skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
According to http://www.google.com/finance?q=msft , 1% of Microsoft shares changes hands each day. This means that every 3 months, on average, every Microsoft share changes hands once.

Bill's selling represents less than 100% and occurred over a decade, which is a much larger time interval. Nowadays mutual/hedge funds look at the company performance (earnings) and at the stock price and effectively pour in the capital whenever the P/E ratio drops below their threshold, thereby effectively compensating the effect of those sales.

When 1% of a company's shares changes hands each day you can't really blame Ballmer for stock price fluctuations.

In regard to IBM, when a company buys back its shares it effectively reduces the number of outstanding shares on the market (and thus it increases their rarity and therefore their price), but the money used for the buy-back could have been instead paid in dividends or used for an external acquisition. It is a management decision that partially says "we didn't find anything else better to do with the money than this", but it's too complex to be analysed in a comment's paragraph. The Ballmer transaction is on the market, investor-to-investor; it doesn't change the number of outstanding shares nor does it dilute the price.
This site, probably NSFW, makes use of the datastore (for the thumbnails) and it's now much faster, it's a pity we can't compare speeds with the old latency.

http://wallres.saiswa.com/?tags=girls&pagina=23
BCTabBarController: an open source Tweetie-style UITabBarController
I actually made an account, so that's why I have direct access. You can also circumvent the issue with the BugMeNot browser extension, a referrer modifier extension to set the referrer to google.com, or by searching for the article title on Google and then clicking through.

Either way, I was referring to the "TM" thing, not to (not) being able to log in.
Ok, please excuse me.
Good find. I was scratching my head for a while over this.
Install the chrome dev build without removing the stable version
The Turing Tarpit: Anything language powerful enough to express programs in is in fact a programming language, and the flip side, any problem complicated enough to irreducibly require a programming language to solve is intrinsically complicated. It's all fine and dandy for the first 20%, but then it starts exploding in your face.

It turns out we have general-purpose libraries for dealing with data already. We call them "programming languages". If there is some way to simplify the problem in the general case in such a way that data manipulation no longer requires a full programming language, nobody's really proved it. If your do create an "ORM" or some other mapper that is somehow simpler than using a full conventional language, than ipso facto your mapper or whatever is too simple to handle the full complexity of the problem.

I'm not 100% convinced this nut is completely impossible to crack, but I am sure it would take accommodations on both the data and the programming side (much of the pain of this process is self-inflicted with bad paradigms and bad programming, but probably not 100%), and it sure as heck isn't as easy as it looks when you just look at it. One of the ideas in my head is to take a crack at this problem myself, but I've been telling that one to shut the hell up and go back to hiding in the corner.
replication of experiment shows failure: http://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=1699970
At the risk of being even more pedantic, quicksort with the O(n) deterministic median finding algorithm has a worst-case runtime of O(n log n) -- you use that algorithm to find the median each time and use that as the pivot.

The constants would make it less efficient for most cases, though.
I don't think you can actually delete a Facebook account. It still exists somewhere...
I prefer sitting near the center of gravity of the plane, if at all possible.
How do you validate the email address? You may consider DNSBL (DNS Block List) validation which is basically a dns lookup at an rbl site like dsn.rfc-ignorant.org, zen.spamhaus.org, bl.spamcop.net.

Learn more at http://tinyurl.com/6ba6mq
He was most likely waiting on the final results of on Washington State's income tax initiative, which would have cost him millions had it passed:

http://www.ballotpedia.org/wiki/index.php/Washington_Income_...
I always annotate these on development plans with HBG: Here Be Dragons.
Corporate bureaucracy grows in generational waves. Adams was stuck in the middle. The crew in charge in the early 90's were hired in the early 1960's and defined the old boy's network.
Based on economics, and the fact that nobody is exploiting this for massive gains, I'd say that the prior expectation for this being anything but an error or a fraud is much lower than you seem to be implying.
A SFW website with a lot of images too.. yes, considerably faster..
http://my.educonsole.com/free-educational-games-for-kids/ide...

(By the way, the above site was my gift for my son on his fourth birthday)
Yeah, it's nice to be so famous you're known by your first name only. Cher, Rosanne, Oprah.
From a legal standpoint, I honestly don't know... but doing something like that sounds like a good way to quickly go out of business, which would be much worse than the possible legal repercussions imho :-)
Scientists find damage to coral near BP well
I love how Chrome tells me that this link is insecure (something wrong with SSL). Oh coincidences...

Besides that, I don't quite understand what separates this from any other IM platform..?
It's amazing the difference low latency can make when dealing with lots of small images.
As much as I believe that Oracle squandered a unique opportunity to generate a lot of good will without much cost, this is not all bad news.

If I read this correctly the jRocket VM will be part of the OpenJDK and hence be open source.
Any chance of getting a copy of the text? Site is down and neither Google nor Coral have it.
Two of my cousins own a vending machine business and for certain products they do the same thing (buying out Sam's Clubs). Why? Sam's Club volume is so much higher than theirs that even after Sam's Club tacks on their markup, it's cheaper for them to buy through them than to go to the manufacturer. It's always funny to go on these shopping trips with them, the look on a cashier's face when you have thousands of dollars of candy is priceless.
Google Maps Caught in Border Dispute
Maybe I shouldn't go so far as to say what others should know, but I don't have kids either and I'm aware of Diapers.com, and I'm more developer than business man (or at least I suck at being a business man).

I certainly don't think the title is sensationalist, but for the sake of clarity (given the up/down votes of complaints such as yours) perhaps it should have been made more clear that a company was purchased and not a domain name. On the other hand, would there be any confusion if it was Zappos.com?
The instructor of this course has also written an excellent book, jQuery Fundamentals, and I am convinced that she would be an excellent instructor as well. The $350 seems steep to me as well, but I might be willing to pay it if I expected jQuery to be my main development tool.

(I'm more interested in Clojure, and would have gladly paid the $1k in expenses to attend the Clojure Conj if my employer hadn't offered to cover it. http://clojure-conj.org/ That was just a two-day event, rather than a whole month of training.)
I'm upvoting this partly because it's by J. Kenji (Lopez-)Alt, whom I have regarded as a sort of culinary god ever since I first encountered his awesome piecrust recipe in Cooks Illustrated a few years ago.

(The piecrust is made by substituting vodka for much of the water, which allows the dough to be rolled out without encouraging too much gluten formation and thereby making the crust tough. It is perhaps a shade too much on the crumbly side but makes up for that by being outstandingly tasty, it has now utterly spoiled my taste for the majority of store-bought pies, and it has convinced my friends that I, in turn, am some sort of culinary god, even though this piecrust recipe is idiotically simple, actually simpler than regular piecrust, if such a thing is possible. The lesson here is: Subscribe to Cooks Illustrated and make your loved ones' lives better.)
The insider selling to buying ratio has been over 2000 in recent weeks. This is likely less of a dire sign of MSFT's prospects than it is a condemnation of the US economy after Heli Ben's QE2.

I bet he pumps it into commodities, metals and markets like brazil that aren't devaluing their currencies.
Lisp in JavaScript
I don't know if this is the kind of thing that most JS folks will go for, but I've found it useful in both node.js work and on the client-side:

http://github.com/spencertipping/caterwaul

Feedback totally welcome.
Well how exactly would you exploit being able to see porn from the future 53% of the time? My understanding is that there is a ton of military research also indicating a weak psi effect, as seen in The Men Who Stare At Goats, but I don't think they've found any use for it. I'm not a true believer by any means, but I don't think it's especially unreasonable for there to be some sort of weak psi effect either. You should skim over a copy of Stan Grof's book When The Impossible Happens. Most of the chapters aren't at all convincing, but there are a few things that jump out as being kind of interesting. At the very least reading stuff like that helps one to develop a more noetic understanding of the history of thought.
Maybe this is the wrong way to go about it, but could I do it without a framework? I've read a little bit about MVC design, and I was thinking, I'd hack everything together and try to make it work my self. And then go back and try to make it fit the MVC design.

How strong of a grasp would I need on object oriented programming to make a go at learning GAE without (or maybe even with) a framework? Thanks for the help so far!
Ask HN: Any sample convertible note paperwork?
Does anyone have any links to an online resource where I can see how a convertible note is written?
I don't think the DAY matters; as I understand it, sales by such insiders have to be filed weeks in advance.
I fly a couple of times a month. I travel lightly and my preference is the front of the plane. Getting off the plane, post-arrival, can take an addl 20-30 (maddening) minutes.

I also prefer the aisle
Though window seats mean being disturbed less by others needing to get up
I wonder why he took the job? Seems like he could do better work from the outside, as it were.
Even assuming that there were some precognition effects, we're talking about digital pictures displayed pseudo-randomly. What exactly are the subjects purported to precognit? The electrical states of ram circuits? Are they purported to have a built-in jpeg decompression algo in their brains, that allows them to know which images are erotic?

If the goal of the study is to show that people are able to access purportedly unknowable information, then this is a terrible design. There should be some much more easily knowable condition than binary memory states. If, on the other hand, they are trying to show that effect can precede cause, then physicists should be running the experiment, not psychologists. Introducing people to the equation introduces too much error.
The curious vimrc
I think the question suggests the obvious and rather simple and effective answer: by programming. Make software. Get it out there. Learn more. Get better. Repeat.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blue_Origin
This kind of stuff might require to sell shares to finance too (in the case of Jeff Bezos). I'm sure it can apply to other CEOs as well. Speculation is not the only thing you can do with shares.
His use of the term 'colonial myth' at the start of the piece tips you off that all this Western greed/materialism talk was a narrative he already subscribed to - not the blinding light of (drug-induced) revelation.
I haven't read the GNU Free Documentation License (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Text_of_the_GNU_Free_...), but I don't think so.

"DBpedia is derived from Wikipedia and is distributed under the same licensing terms as Wikipedia itself"
http://wiki.dbpedia.org/Datasets#h18-19

Please correct me if I'm mistaken!
Wikipedia suggests [1] the only non-surgical means of managing plantar fasciitis (i.e. heel pain) is the use of othotics - foot supports. Stretching your calf muscles and the arch of your foot can help in the short term as well.

But you don't want to let your heel pain get to a point where it becomes chronic - if your heels hurt, stay off your feet and don't aggravate the condition.

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Plantar_fasciitis
I use this: https://github.com/milianw/springer_download
yep I see real world programming as mostly a superset of so-called CS. Or say they are two overlapping circles, and the circle representing programming is much bigger than CS, and includes a lot of non-sexy and soft squishie stuff like dealing with users, dealing with managers, clients, your own personality and learning styles, work flow, best practices, tools, etc.
Tryptomine does not exist. Tryptamine is a psychadelic class of compounds. Tryptophan is not a drug but rather an amino acid... found in protein. Tryptophan makes you tired because it gets converted into serotonin which in turn gets converted into melatonin (sleeping hormone) at night. Either way none of these compounds attributed to your friend's experience.

-Truth
Earlier and more varied discussion here:

http://forums.randi.org/showthread.php?t=188366

On an email list of local psychologists, one psychologist pointed out that the showings of different stimuli were almost certainly not random in the way that Bernoulli trials would have to be for the calculation of statistical significance to be correct. I'll try to paraphrase some of his words below:

We have to find out whether or not Bem was really using Bernoulli trials. Did he allow for cases comparable to having an experimental subject guess heads versus tails in a sequence of twelve coin tosses, when heads might come up twelve times in a row? Did he also allow stimuli to alternate back and forth, like a coin toss sequence of H T H T H T H T H T H T? Many times when experimenters try to make sure sequence LOOKS random, it actually makes a sequence more predictable by excluding some possibilities. This always makes the sequence more predictable.

If an experimenter shows subjects sequences that are meant to look random, but for every subject there are just as many "off" states as "on" states, in twelve trials, then there are fewer possible sequences. With Bernoulli trials, there would be 2^12 = 4096 possible sequences of 12 trials, but with "balanced" choices of stimuli there would be only 12-choose-6 = 942. Experimenter-designed sequences can also create dependencies so that knowing any part of the sequence helps to predict the rest of it. A subject who guessed that over twelve trials in a sequence there are equal numbers of trials in each of two states would be right 64.3 percent of the time, on average, not 50 percent.

The psychologist went on to note that such studies are very hard to design properly, but so far information isn't available on how the study was done to that level of detail. He thinks it is more likely than not that the experimenter gave his subjects clues to the structure of the sequences of trials he set up, and that he set up conditions for which performance above the 50 percent accuracy level is expected and not remarkable.
The course is a month long. How much do you bill each month?
Some reports put Balmer's total sale at $1.3 billion. The 5% increase in the capital gains tax rate represents up to $65,000,000. Even for a billionaire, that's real money.
It depends on the size of your project. Mine is large. Javascript becomes unwieldy after a few thousand lines. Closure Compiler really helps, but in you have to use comments to tell the compiler what types your functions take and return. This becomes a drag, making JS, to me, less fun.

If you're going to make a big project, I recommend CC from the start.
Money is not disappearing, but it is simply evolving.

We're now seeing an economy based on the idea of money secured by cryptography evolving in a tiny corner of the internet. Most hackers here are not aware that such an economy exists.
From the perspective of information, the bits that you have decoded into pornography could be decoded differently into another coherent image. Therefore, the fact that the particular choice of decoder produced pornography should not much matter.

The military uses for this are obvious; the military abandoned it because it could not produce results.

And even if this only works for porn, that's fine. I could make a killing betting mathematicians and scientists that I could pick the porn > 50% of the time.

What do you propose to be the propagator of information? Photons? If so, what is the receptor? If not, then what? Also, how is this information propagated from the source? If propagated through time, how does this reconcile with the forward-propagation in time of everything else that has ever been observed?
Ask HN: Problem finding/choosing an idea to work on
TL;DR: Bad at coming up with startup ideas, or possibly just think about them too critically and don't pursue them. Advice?

To give context:
I'm 17 and just started college (web dev. with design degree).
Got my first computer at 13. Have been interested in startups and designing/coding for a couple of years.
Had a job at a web dev. company in Summer '09. They offered me a full-time job as a front-end designer for when I finished high school (Summer '10), but I gracefully declined as I wanted to pursue my own projects and go to college.
Debated about going to college and eventually decided to go for the networking aspect - and since my country has a free educational system, it's not as if going would put me in debt like in the US.

But I have this ongoing problem. At first, I just thought I was bad at generating good startups ideas, but now I'm starting to think maybe the problem is over-thinking any ideas I have to the point where I can't see them succeeding.
I have several (somewhat niche) ideas which I know I could turn into high-profit lifestyle businesses, but I want to go for something a little bigger than lifestyle since I'm prepared to put every second I have into it. Also because I have no family to support and don't need immediate income.

In the meantime I've just been improving my coding and learning more so I'm not exactly wasting time, but I'd like to get started on a real project with good potential.

Is this a common problem? I'd be hugely thankful if anybody could give some advice.
"A 2002 survey by the US National Science Foundation shows that 60% of adult Americans agree that some individuals possess psychic powers."

Yeah.. and 60% also believe in angels..
In the parlance of Facebook critics, robots.txt is "opt out." But, if you don't like my web data example, consider streetview data. I don't recall asking Google to build a fleet of androids to drive around my neighborhood taking pictures of me and my neighbors' houses, but they did so anyway. They control access to this data just as closely as they do their web index. And let me re-emphasize, I am perfectly ok with that, at least until Google starts beating its chest about "reciprocity."

"Facebook ... does anything it can to get a hold of private data owned by individuals ..."

Actually, Spock, Plaxo (RIP), Rapleaf, Whitepages.com, MyLife.com, the credit agencies, governments doing background checks, etc., do anything they can to get hold of private data. They scrape online directories and listings of students at schools, digitize yearbooks and phonebooks, buy subscriber information from magazines and ISPs, buy search log data from ISPs, go to brokers who do this shady stuff and then resell the resulting information, etc. Google itself slaps a pixel on AdSense clients, and a cookie on your disk, and builds machine models that watch your web browsing history to infer your likely age, gender, education levels, interests, etc.

Facebook asks users for their personal information, and they give it to Facebook, because doing so makes Facebook's service directly, immediately better. There is a world of difference; it is the difference between surveillance and voluntary communication.

"... and then hoard and monetize it."

"Hoard"? Would you rather Facebook gave the information away to anybody who asked? Somehow that seems worse to me. Providing programmatic, API access to all of a given users' friends' personal information which is what Google is insisting on here, would be hugely irresponsible. Users have weak passwords, phishing sites exist, etc.

"Monetize": Ah, you're edging perilously close to the "Facebook sells your data!" canard. Thank you for not stating that falsehood outright. As you probably know, Facebook pairs advertisements with users that match the advertisers' criteria; the user's data is not part of the bargain. What, specifically, do you object to about this practice? Do you feel the same way about Google "monetizing" the picture it took of your home?
Important vs. Urgent: How  to Focus On What Really Matters
Keeping Zip - The Hacker Factor Blog
In fairness, those numbers are from 1979. I'm still skeptical, but the information in 30 years out of date.
TL;DR :)

actually I read the first few paragraphs. I wanted to contribute though by saying that my impression is that the bulk of what they teach in a college CS program is stuff that's present in books. Indeed, they use books. Well, those books are also available to any old random guy on the street, regardless of whether you involve a college or not. And if you take advantage of those books (and when I say books I mean text and diagrams, even in digital or online form, etc., that part doesn't matter so much) directly, you have the benefit of saving a hell of a lot of money and time, and gaining way more freedom to learn at your own pace, where and when you have time. You can skip over things you already knew, and spend more time on the parts you need to. Much more so than at a university. It's not completely superior, of course, because there are some positives to college CS programs. But whenever I hear someone talk about how college CS education is great because you learn about data structures and algorithms and "fundamentals" I think, well, you can learn about those things without involving college either, and therefore the elements are confused.
Why do you think metals, Brazilian markets etc are a better store of value than MS stock? Why would you expect QE to affect MS stock as a store of value? In what circumstances would MS stock intrinsic value decrease but world commodity prices hold up, if not a business failure of MS itself?
Who Are The Entrepreneurs?
In IM clients like Pidgin, you can enable TLS for connecting to a Jabber chat server (provided the server supports it). Chat should be encrypted; I wonder why it wasn't the case with Kik.
A great example comes from 37signals - http://answers.37signals.com/basecamp/52-how-can-i-move-or-c... - look for Sam Stephenson's reply (from Sept 8th) in which he explains all the edge cases below the surface.
> created by an engaging and knowledgable professor serving as one's guide.

Very often, an impersonable and overworked grad student from a foreign country with poor English pronunciation, making it harder to understand what they're saying. But sure, in an ideal world, your CS teacher is the equivalent of a Feynman or Sagan, sure. That would be awesome, agreed. ;)
The Cloud Fiasco of 2010: Drop.io
Not sure how much this is worth, I only recently discovered Hacker News (and am 17 also), but if you're having trouble coming up with ideas, it's probably best to find a co-founder who is really good at coming up with ideas....

One of the most common things you here from successful "entrepreneurs" is that they have an overflow of ideas and not enough time to work on all of them.