skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Y and Z are Pareto improvements on X, and they are also Pareto optimal. Points on the line between X and Y are also Pareto improvements on X but not Pareto optimal.

R and U are not Pareto improvements on X, because as you note some people lose happiness, but they are Pareto optimal, since according to the model, no further Pareto improvements can be made on those positions.

The point of the article, as I understand it, is that everyone would prefer Pareto improvements, but these are often infeasible. Economists seem to prefer Pareto optimums over non-optimums even when they are not Pareto improvements, perhaps because the word "optimum" and "efficient" have such positive suggestions.

I think the curve is sort of relevant to making this point, but the harder I think about it, the more wrong it seems.
It's meant to be (I guess) a theoretical model for what different public policies can achieve. But we would all prefer points between Y and Z to X, so why don't we enact policies that achieve that? If those policies are impossible or undiscovered, we should instead redraw the curve of optimality to reflect that, i.e. it should connect R, X, and U.
There seems to be a few mistakes.

First, partially it sounds like a branding problem. It would be interesting to know where/how it happens: is it just an American thing? At least in Europe I've not really heard of anything of the sort. Sure they may rebrand 3G as "High Speed" and 3.5G as "Super high speed" but that's about it. At least they don't change a term they have already been using. I guess here we are also "lucky" that the protocol is displayed much more prominently.

Second point I think the comparison with wirelines didn't convince me too much: 3G/4G/whatever are more like DSL/ISDN/Cable. They can't simply advertise the bandwidth, because you actually need to have the right piece of hardware. Imagine if they sold you a "1MB/sec" connection but it didn't work: "Oh, I am sorry dear customer, but you need to have a UMTS phone for that". I'd be really pissed at that point. :)

Edit: actually another such case is Flash format. You get SD, SDHC, SDXC, for example. It's important they advertise that because that's what may decide if you can read or not the card you just bought. Then sure, they also advertise that the card is 8GB, 16GB or what have you, but you can't remove the information on the protocol.
...there isn't anything fundamentally wrong about this form"

I think the only way to definitively prove either of my points is with A/B testing, etc. But one way I can try to make my argument is to look at forms from other successful companies. Almost every single long web form I've seen or filled out goes down where there is a clear sequential order. Think about long forms on SurveyMonkey or the product selection form on any computer manufacturing website. The main exceptions seem to be for very short forms (~4 fields).

They provide a phone number, office hours, and a satisfaction assurance.

None of that is different from the competition.

About whether manually quoting prices is a good idea or not... I think overall it facilitates the sales process, not harms it. It's a fact of the industry, for one.

There may very well be good, or more accurately, rational, reasons for manually quoting prices but the ones that I can think of (there's human judgement involved, etc.) are all business opportunities. From a buyer/consumer perspective, this pricing uncertainty and lack of information can be confusing and even bad. Imagine having to do this for airline prices, etc. Even FedEx will quote you a price for a similar service (and they use vertical forms: http://at.fedex.com/QX58q).

An aside: whenever I hear something along the lines of "a fact of the industry" I usually smell money. That doesn't mean I know how to get it, but it's somewhere out there.

But does that really matter?

Absolutely. This is not an industry where there are one or two or three players. There are dozens of competitors and if I'm entrusting my business -- and goods worth thousands and thousands of dollars -- I'm going with the "most professional" people. I may pay more for it, though I don't want to. I'm not going to go with the firm that has so little attention to detail that they can't correct typos on a website that has likely been around for years. The fact that they didn't even notice bugs the crap out of me.

Here's a way to test this, if you'd be interested: Take screenshots of this site and I'll pick another site that I think is better designed but that offers the same services. We ask people to pick one based purely on sight. Some third party has to be willing to set up the survey though and email it to some of his or her friends to ensure impartial results.

I'm really not trying to be nitpicky.

I don't think this is a bad thing. I think if you're really passionate about this stuff you care about it to the core or it's not worth caring at all.
>In particular, Dr Dorigo was interested to learn that ants are good at choosing the shortest possible route between a food source and their nest. This is reminiscent of a classic computational conundrum, the travelling-salesman problem.

Ugh.
You already have a universe to run your machine in.

It is, of course, conceivable that the brain contains some kind of computational processes that can be implemented/emulated much more quickly on a biochemical substrate than in doped semiconductors — some kind of quantum computation or something. However, all the evidence we have at the moment points in the opposite direction, and there's no particular reason to believe that the universe is designed to give biochemical systems such an advantage.
No! Don't do it... the mindset at big corporations is that of sheep. If you're a wolf, they'll smell you out. Play sheep, smell like sheep, eat gyros the day before just to be sure. Whatever you do, do not tell them about your startup, they will not hire you. They want someone who will be dedicated enough to stay on board until they get fired. Note: Unless you're applying for a contract job, but only if you've put some real hours into your startup, otherwise you're just shooting yourself in the foot.
I think any action taken today is unlikely to preserve resources 500 years from now. You'd have to start some sort of monastery devoted to hoarding helium. (This is harder than it sounds. Helium diffuses through metal tanks.)

Okay, I godda ask.

How would you hoard helium for 500 years?

It sounds like a fun technical problem. Anyone know any solution?
Dowling Duncan redesign the US bank notes
So you're saying the BankSimple team should consist of folks who have built complex systems, designed and implemented interfaces that are engaging to customers, and are knowledgeable about banking, right?

Oh wait...
That's a function with no dependencies. Still a function.
Any Ginzametrics-ers around giving beta codes?
The article is titled Firebug-Catcher.
Here's a link to the article at the New Yorker's website:

http://www.newyorker.com/archive/1936/01/18/1936_01_18_018_T...

Requires a subscription.
Ask HN: 27 Weeks until Startup Launch - Need Ideas!
My name is Matthew and I am a former programmer who spent the last twelve years selling software for companies. Today, I am in the Fast-Track MBA program at Babson College while also working for a software company in Washington DC. I need the help of my fellow Hacker News readers for ideas and suggestions for our Capstone Project. Essentially, I will be on a project team with the goal of starting a company in 27 weeks. Can my fellow Hacker News readers help with an ideal Babson MBA Capstone Project? An ideal project has five attributes:

1. Involves a product, a process, a service and/or a business model (not simply technology licensing, geographical market expansion, etc.)

2. Requires more than incremental innovation (technology, market, and business model risk cannot all be "low")

3. Requires a new organization approach that is entrepreneurial rather than efficiency-oriented.

4. Significant progress and learning is feasible within the course timeframe and resources. (persuasive evidence of customer need exists, "technology lift" is not too heavy, intellectual property entanglements are not too daunting)

5. Ignites the passion of a 4-6 person project team (more than just an "academic exercise", a commercially-viable opportunity - much more than simply an idea, raison d'etre mertis serious effort, offers a powerful learning opportunity.)

Are you ready to help in our opportunity search? Please comment and/or share your ideas on the following link. The winning idea will receive a significant equity stake and the opportunity to work with fellow hackers on building the startup company in 27 weeks.

https://spreadsheets.google.com/ccc?key=t9qfBG6vOv-9mDnLWAj4lEQ&hl=en&authkey=CJa03b0H#gid=0

Thanks for your help!
Matthew
Why scientists/hackers should found their own companies
Not so much lesser-known truths as absolute bullshit.

The author describes developers who spend much of their time writing code as "lazy, ignorant and arrogant". I think it is the author who is being lazy, ignorant and arrogant in thinking that he knows the truth about programming.

And the idea that a developer will only write a handful of lines of code each day that will end up in the final product might be true for a developer working on an established piece of software but anyone who has worked for a start-up or on their own software will just laugh at the idea of writing just 12 useful lines of code a day. A good developer can easily do hundreds, if not low thousands of lines of code in a day if pushed, and this code does often end up in the final product.

Plus, he seems to think that a great programmer is someone who connects together bits of code created by others, rather than writing his own code. That's ridiculous - is someone who uses another person's code a better programmer than the person who wrote the code he is using, in which case I am a much better programmer than John Resig, say, because I simply use jQuery rather than having written it myself.

I think this article is a perfect demonstration of the Dunning-Kruger effect. Sorry for being so blunt but the article bloody annoyed me.
Intel buys McAfee for $7.7B in push beyond PCs
I use it to tell when I have text messages - it flashes green.
Not always, but usually. In part this is because he's usually writing about subjects (like evolution) that he knows a lot more about than his interlocutors (like creationists).

In this case, the situation is reversed: he's writing about subjects (artificial intelligence, information theory, and self-reproducing systems in general) that he knows very little about, and that Kurzweil knows a great deal about.

It's unfortunate that he didn't bother to find out what Kurzweil was actually claiming, instead relying on some dumb-ass "science journalist", before launching his little jeremiad. You'd think Myers, of all people, would know better than to trust science journalists.
That 3.5G is HSPA+ which has a max downstream of 21 megabit versus 3G (HSDPA) at about 7 megabit down.
You are referring to Q1 2010, GS had 3 months without a single day of trading losses. During the same period, JPM, C, and BAC also had a perfect quarter (1).

While its true that HFT groups tend to have great win/loss records (2), those "trading profits" basically have nothing to do with the banks' HFT groups. The banks basically all had very big carry trades on -- they were borrowing at short term rates from the fed and lending at higher rates to others and collecting the spread. Since the Fed was desperate to pump money into the system, they allow banks to borrow cheaply and essentially guaranteed the carry trade for the short term.

That sort of trade tends to be highly stable in static rate environments and you get very smooth return profiles. Since they knew the Fed was essentially backing the trade, they piled onto the trade and that particular component of the firms' total daily P&L just dwarfs the rest of their "real" prop trading operation P&L.

Of course, it won't last forever. Its the sort of trade that works until it doesn't -- Long Term Capital Management basically had super levered carry trades on which gave them a really high sharpe ratio until things got choppy and they blew out.

1: http://www.businessweek.com/news/2010-05-11/-perfect-quarter...

2: Tradeworx claims to have not had a down day in 4 years, reference http://dealbook.blogs.nytimes.com/2010/05/17/speedy-new-trad...
But you can no longer buy one subsidized via a T-Mobile contract for something like $189. Unsubsidized phones are a tough sell in the US and really don't make sense on most carriers. Only T-Mobile gives you a discount on service for skipping out on subsidies.
Done! Works in every single browser.

div {
background: red;
width: 250px;
height: 250px;
top: 50%;
left: 50%;
position: absolute;
margin: -125px 0 0 -125px; /* Width of Element / 2 = Negative Left Margin
Height of Element / 2 = Negative Top Margin */
}

Live demo http://www.faramarzhashemi.com/valign.html
I knew that ancient architecture was usually vividly painted, but it didn't occur to me that the statues might be as well. The interesting thing is how nowadays we model buildings and statues after our notion of what classical art looked like, but the models were never intended to look like that. It's almost cargo-cultish, in its own way. Of course, the non-color elements like the shapes and the proportions still stand through, and those are definitely worthy of study. But painting such a sculpture or building like this would probably be outright offensive to some people.

The color-restored versions somehow look less... impressive with the colors on, but that could be just because I'm used to thinking of the colorless versions as more regal. On the other hand, black-and-white photographs look more artistic as well, so it could be something about the lack of color itself.

If you want to see how ancient classical buildings looked when they were in use, check out the old British TV series "I, Claudius." It's strange to see everything so bright and garish, but it's accurate in spirit, if not in detail.
You owe me a new keyboard.
Why brevity matters
(From the original poster): You're right that I mischaracterized the diamond problem. I edited the post to fix that. My C++ mind model has been slipping away fast in part years. Definitely not like riding a bicycle.
This is an interesting blog post because I've noticed that often the apps that solve the most "mission-critical" problems have the worst UIs. Maybe its the complexity of the task as much as lack of effort? I'm not sure. On the other hand the most beautiful UIs are often on top of apps solving extremely trivial problems.
BBC (I think or maybe it was PBS|NPR) did this. Recent article talked about how they decided to go "open" and put everything in API. Later on when developing for satelite stations and other projects they found using their API was the bestest, fastest way to go.
I do have a couple of ideas so you know I am not completely lame.

Dirt Jockey (www.dirtjockey.com) is a marketplace for used construction equipment, parts and attachments. The customer need is that construction contractors are not able to buy directly from one another right now, it is only dealerships or auctions. Let's change the game.

Naked Farms (www.nakedfarms.com) I have no idea yet but the name is pretty awesome for organic foods. Actually, I do have some ideas around a customer need but not enough to put into words.

Cyber Gym (domain TBD) I do P90X and I used to have a personal trainer. The trainer costs too much money and the P90X videos get boring. How about a virtual trainer that watches you via the webcam to make sure you are doing exercises correctly? Think obesity - those folks don't like going to the gym and want to workout at home.

More ideas to come... please share you idea and "Customer Need State"...

Also, read this book before writing your business plan. Great Advice: http://www.amazon.com/new-business-road-test-entrepreneurs/d...
You are applying the term "solution space" in a manner I didn't intend. It's certainly true that an engineer isn't discovering new physics, just as most programmers are not discovering new complexity classes or doing fundamentally new CS. A good chunk of engineering consists of applying existing physical principles in new ways.

Of course, there are engineers building yet another overpass/HVAC/etc just as there are programmers building yet another CRUD app, or scientists sequencing the DNA of yet another bacteria. And now that I think about it, they may make up the majority.

In that case, most pf programming is not so special at all.
Yes, "fold proteins" is a member of a distinguished class of algorithms that DNA is exceptionally well suited to handle.

Similarly, "simulate shallow wave dynamics" is in the class of algorithms that a water tank is pretty near optimal for, and the "find local minima" problem is handled with remarkable ease by gravity and a rolling ball; we'd be hard pressed to write computer programs that solve any of these problems using fewer bits than we can get by with by using the real world to solve them instead.

But most algorithms are not made that easy by any of these computational substrates; in fact, vanishingly few of them are, and an algorithm is only likely to be "easy" relative to vanishingly few systems.

What would let us assume that "Do intelligence" is a member of the subset of problems that are made easy by the detailed workings of biology? Because the a priori probability that it falls into that class is just about zero...
I can't upvote Mr. Ptacek enough here. I am a member of a meat CSA that's local because I can go to the farm and see how the animals are raised. I buy veggies from the market here in Chicago because I can go to the farms and see how they're growing the produce. While lowering the energy factor is a bonus, it certainly isn't the reason I eat mostly local food. I eat local because I want to know how animals are treated, ensure that animals aren't bloated with corn feed, and to ensure that I'm not eating chemically (ammonia) laced meat.

It's also important to put money back into your local community. If I spend $50 at a chain grocery store, very, very little of that is going into the local economy. If I spend $50 on meat from a local farm, all $50 is going to the local economy.

PS How's the 1/2 pig?
Sorting algorithms - now even more exciting with sound effects
I'm not sure if you truncated that excerpt on purpose or not, but the sentence that follows it indicates that the author does actually know what the TSP is.

> In particular, Dr Dorigo was interested to learn that ants are good at choosing the shortest possible route between a food source and their nest. This is reminiscent of a classic computational conundrum, the travelling-salesman problem. Given a list of cities and their distances apart, the salesman must find the shortest route needed to visit each city once.
> "A RAID0 over three disks has about 1/3 the MTBF of a single disk."
This is incorrect, the MTTF and MTBF are not significantly changed.

Wikipedia disagrees; http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Standard_RAID_levels#RAID_0_fai...

array_MTTF = avg(drive_MTTF) / number_of_drives
The Nexus One is the only modern Android phone (besides the original Motorola Droid) that runs pure Android- it doesn't have any of the additional software like HTC Sense or Motorola Blur.

It's also usually the first to receive updates, it got Froyo way before any other device.
This was cross-compiled. We had just implemented the full (as opposed to abridged) C++ libraries so obviously we decided to make sure that our customers could use them fully, however given that this was new support there was a distinct lack of test cases. Someone suggested that Boost exercised this functionality pretty well (some customers previously complained that they had been prevented from using boost before due to our only supporting the abridged libraries so this was actually a good idea), someone decided that I should be in charge of this.

What it amounted to was debugging horrible compiler crashes, broken library behaviour and spending a long time deciphering huge template names. This caused me to hate C++ more than you can ever imagine. I swear whoever decided to stitch templates together in the way Boost does has never had to debug a development compiler, this broke almost every part of the toolchain.

Ugh.
Did you program this yourself Ray? If you're an SEO who can program as well, call me super jealous!
"The color? Always something tacky."

Pity the ancients didn't share our fashion sense, eh.
The statues on the pediment of the Philadelphia Museum of Art are painted in the old style:

http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Pediment,_Philly_Art_...

http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Pediment,_Philly_Art_...
Too bad most folks prefer subsidized phones, and Google's experiment with the N1 didn't work out.

After initially falling in love with the iPhone, I bought an N1 since it supports T-Mobile's US 3G frequency. The N1 is a great phone, and I'm sending this comment over it's mobile hotspot through my ancient $6/month T-Mobile unlimited data plan.

Where there is coverage, T-Mobile's 3G network rocks. The latency and download speeds are comparable to a good DSL connection. I've made Skype video calls with a MBP via the N1 that were absolutely perfect. But then I might have been the only user in that cell ;)

A little known advantage of T-Mob's 3G network is that it's purely for data, while voice is carried over other frequencies. They have fiber to their towers, with HSPA+ already deployed in many metro areas.

Another advantage of the N1 are the unbridled access to the latest and greatest firmware and app updates.

Downsides are the plastic touch screen that scratches easily, and the OLED display which is almost impossible to read in sunlight.
If I want an IP block (and have a legit reason), I can get a previously unallocated block. Soon, there are going to be no unallocated blocks. We will have _run out_ of unallocated blocks.

(That we are able to re-allocate, and thus, resell previously allocated blocks/addresses only means that there is a market, after all blocks have been allocated.)
I don't see Cheerwine on the list =(
157 App Stats you should know about
Pardon my ignorance, but is it possible for someone with a Sense phone, say, to install pure android on it and get all the advantages of the Nexus One, with the updates and all? Or do you need drivers or something?
From "counting the DNA", you would expect that the family of hundred-amino-acid-long peptides, which are encoded in strings of 300 bases, would have 4³⁰⁰ = 2⁶⁰⁰ possible three-dimensional conformations, or rather probability distributions over conformations, since many peptides have multiple stable conformations.

However, those 2⁶⁰⁰ sequences of bases are immediately reduced to 20¹⁰⁰ ≈ 2⁴³² possible sequences of amino acids (ignoring the start and stop codons, which are presumed to lie just before and just after the 300-base sequence in question).

Are you suggesting that these 2⁴³² different peptides somehow express many more than the 2⁶⁰⁰ different three-dimensional structures, or rather, probability distributions over them? Because that seems like a highly implausible claim, on the face of it.

Or are you going to answer, "Fucking arithmetic. How does it work?"
The less is more mantra may not be desirable for everyone.

From one point of view (say, a seller's) the solution of "reduced number of options" may be a good way to influence a quick and (potentially satisfying) decision (like Dan Ariely also says here - http://bigthink.com/ideas/20749.)

But I as a consumer would definitely want to explore all the options before making a decision. One good fix here is to just understand that one can't have everything and learning to prioritize the needs.
When Wilbur and Orville Wright went to go build a bird, they did not endow it with a beak and talons.
You've never used Redmine, I see!

Not that there's anything wrong with the other two, but Redmine is miles ahead, in my opinion.