skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
That is fascinating. It solves a puzzle for me: the books I read, which would certainly have been the 1959 revisions, were definitely of a 1950s and not 1930s sensibility. The feel is that of the beginning of the rock and roll era, when teenagers would drive around in cars of their own and devote themselves to fun, but the social and family structures were still stable. Nothing transgressive had happened yet, but it was about to. The late 1950s were nostalgic for themselves before they were even over.

My bet is that the 1959 revisions were a great contribution to the Hardy Boys' longevity. It sounds like the books were stripped down to their essence. Talk about uncelebrated. If McFarlane was at the bottom of the literary barrel, how about the anonymous hack who had to go in and clean up his work! Whoever it was, I'm on their side. Snobbish though every critic may be, you can't argue with those books' success. I don't mean success at selling copies; I mean success at captivating children, generation after generation.

Harry Potter had a similar ability to suck children into an imaginary realm and get them reading. But its popularity was more intense and perhaps short-lived. The Hardy Boys' effect has been more diffuse but extraordinarily durable. Maybe in 15 years someone will cut the Harry Potter books down to size and turn them into perennials too.
The most important job of your startup is to MAKE MONEY.

So when there isn't money in the bank you go out and you MAKE SOME DAMN MONEY.

If all else fails get an out-of-focus purely-for-money project. There's usually a lot of those lying about if you're willing to work on them.

full disclosure: my startup has yet to pay bills, but we have a knack for getting government grants
Sure it does. He is the living embodiment of "you can just go around talking shit", he's irrational. You can call him an abstract painterly post-modernist thinker, or whatever, just don't go supporting his way of being by putting meaning where there is none, you'd be giving people false hope, so to say. And that really murders, and subsequently mutilates your inner child.

Night.
Jobs Gets in a little fight with a College Student over Email
"That particular article may not have been written by Scott Locklin, but a quick browse of his other works on the same site validates ahoyhere's point."

Oh, really? The burden of proof lies on your shoulders. More to the point: citation needed.
So, does DRM translate to more sales?

Here's the thing - if all publishers cared about was their bottom line, then DRM must absolutely translate to more sales, in this context and in big triple A title games.

Or is it that publishing execs aren't willing to take a risk on trying a DRM free model, even though their revenues would hold/increase?
Heh, I've been a zipcar user since the flexcar days and this happened to me but I just ignored it all. I ended up renewing some months later but Im hope they didnt report me me. Though I did a credit check a while ago while apt hunting and nothing odd showed up.
AFAIK for JavaScript there is no systematic protection like for CSRF (CSRF token), but the use of a templating engine reduces the risk. You can also order a scanning service like http://www.godaddy.com/security/website-security.aspx
I add a language to my resume once I've built a few real projects using it and feel comfortable enough with it that I can learn whatever I need to know for a given task. If I'm not confident that the use of that language would not be an issue for me in any (realistic) task, it's not going on my resume.
Ask HN: How can I be more effective?
I've spent the last year radically overhauling a lot of things about my life, mostly in the areas of self-discipline, building good habits, and time management. I feel really good about what I've been able to accomplish, but I feel a plateau starting to emerge. I'm not sure I can squeeze much time out of my schedule without it being unsustainable (I'm not willing to sacrifice my health, sleep, or relationships). So I now have a lot more productive time than I did before, but I'm wondering how I can best leverage those improvements for even bigger gains in the future.

How can I be more efficient with the time that I have? (doing things better)

How can I be more effective in general? (doing better things)

I realize these questions are very general, but I'm interested in hearing a lot of different perspectives and whatever general principles you've noticed from years as entrepreneurs, developers, and humans.

PS - This might sound like I'm sacrificing life for work, but I'm really not. I'm married and spend lots of time with my wife, friends, and family. I'm working on my pilot's license. I exercise, try to eat well, get enough sleep, and take time to read great literature, etc.
Let me get this straight. Intel sells you a chip with X amount of L3 cache. You buy the CPU because you agree that's a fair price for a CPU with that much cache. You later find out that Intel snuck an extra megabyte of L3 cache into the silicon, so you can upgrade over the Internet instead of having a new part shipped to you. And you think this is immoral?

Intel could just as easily have (a) charged everyone $50 more for the CPU, even those who don't care about the performance upgrade; or (b) shipped a part that couldn't be upgraded at any price. Both of these outcomes are strictly worse for consumers.
What are your specific beefs?
Oh, actual asinine behavior is not anything I have any fondness for. I hope your social road rash heals up quickly.
IMHO technically memcached is best when used locally on LAN, not somewhere on the 'net where latency is high and security is less strict - and memcached has neither encryption nor secure authentication support.
already exists, see
http://www.cs.rochester.edu/u/jbigham/vizwiz/video/
thanks...I'll try to fix. As I said it was just for internal use (only windows), so I din't test too much.

Do you tested also the app?
Considering he gave you 100% of the means you required to investigate it yourself, one can only come to the conclusion that you are a troll, not interested in truth, but only in gaining attention.
Beware, journalists: Apple is not your friend
Personally I give prominence to the languages I would love to work with and generalise everything else under project experience. So while I wouldn't list PHP, I would say that I've "built many websites using various technology stacks". But I might write one or two specific cool/neat things I've built with Lisp or Clojure.
Weird Science shrugs off Chernobyl
I hate phones. So why am I thinking about buying a smartphone?
Kin comparisons hit the nail on the head.

Not what Kin turned out to be, but what Kin was originally intended to be: the phone that is to social networking what the Blackberry is to enterprise email.

As mentioned in the grandparent post, Microsoft's dragged-out WinMo refactoring of Kin cost them their original deal with Verizon, but there's no reason Facebook couldn't negotiate a similar or even better deal for cheap data plans for the Farmville crowd. What Facebook would have to do to stand a chance is to go head-to-head with prepaid MVNOs and outgun them on features and Facebook integration while staying roughly within their price range.

The problem with the Kin was that it ultimately became lost in delusions of competing with mainstream smartphones instead of concentrating on its core competencies. The Facebook phone would have to have no such illusions, competing instead with two-year-old Kyocera featurephones that kids buy for $39.95 contract-free, but delivering a much better Facebook experience for very little more.
Showcase Of Web Design In The Arab World
Note: I don't literally mean that the author sat down to lure HN-ites in. Let's not flatter ourselves.

My point is that extremists in one area also hold non-extremist beliefs in other areas. That can lull you into a false sense of sharing an identity with them. And that, according to all kinds of psychological research, can end up with you conforming to their other ideals as well -- if you believe they go part and parcel together, you will, on some level, strive for consistency.

That's why you have to be aware of who's saying what, and why, and what you read, and how you feel about it.
I'm confused. How are facts skewered by intent?

The author cites an article at the NYT which points out that black children are suspended more than whites. He then points out that this suggests black children are more likely to exhibit behavior problems, hindering the education process for better behaved white children. He then advocates segregating black children from white children, except for the minority who have the aptitude for school.

His reasoning and data gathering process seems no worse than most newspaper columns (which are, in general, pretty bad). I don't agree with his conclusion since some of the values he is basing them on differ from mine, but that doesn't mean his facts are wrong.

So how, pray tell, has he skewered facts? And why does that mean we should ignore another author who shares a site with him?
>Even the doctor wouldn't know if this were a double-blind test.

Actually there's plenty of evidence that doctors do tend to know which groups patients are in. In SSRI trials, they can be about 80% accurate (can find the ref at work tomorrow if needed). Patients also tend to know — probably because of the different side effect profiles in drug vs placebo arms. This is one of the major arguments for running trials with active placebo arms — that is, a placebo which does have side effects but which is assumed or known non-efficacious for the problem under investigation.
I have an office with phones, copiers, fax machines, high-bandwidth internet, comfortable workstations, power, secure entry, and whiteboards. We have about 10 people working out of it. I have a very good idea of what these things cost.

On the first floor of my building is a coffee shop. It pays more than 3x per rentable square foot than we do. Retail space is priced differently from office space. Attractive retail space is far more expensive than good office space.

No, I don't think phones and Internet makes it a toss-up. I think you're way off.
.. and this is also required reading (while we are on the topic..)

http://simson.net/ref/ugh.pdf
Perhaps the call to 'sue me' would have more weight if you'd already managed to hack the unlocking process.

But anyway, how are Intel doing anything to the 'free market'? In a free market Intel can sell whatever they like for whatever the market will pay for it. They're not quite a monopoly so if you don't like the 'unlockable' processor, don't buy a machine that uses it.

The only way I can make this rant make sense in my head is if the writer assumes that it's immoral to make a profit at all. My understanding of free market economics is limited, but I suggest that the author of that rant has an even worse understanding than I do.
You can look at process as "a list of stuff we have to do" or you can look at it like "stuff we need to worry about"

The first way, you are relieved of worrying -- you do the list, and the list thinks for you. The second way is much more difficult.

The problem in big organizations is that different folks are worried about different things. That's why they keep making and giving out lists of stuff for people to do -- they don't want you screwing up. If you have a hundred teams and one of them takes down production for a day, I can guarantee you somebody is going to make a list of how-not-to-do-that-again, like it or not.

We all know where this heads -- mindless trolls doing paperwork and following the list while nothing gets done. But it's important to realize how we get there too. There are no bad guys in this story. It's not just descriptive process that causes the problem, it's letting the "chickens run the farm" as one other commenter put it.

There has to be some give and take. I wish you could throw out some kind of slogan and have an easy answer, but a lot of this is highly dependent on organizational culture, previous history, the people involved, etc.

It depends. :)
I'd be interested in hearing from anyone who's running pgPool in production. What's your setup, what problem does pgPool solve for you?
>he act of qualifying for the trial can confound the results
The example you give doesn't confound the result of the trial (provided it's properly randomised) but it does make it hard to generalise the result to the general population.

What you describe is actually common — antidepressant trials typically exclude people with comorbid medical or psychological conditions, despite the fact that the rate of comorbitity in depression runs at >60%.
The &lt;spacer&gt; HTML Element Is Gone
Thanks for clarifying :)

No need to apologize. The phrase "mentally challenged" is used by many people, with different meanings and intentions. Rather than jump on you straight away, I wanted to be sure of what you meant.

As someone on the spectrum, I like hearing/reading what other people think about it and their associations, etc. I prefer to think of myself as just having a differently wired brain (i.e. there are some things I excel at that others don't, and vice versa).
This doesn't seem so terrible to me. You entered a contract with Zipcar where you pay them an annual fee for their services. Failing to pay the fee doesn't automatically break that contract.

Think of this way: what if you could simply stop paying rent when you want to move out of an apartment? Or you just stopped paying your cell phone bill when you want to cancel it? What if you forgot to pay your health care premium and you lost your health insurance??

Clearly these aren't acceptable ways to break out of a contract.

The author's trick to "lose" your card to prevent auto billing is inviting issues like this. It seems so much smarter to just check your credit card statement each month. That would be much less work than having to update your credit card number everywhere you do want to renew a service.

Your credit card failed processing and Zipcar kept your service up and prompted you to update the card. That seems like a great way to go. If they had simply cancelled your account, I could imagine this blog post going the other way. "I forgot to update my card and zipcar cancelled my account, leaving me stranded when I really needed a car!!"

With critical accounts like your car, apartment, cell phone... it seems best to be explicit when you want to cancel your account.
Its working.
Would be interested to know why this is the case ?
GOG.com message may be a bad PR stunt
Interesting! There is an open source Apache Mahout project for doing machine learning via hadoop. Also have a look at Vowpal wabbit an open source framework for fast SGD for online learning.

Also another interesting point is their use of boosting, since i recently attended a tech talk by facebook engineers where they told us that bagged decision trees while predicting the friends for a user.
It's interesting how many stories appear on HN claiming that too many people have college degrees, when a historically low proportion of Americans have degrees in comparison to other nations. The proportion of Americans with degrees - around 25% - hasn't changed since the 1970s. Back then, that was the highest proportion in the world. However, since the '70s other countries began taking post-secondary education seriously. There are at least ten countries with a higher proportion of college grads. If too many people have degrees in the US, then you'd expect graduates in those countries to be despondent. Heck, Canada is over 40%. The country should be in open revolt if things are really that bad.
I wasn't trying to be PC at all. I'm the least PC person I know: I'm an Aspie, I have little to no filter. I was just seeking clarification :)
Media Hype Protects You From Disease
How about all those games on the App Store?
Bills sent to collections for as little as $15 can severely affect your credit score (personal experience). Since most car dealerships these days use the score as indicative of credit worthiness, even a small dispute can lead to annoying situations.
Or they could have sold him a chip with X amount of L3 cache and no extra cache snuck in, and then priced the chip lower since it costs them less to make. That choice is better for the consumer.
That's what Apple said.
Like your lunch? Like ruby/rails? In NYC? Come work with us at StreetEasy.com - We make it a point to get out of the office for lunch. Oh and we build some cool stuff too. :)

Resume and cover letter to:

ruby -r base64 -e 'puts Base64.decode64("emhAc3RyZWV0ZWFzeS5jb20=\n")'
I don't understand where systems thinking comes in to this. Because anybody who has thought at all about systems will realise they the are complex and hard to predict (because we can't know everything about the system), and therefore that the way forward is to make small changes and see how the system reacts to them... which seems to be exactly what Peters is advocating.

I don't know how the term is used in management consulting circles. Perhaps "systems thinking" has nothing to do with either systems or thinking, and it's just the latest buzzword that management consultants use to carry on selling what they always have. But if that were true, it would surely say more about management consulting than about systems thinking.
As little as I like the RIAA/MPAA/etc's policies of suing everyone, I'm finding it even harder to like what amounts to petty cybervandalism.
Film: The Real Raw (2009)
I think damage to your credit score is worse than being stranded without a car. The policy seems bad from a PR perspective to me, quite apart from any notion of right and wrong. Besides, you seldom get far in business victimizing your customers.
This site and Math Overflow make me... question... my skills. One day I'll get to that level though, I hope. :)
حملة الدفاع عن عرض ام المؤمنين _( كل ماهو جديد)
The biggest barrier to entry in higher education has nothing to do with the context of the education or course material, it's accreditation. In fact it's so hard and expensive to become accredited that most education entrepreneurs just BUY accreditation by purchasing a failing school. Until we address the high barriers to entry, highly entrenched players, and government support of the education industry I doubt any innovation will gain significant traction outside of skills training and tutoring.
I don't see the correlation to apartment renting.

For me, it's more of like magazine subscription. If you don't renew, they can just stop sending you magazines.

With apartment renting, you continue to use the service/product. If you stop paying your rent, they need to kick you out of your apartment.

If you don't renew, what is the cost for Zipcar since you can't avail of the service anyway?
The PR department exists to do PR. Irregardless of the motivations of the people who contact them, sending a few official comments should be well within their ability.

That someone expressed interest in their products is something to be encouraged by a PR department. It's unfortunately that Steve responded at all. Surely ignoring the request would garner much less negative PR than repeated denials.
This is a fecund article as evidenced by the excellent comments here it has sparked.

My half-serious takeaways are:
Peters mistakes overplanning and over-complexifying for systems thinking.

Some things really are complex. They stretch the boundaries of Einstein's idea that things should be as simple as possible but no simpler.

Anyone who thinks rapid prototyping is "play" hasn't been in a high-intensity production environment.

Peters is a popularizer but he sure can get the mental blood flowing.

You can't define a minimum viable product with which to start prototyping without some good planning/thought.

Perhaps to belabor the analogy, part of getting ready to fire is some amount of aiming.

The rap (deserved or not) on Microsoft is that it does the worst of both overplanning and then releasing products (prototypes?) that the customers have to "test". Slow-prototyping?

I like Bloomberg's quote, "We act from day one..."

The oil hunting analogy shows Peters' basic idea flaw because in order to drill test wells you have to read maps and study. Plus lack of planning can get very expensive in that field.

Was it Beckett who said, "Fail better." Even that requires planning along with the experience.

Attributing the loss of the House to "Hillary care" is solidly in the "dumb-simplifier" category.

Good enough depends on very intelligent implementation and feedback. Going off half-cocked is fine if the foreplay is effective. :-)

There is a difference in writing in which all your rapid prototyping is done in your drafts than in putting out an under-developed product. Although there are some experiments with crowd-sourcing writing too.

I liked this submariner catch-phrase, "Water in the people tank."

One comment said: Life is what happens to you while you're busy making other plans." John Lennon
My thought was, "So is death."

Ah lazy Sunday mornings.
I “lose” my credit cards yearly to avoid sneaky auto-renewals just like this.

Doesn't this also damage your credit? Length that accounts are open factors into your credit score, and people who cycle through cards typically see it go down.
Hmm, yeah, I can buy that. If I were designing an algorithm, I think I would attempt to differentiate different types of disputes, so something like a dispute with Newsweek over a subscription renewal doesn't get much weight, while skipping credit-card or mortgage payments does. But maybe they've run the numbers and found that these small disputes actually are predictive of bigger defaults? Although, alternately, I could believe that the FICO folks don't care that much about predictive accuracy, since they're basically a monopoly with a good moat.
You're only taking variable costs into account, and forgetting about the likely tremendous fixed costs of having different manufacturing lines so they can vary the L3 cache for different versions of the same chip.
Well, if you're so hard up you can't afford 50 bucks, why should anyone lend to you?

(For the sarcasm-deaf downvoters out there, I'm pointing out the perspective of the algorithm reviewing the credit score, not stating my personal opinion.)
Excellent analogy. "Mining the miners" they called it.
File a police report and have Apple flag the serial number as stolen. If it ever makes its way into the Apple store you'll get it back.
It's a miracle. A three-way seesaw between ideas, actions and planning.
If you just your card stolen, they send you a new card with a new number on the same account, which I don't believe shows up on the credit report at all (it still counts as the same account).
Yeah, that was what I thought too!
I remember snakes having something more akin to heat vision - and thus meaning no dead prey.
My facts might be outdated or just simply wrong.
Better check my facts.
Wooooo! I've always thought of the proper title for this hypothetical book as "Sky fire" (to bring it full circle, you see). "Sky children" makes me think it's a stealth quadrilogy. Sooner or later it's got to cycle. "Children of Fire?"
> the level of thinking users did before they paid for something versus when they bought it for free was different

This is the very reason we never dropped the price of Swipe to free, even though Square and other competitors did so. Because of the relatively complicated nature of the signup process, their ratings quickly dropped to 1-2, and ours remained 4-5. Additionally, our customers were more qualified and converted at a much higher rate.
Does anyone know what text editor that is? Emacs?
And screen readers would implement that by detecting a meta tag named "ms-application-jumplist"? In other words, screen reader developers should support proprietary Microsoft extensions rather than using the standard methods of supporting screen readers?

You're right, it's brilliant.