skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I agree with you that people don't want to micromanage (the means) but I do think people want to segment their social sharing (the ends).

I think the trick will be to figure out an interface where you can share this way, without it feeling like a pain/micromanaging, etc., and I think this will require a paradigm shift.

Any solution that is, essentially, a "facebook tweak" (whether it's by facebook themselves or diaspora, or whoever) will always be cumbersome.

I think to solve this problem a new paradigm is required, one that replaces the ultimately inaccurate social metaphors of facebook (friend requests, wall posts, news feed, status updates, private inbox messages), with a totally new approach that comes at these problems in a different way (for instance, a unified feed with messages organized by group, as a replacement to all of the features listed above).
absolutely. Really hope Google puts its foot down on this kind of garbage.
Your comment says it all about America. You can't even be bothered to read it.

Secondly, stop giving MBAs a bad name.
+1 for not looking Japanese.

A former hostel-mate of mine was Japanese and we would hangout with the Japanese expats in Shanghai. 100% of the time, Japanese people would speak English to him. I forgot where exactly in Japan he is from, but he said everyone in his home town looked like him, but Japanese people elsewhere would assume he is something else; 6.4 tall, full beard, and looked a lot like Tarkan, the Turkish singer:

http://www.frogview.com/uploadimages101/476366f66b4d62.07061...

A year later when I went to Japan I found out how unusual looking he was.
Interestingly, Nokia's downfall is caused in part by its failure to compete with Google & Apple's - two American companies - innovation.
No I don't think so. Unlike statistical physics, where probabilities are simply a mathematical technique for dealing with uncertainty, quantum mechanics actually postulates that randomness is inherent to the universe.

If you disagree with me, please describe how your concept of "maps and territories" applies to the StatPhys/QM distinction.
Heroku: Announcing the Add-on Provider Program
But they do have power: buying power. Maybe one could somehow give them the information they require. Of course the operators have done a good job obfuscating the information.

Maybe some people don't want to be helped, either.
Super Mario Bros turns 25 years old
A better team “might” have been able to pull something like Haystack off. Disruptive technologies are often brought about by small groups of skilled visionaries, and it was certainly possible that Austin Heap may have been one of them. But he isn’t. He greatly exaggerated his own hacking abilities, he refused numerous offers of review from real experts, and he fabricated stories of Haystack’s impact inside Iran while soliciting donations all the while.

In doing so, he likely made the “fundamental economics” problem that you mentioned even worse. During Iran’s election, people everywhere were anxious to help protestors in any way they could. Legitimate anti-censorship groups may well have benefited from increased media attention and a resulting increase in funding, had Heap not stolen the spotlight. Lay people could have been educated on the real challenges in thwarting censorship. Instead many were led to believe that the problem had already been solved by a boy genius, and that it was simply a matter of sending him enough thumb drives. Heap’s dishonesty and the lax journalism that encouraged it should rightly be discussed.
Yeah, if you happen to live in a newly-wired building in a major city or suburb.

The latter part of your statement is true. They're not wiring up rural areas. However, I live in a neighborhood that doesn't have a home newer than 30 years and am receiving AT&T U-Verse, 20Mbps down (and consistent).

I don't believe the future is in shiny discs. The near-future probably isn't in exclusive streaming video, but the longer term likely is. We're a few technological break-thrus away, perhaps, but for what my opinion is worth... I believe it'll get there.
If they want more users, why not expand internationally, instead of (just) slashing prices?
I'll take your word for it.

My impression of cause and effect was that it started pretty much from the beginning, when Obama tried to push for economic stimulus first and universal health service later.

And now the teaparty are a force to be reckoned... and their whole point is to have a small government, and they don't want stimuli or similar (as well as no health service).

But please tell me more. American politics is quite interesting. :)
"people spending at the overpriced hotel minibar reduce the room prices for everyone else" only works in a very competitive marketplace where prices are necessarily driven down by competition. Otherwise, the hotel just figured out how to wring out more profit by simply offering an overpriced minibar.
Employees cost a company more than just pay, such as insurance, etc. You'd have to take into account the full cost of an employee.
Isn't "can't wait to jump on an exciting new idea" the opposite of self control?
I just dont get this line of reasoning, i had a mediocre Windows phone on Verizon, and i could do anything on it including mp3 ringtones. there was no restriction on any element, that was before the iPhone was around.

I dont really trust either the operator or the phone manufacturer to restrict my phone experience, why should the choice for the consumer be a lesser of two evils when the obvious solution is right there, that is, no lock to either (if the consumer so chooses), i dont see the difference between restrictions imposed on sideloading regardless of the source

Frankly i consider not being able to change the default OS keyboard (say use swype instead) or default music player, or be forced to use Itunes a regression. Not to mention i have to connect it to a computer (an Authorized one at that to update the iphone, again forced to use that awful piece of software forced on me by the manufacturer)

If we suppose that the competition with the Iphone creates a better ground for consumer freedom, then it would not suffer from new players, on the contrary, it might force the iphone to be more open as well.
Personally, I think Google's recruiting process can become very long and tedious. I interviewed with Google 4 months before my graduation and went through 6 different interviews (all technical) for two different positions. The HR person told me that she would like to schedule another hour for interviews and took my availability for next 2-3 weeks. I got no response back. I contacted the HR person again, and she told me that they were going through reorgs and things were getting lost. She then took another 2 weeks of availability. No response. I didn't have much time to wait any longer, I decided to join another company.

From friends and colleagues who interviewed and/or are working at Google..I found out that the interview for college hires can become very long. One of my friends took 6 months to get a job. If this is still happening at some part of Google, they must improve this process. People don't usually have time to wait 6 months to know whether they got a job or not.
If anything, the numbers they cite for those who do are higher than my anecdotal observation.
Some of us require more stability than the startup scene allows. Some of us also have wives that want to be able to afford decent living/eating conditions, and demand to be able to spend time with their spouses. Some of us also don't like the amount of stress involved, or the need to do things other than just working on software...
You touched on this in your last paragraph, but I think it still deserves saying: Apple wields a lot of the power it wrenched away from carriers to the benefit of it's consumers. I'm stoked that my iPhone doesn't com preloaded with crap ware and that my girlfriend's 3 year old device receives OS updates immediately once they are released to the public.
My question is who won this battle when Verizon and Apple negotiated the iphone coming out next year. I'm guessing Verizon wasn't able to get any crapware on there beyond Apple's standard crap, but you never know, Apple really wanted to expand beyond AT&T.

As far as Android, I get the sense that Google is not happy with this situation and they do have one big stick they can use, access to Android Market.

I'd also like to remind the ridiculous Google haters that it was Google that fought the FCC and the carriers to get open access rules added to the bandwidth auctioned off in 2008, those rules should loosen at least what Verizon does in the future.
Insync Is Dropbox For Google Users
Suppose I accurately map the coastline, and every relevant part of the coastline is depicted in my map. But the map is not the same as the coastline itself.

If my coastline has some feature that blips in and out of existence in a predictable way, I can integrate that into my map. My map then has uncertainty in it. That uncertainty is an accurate reflection of the coastline itself - but there is still a distinction between the map and the coastline.

I don't disagree with your second sentence. But there is still a difference between our theory of quantum mechanics and the universe itself.
If HFCS as produced in sodas is the same thing, why does it make sodas taste significantly different?
I hope so. Can it happen without government regulation?
I recently interviewed with Google and I'd dispute (2). I have a friend at Google who vouched for me, so they didn't bother with a phone screen. The interview process consisted of two half-days where I spoke with 5 interviewers in total. That seems about the norm for tech companies. I certainly prefer splitting it across two half days rather than having one giant wall of interviewing from 9 to 5.

Also, your payoff/cost calculation is off since they choose whether to invite your back for the second round. I was told that because I got called back, the odds of me getting an offer were much, much higher. So if you get flushed early, you only blew half a day. If you end up having to spend two half-days, then the chances you'll get an offer are quite high.

I've heard some anecdotal support for (3), but they also seem to have very generous 401k matching. Plus, getting good food for free every day has to be worth something too.

Also, what's the upside of actually working for Google, compared to a startup?

One can generally work on different classes of problems at an established company with enormous problems and tons of really smart people like Google. Most startups aren't dealing with data anywhere close to the scale that Google is, and there is no startup in the world that can give you access to the internal talent pool Google has assembled.
Nobody is arguing that American companies can't compete, or that America isn't a great country. But the UK was an innovator once, and so was Italy before it.

That said you could very well end up with a future with very powerful and very competitive american companies... in a country with no middle-class and a strong divide between managers and those with money, and the labour force with little privileges.

Edit: I think USA got to where it is for a certain pragmatism that it seems to have lost. Now ideologies (free market, socialism, God, etc...) seem to be all that matter, and society is suffering for it. GDP is not a good indicator of the society's wellbeing and even less is current GDP for tomorrow's society's. At the end of the day the richest man in the world is Mexican, but Mexico is hardly a first world country.
Did FoundersCard jump the shark w/ American Airlines (see comment thread)
>You buy a book, generally there are no preconditions on your opening it, whether in the store or at home. So since there are no apparent constraints, there's no scope for an agreement to exist between you and the publisher.

So book publishers need to add a wrapper license and some plastic wrap and can then sue anyone selling second hand books. Hoorah for capitalism over common sense.
Agreed; in particular, the quotes read like poorly-transcribed scribbles that don't even form sentences.
Consuming anything heavily sweetened --- or even high in refined carbohydrates of any sort --- should play havoc with your appetite, simply because of the way insulin works.
Somehow I tend to lean towards a softer interpretation towards people: so I would assume there might be other factors at play, for example with the guy who watches Netflix instead of writing his apps. Perhaps he subconsciously doesn't believe in his success? In general, I think the only way to cure an addiction is to replace it with something better. That is why often alcoholics and drug addicts seem to recover by becoming ultra religious ("better" being subjective, but it fills the void). Instead of looking down on people without self-control, why not try to help them find something better or motivate them?

Of course with a lot of self-control maybe the app guy would just sit down and write the apps. But can self-control then not also backfire? At other times HN is flooded with articles about failing early enough or being prepared to change course. Self control would prevent that and therefore make you less adaptive (at least one possibility).

As for the kids with Marshmallows experiment, yeah, I've heard about it, the guy also wrote a bestseller called "Emotional Intelligence" (notice he is good at marketing). But how many kids did he test? Has it been repeated? And maybe it was other factors - perhaps the kids not taking the Marshmallows were more intelligent and had already learned that Marshmallows are bad for you. Perhaps kids from families with higher socioeconomic status feed less candy to their kids, so the kids craving for candy less were already from better backgrounds. (Not saying that is the explanation, just saying there could be lots of factors at play besides self-control. Personally, I never liked Marshmallows, not even as a kid...).
I feel you.

I think the "drinking photos" example is illustrative because it's extreme, but I think the real, widespread pain points --- I know the ones I have, at least --- are more along the lines you mentioned.

Sure, you can put up certain walls relatively easy (i.e. only these friends can see my pictures).

But I think you hit on the essence of contextual sharing, which is that privacy aside, you simply want to share different things with different people.

I want to share the Paul Graham essay with only my start-up friends, I want to share the new NoSQL db github link with only my hacker friends, I want to talk smack about fantasy football with only those people, I want to post my family vacation pictures to only my family, etc.
The behavior you describe is its own antidote for a normal person. A narcissist would blame the client. A sociopath would grab some nearby colleague and throw them under the bus.
May I suggest that the trouble with narcissists is the efficiency of their thought processes: They only have to think about one person at a time...one person ever. That makes them more efficient mentally. Also, people who can't see themselves have no self-doubt. That makes them better, more efficient leaders. Also, people who are good-looking are more likely to develop these traits, and, having developed them, are less likely to have to go away and sit quietly by themselves and unlearn them.
I'm speaking from experiance. I've had narcissistic, sociopathic, and "other" SOs. The Sociopaths are most fun because they don't have any fear. The narcissists are the next most fun because they tell jokes better (attention) and they try harder to get praise (attention) and they are better conversationally and socially.
Ultimately? I would not go back. I like to get a massage, instead of having to give all the time, for example.
But let's call a spade a spade: Good looking and fun? check! No self doubt? check! Hot in the sack? check!
That's hard to learn to say no to. It takes practice, and really, to make yourself not answer the phone there has to be baggage to create that strong "I don't think so" reaction.
My examples are from personal life, but similar themes apply at work and socially. Narcissists are more popular and harder to create momentum against. They are more glib, and get away with talking first and longest. It takes conscious effort and practice to get a word in and certainly if there are cliques in place, it may take effort which is not going to see long term payoff to defend a position or create momentum without a narcissist getting on board to bring the group.
Is this a cause or a symptom of the founder-hacker/salesman-CEO devide?
Such large differences imply a difference in the algorithm

Indeed, you write

c = mat2.getcol(j)

norms[0, j] = scipy.linalg.norm(c.A)

which means (i) extract a sparse column vector, (ii) convert it to a dense vector, and (iii) compute the norm. Now, this should explain the speed difference. Looking at the nnz, a dense norm can take up to a factor 5e5/(1.2e8/1.3e7) ~ 54000 longer :)

The main issue here is that the linear algebra stuff under `scipy.linalg` doesn't know about sparse matrices, and tends to convert everything to dense first. You'd need to muck around with `m2.data` to go faster.
Orkut has already that feature in recent roll-out

See this video: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=R1xzJrPn-Bc
Really? We have to hand-hold adults that much now? We worked with chemicals that could cause serious injury in freshmen chemistry. The instructor did an extra "yes this stuff is really dangerous" warning those weeks, but it was a bunch of 18 year olds.

This was a Masters level student, so I don't feel like the instructor has any blame here
Voila:

"The ultimate reason for the lower Japanese body esteem
may perhaps concern broader cultural and historical
perspectives. Being part of the West, but non-Caucasians,
Japanese people seem collectively to experience high
incongruence between their Western-oriented bodily ideals
and the perceptions of their own body. "

Japanese body image: Structure and esteem scores in a
cross-cultural perspective by Rotem Kowner, University of Haifa, Israel, in: INTERNATIONAL JOURNAL OF PSYCHOLOGY, 2002, 37 (3), 149–159

http://www.sjsu.edu/people/jennifer.anderson/courses/c5/s1/K...
Can you cite a peer-reviewed source that says that HFCS "hits you much faster" than sucrose? The sources I found suggest that the two are handled almost identically once in the bloodstream.
A lot of the countries in Europe have strong independent governments that were established long before the USA existed. European countries have large complex systems of law that have taken thousands of years to develop and grow. We also have hundreds of millions of people. What was the original population of the USA?

How difficult would it be to wipe and rewrite the constitution of the USA today? Imagine something 100 times more difficult than that, and that is how difficult it would be to create anything resembling the USA in Europe.
Ask HN: Crowdsourcing your health
In BusinessWeek, they mentioned a company called ExpertConsensus which for a $20k+ fee collects your medical data, organizes a panel of experts, and advises your primary physician on alternative (I guess better?) treatments.

As tech savy people, would you be comfortable (in the distant future) using a cut-rate start-up version of such a service?

I'm thinking that as the price of medical tests drop (23andMe, etc.), the potential for a service to create a cheap network of retired/low-wage/part-time doctors would increase. Ultimately though is this an instance where people have a very firm image of price ( as mentioned in Don't Roll the Dice ) and if you price too low, you'll lose consumer confidence?
Let's Open Up Angel Investing's Country Club Rules
lol ... Russians love to forget articles
A crude and uneven ability to think from the perspective of another is a pretty good working definition of narcissism.

Wow, way to take a very specific operational definition of narcissism, as measured by a psychometric instrument, and conflate it with something totally different.
clickable (not paywalled): http://www.businessweek.com/magazine/content/10_38/b41950224...
Stonebreaker isn't a relational zealot. He's been inventing new stuff outside the original relational model for ages. Remember object relational databases? The relational purists hate this guy.
Ok, can we label cane sugar as "CS-50" then? Labeling so people can pay attention to the amount of fructose they're metabolizing seems like a good thing. Setting up a system that gives a free pass to anything that doesn't start with "HFCS" seems like a very bad thing.
Yeah, true. I will break the trend and say that I have little-to-no interest in having my own company, and that I like programming and making money. Working for the bank facilitates this.
Or they've got very little discipline. It doesn't necessarily reveal anything about their attitude towards others.
Ask HN: Why is there no competitor to the iPod Touch?
Is there a viable competitor that I'm missing?

And why do other vendors think they can compete with the iPad if they can't compete with the iPod Touch? The iPad after all, is partly so successful simply due to the fact that "it's a big iPod Touch."
Let me preface this with my bias: I personally advocate the abolishment of copyright and patents.

I think that crowds like this find the "lolz it's not theft, it's infringement" argument to be a particularly apt one. I've been guilty of such things myself, after all, it's technically correct, which is the best kind of correct.

However, I think this makes an interesting distinction: it doesn't really matter, from a 'hearts and minds' perspective. Neither side really 'wins' from this kind of argument, because the argument fundamentally isn't about the definition of theft. It's unfortunate that 'pro idea freedom' (two can play this game) advocates are effectively slandered by suggesting that they're 'thieves' or 'pirates,' but I'm not sure that an overtly semantic argument is the best way to get around this.

I think it's better to make it a 'stealthily semantic' one, that is, don't talk about definitions, just move the dialogue to the core point: creators do not have a _right_ to profit, and therefore, they're not deprived of anything through infringement. It's not about theft, because they had nothing in the first place, ideas are not property.

Even if you disagree with this line of reasoning, I think everyone can agree that a real, actual dialogue is better than what appears on the surface like quibbling. Yes, one can still be 'anti-theft' and 'anti-copyright', and theft and infringement are semantically distinct. But it's just not a deep enough level of discourse to truly explore the issue: we're seeing a natural progression of technology and culture, with many powerful, entrenched interests. It's a really, really important topic, and deserves more than soundbite arguments.
details and a link to the flaws please...