all without a search engine or looking at any API docs?? Maybe it's just cause I'm not a games programmer, but that's insane. How does he know what he's programming to?
Back in the day I used to do a ton of affiliate sales for information products. Personally I stay away from the long-winded sales copy pages, I see them as insanely scammy, but they still sell to normal people.

Ramit has a way of marketing like a scammer, but delivering solid content every time. Seriously "I will teach you to be rich"? I was really reluctant to buy a copy, but after a few solid recommendations picked it up. I trust Ramit's opinion on finances highly, enough to bring my people to see him at sxsw and keep reading his blog. My copy of his book has been passed through probably 10 people by now (haven't seen it in a year) and I link to his articles from my University niche sites, because they have tremendous value.

When is "I will teach your business to be rich" book coming out?
I bet you mean Nezumi. I'm clearly a biased party, but my primary motivation for writing Doppler for Heroku was that I needed support for multiple accounts and direct console access.
I'll second chronolapse. I've used it for reviewing my productivity at the end of a day.
Record for fastest text message on a touchscreen device broken with Swype
Bub-bye Yahoo
I was going to comment here, but I should get back to coding...
Jonah Lehrer: How to raise a superstar
I don't see what was wrong with the first comment in the homelessness "experiment". It actually was a direct response to the article. It's all about sample size. You wouldn't make grandoise statements if your sample size was a miniscule section, regardless of the experiment. Spending 5 days on the streets wouldn't give you any idea of what it was really like to live there permanently.

I found the discussion on that article very lively, with good comments.
Credit card interest rates don't generally relate to default probabilities in a sane way, as Mike Konczal explains here: http://rortybomb.wordpress.com/2009/05/22/credit-card-reform...

There is no rational model that relates your credit card interest rate in a reasonable way to your own actions. If you send in a $5 payment two days late, that's often treated the same as sending in a $5000 payment one month late. But any sane bank officer will tell you that these two events are vastly different when it comes to default probabilities. Credit cards in the US are an insane debt instrument, and ideally, people would use them only for providing transactional credit and not for loans.

Its funny, given the wealth of data available to credit card providers, they have the ability to carefully fine tune rates to a decent estimate of loss probabilities. If that happened, you'd see rates smoothly transition along a curve in response to your actions rather than see-sawing between two or three rates. But pricing in default risk isn't the goal since defaults are great for credit card companies. The more you default, the more fees and interest they can tack on, and many borrowers will end up paying most of that back. It is so much more profitable to earn $5000 on a debt of $1000 after all, even if you have to wait 2 or 3 years to actually get it.
Gah. Where do we even begin with this article's problems?

1. The studies were done with college students (a very unrepresentative, and relatively immature group), in a non-organization (basically they were linked only by a possible monetary reward at the end) and with some very trivial incentive in play. If this has "implications for business work groups, volunteer organizations, non-profit projects, military units, and environmental efforts", please let us know how those implications are arrived at!

2. The description of the experiment is unclear and self-contradictory: "...pools of points that they could keep or give up for an immediate reward of meal service vouchers. Participants were also told that giving up points would improve the group's chance of receiving a monetary reward." So if you "give up" points you _both_ get free meals _and_ you improve the group's welfare?! That doesn't make any sense.

3. What's the deal with the rules - what rules were the "do-gooders" breaking? They're only mentioned in passing but they seem essential for the meaning of the experiment.
Actually C-14 levels have varied over history, so we already need to calibrate C-14 readings with other measuring sticks, such as tree rings.

That calibration would catch any possible variation.

Incidentally did you know that C-14 dating no longer works? The reason is that we've released a lot of carbon from fossil fuels that is very low in C-14. As a result fresh organic matter today has lower C-14 levels than organic matter from 100 years ago. Odd, but true. (And don't think that the Creationists haven't been all over that fact.)
This is a pretty neat idea. I get it now.
That's not "a" video games programmer. That's Notch.
There already is a newsreader app for the iPhone called "Doppler", so perhaps you should consider a different name.
To M.B.A. or Not To M.B.A.?
It depends on the company, your timing, and what terms you agree to (number of options, vesting period, ISO vs. Non-qual). If you're actually interested in doing well, you may need multiple startups, and the earlier the stage, the better. I know multiple people, including myself to some degree, who have done well as employees in startups.

And of course, you could always try to start your own -- multiple times as needed.
By getting used to not getting used to things?
Chicago... the Groupon effect?
The 2010 Inc. 500: The Fastest Growing Private Companies in America
I once worked at an independent hotel where they backed up their reservations nightly, by dragging and dropping the reservation application shortcut from the desktop to a zip drive. I wasn't sure whether to laugh or cry when they asked for help retrieving the data after several reservations were lost. They kept pulling the shortcut back off the zip drive, but the data wouldn't come back. :) (I ended up examining the original corrupted data file, found a phone number that the owner recognized, and all was made right.)
My impression is that HN readers write more intelligent and critical comments than other places.

I gave up on Slashdot back in 1999 because, back then, I was somewhat aware of what was to be biggest drop event for domain names in history. A certain story was a link to a clueless article about the topic, and the comments were dominated by people who knew nothing but sounded authoritative, so they were getting their comments voted up.

Then I thought about it and realized that the information I had was commercially valuable, why the hell would I share it with a bunch of people who couldn't tell right information from wrong information.

The drop event came, our detection system worked, and we grabbed 6000 names that we wanted before anybody else.
> "I disagree with their fundamental premise that Google is "the world's last digital library". Google's demonstration that such a thing is actually possible removes one barrier to entry."

That was my first reaction too, but then I realized the article was implying that the real barrier to entry is the work of scanning billions of books into digital form.

After Google has done that, there will be little incentive for anyone else to incur that same expense to create a service that Google already has a 5 year head start on.

Alot of startups these days are about finding better ways of doing things in already-crowded domains. Google itself showed the way there. But I'm not sure I disagree with article in its assertion that doing this will be much more difficult, if not virtually impossible, in this domain of creating a digital library from scanned books. There really is a significant moat here.
by paid traffic I meant media buys.

actually the third matters a lot...you can get .05 a click, but it won't matter if that particular keyword converts at 1:200.

I know the mechanics of the industry...nothing can actually convert at 1:10. That's bullshit and you should know it if you actually do affiliate marketing.

ESPECIALLY if you do ppv and media buys like you say.

Hell...most products don't have 1:10 conversions for the actual order form. That means that for every 10 people that actually tried buying the product...only one actually paid.

So you are going to tell me your colleagues are converting at 1:5 for an ebook product? How about 1:1?

If you are going to bs...at least make it believable.

Like I said...the only way you can actually get 1:10 conversion rates...is if you do VERY targeted CPC...which usually means you are getting low volume(which explains the 40 cents CPC).

How many actual sales do you have every month at that 1:10 conversion rate?
"Imagining self replicating nanobots or nano machines is ridiculous." The author does not seem to understand that all of cells of life are nano machines. If you insist on a definition of a machine being a collection of gears and bolts, then you must expand your definition.
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Wow. That's like buying a new suitcase when you arrive at the hotel, and wondering why your clothes aren't in it. Packing? Don't confuse me with your jargon!
most of the homeless he encountered isn't most of the homeless. it's a small subsection of homeless in two parts of his town. different parts of different towns have different kinds of homeless. the wikipedia article i linked to explains how a surge of homeless came about, many of them having mental or medical issues. many times those coming back from war have both and end up homeless. and sure, eating what little you can, living outside and a stay in prison may give you better reflexes than a rich computer geek who blogs about being homeless for a week.

i don't think many people anticipate being homeless and then go and buy homeless gear. they aren't going to pack themselves a homeless kit. i imagine one would acquire things as they wander, pick up other people's junk, get what they can in handouts, etc. by just buying this stuff you're giving yourself an advantage over the penniless. perhaps it was his interest in only doing this for a week that prompted this "self-donation", i dunno. i refer to this same point regarding phone/laptop/etc.

it's feeble because he didn't really appear homeless. he only did it for a week. he just tried to get into places that were more comfortable vs living like the people who were unfortunate enough not to win the lottery. in other words, he was basically trying to game the system and see how good life could be as a homeless person vs how life really is. he's intelligent, well prepared, aware of his surroundings. he doesn't have any particular handicap which could prevent him from eventually just finding stable work. he makes a good point that there are good resources for people who fall on hard times temporarily, but this doesn't account for the majority of homeless who stay homeless for an extended time (or indefinitely). and i found it feeble because he spent more time taking pictures of himself than getting to understand "the freaks" or anyone else but black mike.
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Can someone answer me this? How does the BSA get the right to enter a business? I am not trying to be facetious I do not understand this part of the law where a private entity gets the right to enter another private entities establishment. I can understand officials like the police but by what virtue can they (a private entity) compel you to allow them entry. I assume that it has something to do with licensing terms but what if you have not purchased any BSA licensed software?
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Thanks for doing this, definitely very interested in the follow up posts. Having just finished working for a company that 'claim' to be experts in this area it is very interesting to see you guys wipe the floor with your connections/node ratio.
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If you're having problems communicating (or being understood) now, that is a big indicator of what the future may hold.

You're only 28. The most important discussion you might be having is whether or not to have to children. Wait until more serious questions about how you two want your life to unfold, or (the even more difficult) estate planning to happen. Or the painful discussions dealing with aging parents, death of family/friends, and all the other things that people rarely need to have concrete discussions on in their 20s and 30s.

If you're having problems communicating about your passion, just wait until serious topics have to be thought about.