skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I do not think our understanding of real world economics and the way that our economy actually works is adequate to state anything about the impact of one strategy versus another. Academic Economics certainly is not adequate to predict anything in the real world with any degree of reliability. Time series analysis of indicators does not provide insight into the causes and effects of complex events. No one seems to be trying to model the impact of various strategies and compare them to observations.

This is what makes this not Hacker News, in my opinion.
Google Percolator
I understand what you're saying. But don't you have to consider the number of times Buffett exercised his investment decision, and not only when he's put money up?

You'd have to consider all those deals he passed up, as using his investment strategy, no? He may make 1-2 investments a year, out of maybe 200 investments available to him that he's analyzed. Thats still 200 investment decisions, not 1 or 2, which I'm assuming Taleb is using.

Wouldn't a thorough analysis consider four possible outcomes? The first event is the decision to invest (Y/N). The second event is whether their decision worked in their favor (+/-). (Y+, Y-, N+,N-) Y+ and N- are successful use of strategy. Y- and N+ are failed strategy. Same for Soros.

Example: Consider all of the investments that were passed up, that would have been terrible investments. That could be considered successful employment of an investment strategy. Buffett inherently (based on his style and risk profile) has a larger proportion of these.
Play The Horrors from Planet 10 online at y3 Games club
Swing your mace around as you take down all the enemies trying to attack your energy core.
Actually, economics is not that complicated, and not that hard to figure out, or to influence. The reason there's so much effort to pretend like it is complicated is because it is profitable for those in government to do so, to cover up the effects of their actions.

The idea that the crises in 2008 was unexpected, or that the bailouts were necessary is absurd, and had been refuted decades before. But it is part of the act government goes thru to keep people controlled. I knew there would be a housing bubble in late 2000, before it really got started. I knew this because I was told this by economists and hit made perfect sense. And all these bubbles, being creations of government, result in the same kind of government response. The effect of that response, having seen it so many times before, is quite predictable. We've not seen the effect of the bailouts of 2008, and the bailout that just happened for credit unions... but I expect we'll see it by 2012. And when it happens, they will all be on TV saying "this could never have been predicted!" Just like they were in 2008.

I suggest you read "Economics in One Lesson" by Henry Hazlitt, or if you're unwilling even though it is a short book, simply familiarize yourself with Bastiat's Parable of the Broken Window
DuckDuckGo Search Engine Erects Tor Hidden Service
These are definitely UX methods used by practitioners in larger workplaces/agencies. The issue is that most startups don't have a UX person that focuses exclusively on UX. For better or for worse, there aren't many resources given to UX in startups so the person (it's usually only one person) that is responsible for UX is often also responsible for UI, visual design, branding, marketing, HTML/CSS, etc.

So, someone in that role has to condense each field of work into their most efficient/cheap forms. Formal UX processes like wireframing, rapid prototyping, and user stories can directly result in product decisions.

Other tasks are meant more for gathering inspiration, forcing lateral thought, challenging assumptions: exercises that inform product-level decisions. While that's very valuable, many startups already have a fairly clear path determined by folks from the engineering or business segments. The designer is usually taking pre-determined product decisions and crafting them into something usable, attractive, cohesive, marketable, and high-conversion. No easy feat, but not quite where unfocus groups are helpful.

This isn't what I would necessarily describe as ideal, but it is how it often works in my experience. I would hope that the fuzzier UX processes find a home in startups but I don't often see design having that much of a priority, in terms of resources allocated or level/stage of input.
Twitter...invented an entirely new communications protocol

Um...

Zynga...bigger economy than many developing nations

Possibly true. I admire the business acumen of both firms and think they have scaled their services quite effectively. But how productive are they? I mean, I remember seeing stockbrokers and lawyers standing in line at 8am to buy limited edition Beanie Babies because they were considered a smart investment.

You make several good points but I agree with the other posters questioning the degree of value creation taking place.
Please don't use this unless you are actually writing code for the 8086. For example: the NOP instruction in your assembler will result in the same opcode with less work. Why write the XCHG if you don't have to? Hell, at that point it's probably faster to write the 0x90 straight into the obj code.
IT would take a very long time to read all the krugman articles, and he doesn't write in a very straightforward manner anyway.

However, you can save a bunch of time, and get counter arguments to krugman along with citations of his articles relevant to the bailout at Mises's bailout reader: http://mises.org/daily/3128
Maybe this article is a PR piece. But I agree with that 'social' and non technology-focused startup ideas are overvalued currently by young enterpreneurs, by the media and by investors.
As if those problems which existed 10-20 years ago would not exist anymore. As if those problems currently solved by 'old companies' and generating incredible amount of money, could not be solved better by some startups. Not enough startups are competing _directly_ against those old products like Microsoft Office, Adobe Photoshop, etc... Not enough young companies are based on deep technology. Almost everyone want to be rich quickly adding very little technology-wise to exisitng open-source stuff like Ruby on Rails. To use Zed's terminology I am half a 'long beard' half a 'product guy'. So I am trying to create something which is a product for people, but potentially can go quite deep technology-wise.
I didn't see significant examples of Omega, but…

I'd be surprised if a language with a Haskell-like syntax is verbose.

The verbosity most likely didn't come from the language itself, but from the proofs.

Once you've built the foundations, and proven a host of invariants about them, then you don't need to prove much more when you write the rest of the program. I bet Omega supports the very programming model you advocate: invulnerable foundations, and quickly written "rest of the program". If the code you saw was verbose, that's probably because it was foundation code. (After all, standard data structures are par of the foundations.)
One of the great things about the BBC natural history unit's programmes is that on the DVDs/Blu-Rays/Broadcasts they tend to show additional footage of how certain scenes were captured. They do tend to have the whole 6 weeks out in the middle of nowhere waiting for the perfect shot stuff going on, but of course that tends to be for one scene.

The other thing I've noticed the BBC do is they reuse footage from one documentary in another, which I guess is fair enough if it's good footage. I'd also be surprised if there wasn't some clever editing with audio to get the results.
They create and acquire patents for revenue, not defense. They don't need protection from infringement suits because they don't sell any products (and their research should fall within US patent law's exemption for that purpose). There's also speculation they have backed some infringement suits raised by shell companies.

I'm torn. There ought to be some way to compensate researchers for actually solving hard problems (here I'm excluding a lot of poorly-examined software patents which basically claim the whole problem via the obvious solution) yet doesn't involve giving them an exclusive stranglehold on anyone using their work even accidentally.
Regarding Man v.s. Wild: The entire premise of the show is false. They claim to drop Bear Grylls in some remote location where he has to make it back to civilization. But in reality they seem to just drive around and film him doing stunts, see e.g.:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3UpSlpvb1is

Worse, a lot of the behavior on that show is terrible survival behavior. E.g. when they did the episode in Iceland Grylls at one point jumped into a water filled ravine to make it to the other bank, and planned to dry off in some geothermal area he could see in the distance.

Firstly there's no ravine like that in Iceland that you couldn't easily walk around in 5-10 minutes without getting yourself wet, and secondly jumping into freezing water in the wilderness and thinking you can dry yourself off in some unfamiliar geothermal area you can spot in the distance is beyond stupid.

Most of the world's geothermal areas (including Iceland's) are just a collection of steaming holes in the ground, or water either too hot or too cold to dry off in. It's much better to stay dry than to take such a chance.

There are examples like that in virtually every episodes. E.g. Grylls climbing down a waterfall that he could trivially have walked around.
The Krugman detractors seem to be of the opinion that Krugman is clueless, not that he advocated a recession or cheered on the disaster.

In this article, Krugman says that consumers need to spend more and that a housing bubble is one way to increase consumer spending. Perhaps he was not advocating a housing bubble, but he clearly didn't see a housing bubble as the terrible thing that it turned out to be. If he thought the policy was bad, he wouldn't have offered it as a solution.
I wonder if one can define a loose version of the Heisenberg uncertainty principle for all documentaries: the more closely involved the film-maker is to the action, the more he/she influences it.

A scene which vividly comes to mind is in Harlan County, USA, where the film-maker gets shot at (!) by one of the anti-union thugs.
I'm sure that the message of both the movie and this spin-off piece are skewed towards fantasy and there is great work coming out of SV all the time.

But let's face it innovation doesn't decide to shack up in one place, settle down and have a couple of kids, calling one place home for the rest of it's existence.

Hubs of both engineering and social innovation will dwarf SV in coming years. The only question is where...
Who does the money belong to?
the points that were trying to be conveyed are a bit jumbled. i guess you had to be there.
I use the regularly, whether it's with start-ups or multi-billion dollar companies.

This is your absolute basic foundation stuff in UX, but it's only one part of it. This (persona modelling) is the sort of stuff that you do when refining processes based on how various demographic targets will go through them. It's essential stuff to know.

So, pay attention!
That's exactly the most interesting point in that article. Not the "green town BS" I expected. Rather a "folks, let's return to the basics". And what if we applied the same in Europe by rebuilding a medieval town model with modern technologies? It's already happening in Germany, where medieval houses get renovated with better isolation etc. You'll never see these houses for sale on any agency or newspapers because it's all sold to friends or family - the demand for these is just too high because of the incredible quality of life and the feeling to live in a special place.
Yes, they're all pretty standard and certainly applicable to BigCo implementations in UX.

Some of it, however, is bleeding into product development (user stories, personas, etc- not so much "UX" IMHO but still domain-useful). But if product dev is something you want to get into make sure you are learning about spec docs, agile methodologies and perhaps a programming language or two.
The correct URL for this piece is actually:

http://bit.ly/Daniel-Lyons-Link-Bait

HTH.YMMV.VWP.
You doubt it is UX because you are not actually designing any UI? Then it is important you understand why this class teaches you these methods: before designing a UI, you have to figure out what UI to design. You can design all the beautiful UI's you want: if you designed the wrong UI, or designed for the wrong user, they are completely useless. You have to understand your users, how they would use the app, etc. You may think you can just 'figure that out', but experience has taught that you will be wrong, because you are usually a very different person from the users of your app.
You repeatedly use the words "inneffective" and "marginal" and things like that to claim that the policy I propose will not be as effective as a policy that you propose, even though you admit that the policy is a damaging one.

I believe you are doing this because you've been sold a lot of nonsense from people who want to raise taxes.

The error in your position is illustrated by a simple illustration. There are far more poor people than rich people. The bush tax cuts dropped the rates in the poorer brackets much more dramatically than in the middle class and wealthy brackets, further this effect has been magnified by the significant inflation in the intervening years.

Furhter, a dollar cut in spending is FAR MORE beneficial to the economy and to the deficit than a dollar increase in taxes. That dollar increase in taxes will destroy $10 in GDP the first year, $23 in GDP the second, etc...and so on. Because that dollar prevents economics expansion AND goes to fund government expansion, which will require ever more funds each year. IF that dollar had been left in the economy, it would have created a job at a rate of ten private sector jobs to a single public sector job, and those jobs, every year, would produce dividends with a postive rate of return, magnifying the effect of that tax year over year.

Our GDP is $1T lower now than it would be due to just the taxes collected between 1970 and 1980.

Every year you collect a tax, you destroy jobs that will never come into existence, and you increase a future burden of even more taxes, which will destroy even more jobs down the road.

I know those who are absolutely incapable of being irresponsible have spread an everest sized mountain of rationalizations, lies, and "reports" to show all kinds of projections. But at the end of the day, you're a fool to believe them... since every year they produce more, and every year they ignore the past 20+ years that they did so and it turned out to be lies.

Just going back a year, our unemployment rate is significantly larger than Obama threatened it would be if we didn't pass his so called "stimulus" bill.

He doesn't give a damn about how many lives are destroyed.

If you do, you'd be a fool to believe the bullshit these people are peddling.
How "productive" was Electronic Arts? It's from the same class as Adobe, etc.

Computers aren't just for spreadsheets.
Specifically, he does not understand monetary economics on a fundamental level. He could be called a Keynsian, but this would be an insult to Mr. Keynes. (Who only advocated inflation as a short term measure, not as a way of life, and who warned against the results if it were not reversed.)

So, in short, both John Maynard Keynes, and the Austrian School of Economics would say Krugman is clueless about monetary policy.

I think he is not actually clueless. He is a silver tongued liar employed by the government to spread misinformation and make those who think that they are well educated buy into nonsense so that they support unlimited government spending.
Some of these are pretty hardcore...
There's also multiple smaller downtown labyrinths in downtown Riyadh, and 'computer souks' across the middle east. The first time I went to these places I was amazed and bought some really odd electronics (I bought a GSM jammer in Riyadh) but when I was back earlier this year I noticed that all of the wacky stuff was available on the Internet.
No, it's a completely serious 0-byte framework.
The theory of economics is easy to understand -- in this you are right. Whether or not the theory has anything to do with actual processes has not been established with any surety outside the field itself.
I respect your comment.

You're right about truisms, but in this case making a billion dollar is something so vague and unsubstantiated that there isn't any fixed path to it. Whereas smaller short term objects and goals can be grasped and put into perspective. How can you do that with something as fluid as the path your life will take? It's certain that in the random chaos your plans will never work.

So, what happens when you set out to become a billionaire, or a millionaire with single minded intensity? You lose your ability to adapt and invest in the seeds that grow into something truly meaningful be it people, knowledge, observations, research, projects. So in essence by having that rigid goal in mind you're setting yourself up for failure.

Yes, I agree that people are complex beings and you can never factor them in, but what I have observed is that almost anyone who became anything in their lives at any level had a comparable amount of resilience. Whenever you do anything at all you will fail again and again and again. It will be as if the only thing you can do right is getting things wrong, but it takes persistence to move beyond that and that persistence is a combination of the amount of resilience a person has and what drives them.

As far as luck goes the interesting thing about it is that you have to be the one to walk through that door. Chance in itself can only go so far someone has to see the significance and exploit it, but that again is a function of the state of that person. Hence, you have a recursion. The luckiest people tend to be the ones who go the farthest.

On the other hand, my comment really might be a bunch of sour grapes. I can't go to college any time soon and I admit that I would love to be in the type of environment MIT offers. So, I have soul searched a lot and tried to see if I could convert this into something far more beautiful.

The only thing my life has taught me is that failure should be celebrated more than success.
Do the buyers there care about the technical aspects of the website?
I have fond memories of buying cheap laptops, modded Xboxes, and tons of DVDs for a few bucks each at Wan Chai Computer Centre in Hong Kong and Sim Lim Square in Singapore when I was on deployment in the Navy.
But no mention whatsoever how paying down federal debt instead of stimulus would supposedly have strengthened the economy.

The argument for paying down our debt is usually to prevent inflation or keep future borrowing cheap, but despite the plunge in GDP neither of these are anywhere close to becoming an issue.

Speaking of GDP - it's not the deficit that's responsible for the US's decreasing GDP/debt ratio, it's the drop in tax income due to the job losses following the financial meltdown.

There is plenty to dislike about how the stimulus turned out (too small, partially negated by state-level cuts, focus on tax cuts), but no evidence whatsoever that it made things worse.
You know, still today a ridiculously small proportion of houses have A/C in Europe, including hot places like Italy or Spain. You just don't f*cking need it.
And is community built, so please contribute your CD listings.

I don't have any experience with their audio file (MP3, AAC, etc) fingerprinting, but I can tell you it's a great experience to pop in a freshly purchased CD and have MusicBrainz find it. I know that experience comes from some other kind soul having input the CD, so I try very hard to make sure I do the same.
BS. I dropped out after a year. It was dull and I wasn't anything that would ever be of any use. (I passed the first year exams).

(I'm in the UK, so maybe it's different, but there's certainly no stigma here).
> So if all the gas stations in the country said they would charge $6/gallon that would be price fixing. If all the consumers said they wouldn't pay more than $1.50/gallon then that's not price-fixing in the same sense.

That's probably true with those examples, but antitrust law tends to ignore large groups of individuals "colluding" in their personal retail purchases. Companies that together exert significant market power get more scrutiny, though; for example, if all the gas-station owners in Texas got together and said that they wouldn't pay more than $1.50/gallon wholesale for gas from refineries, that could be a Sherman Act violation. There have been a few cases about "group boycotts" as well; whereas consumers can organize boycotts for political or personal or whatever reasons, groups of companies organizing boycotts of other companies will attract investigators looking into whether the purpose of the boycott is market distortion.
They claim the appendix is available for download but all I can find are JPG's.
As tptacek says, this is a transitive trust issue. The problem is that Facebook doesn't seem to care about the security of your data (facebook considers your data to belong to them) and is unlikely to enforce security requirements on sites it partners with.

If they ever open this up for general use, I hope sites like http://youropenbook.org/ sign up. I can certainly see this being abused on a massive scale.