skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Harrrah’s Low Rollers Account for 80% of Revenue & 100% of Profits
I sometimes see graphs in magazines like The Economist or National Geographic. Generally speaking, it takes a bit of work to get this kind of data from governments
Oops, you're right. I usually blame misinterpretations on the writer, not the reader. Sorry. I can't imagine saying what he thought I said.
In some cases, because the company in question feels you shouldn't need external access at work.
What do you mean by "marketing"?

It is very patronizing to assume people make decisions that aren't in their best interest. You can certainly point to lots of irrational behavior, but generally people move to where their lives will be easier.

The biggest problem with happiness research is that there is no objective measure of happiness, and claims are relative. Poor in a village in Thailand = happy. Poor outside LA = unhappy.
Are you really denying that your view on Vietname is a political position, on the basis that you think you're right really strongly?
People were saying that at the beginning of the last crash, too.

Nevertheless, after a few months of sharply lower spending the investors began to get twitchy, and venture funding began to dry up. Startups imploded quickly, and the business that they were doing with the big boys went away almost overnight. Ultimately, the tech drought lasted well past the end of the official recession -- late to start, late to finish.

Some will say that it's different this time around; fewer tech companies depend on massive VC funding, and this effectively insulates them from the credit crisis. That's somewhat true, but if consumer spending continues to tank, it's going to hit discretionary purchases hard -- and how many software purchases are essential expenses in your household?

I don't know what's going to happen tomorrow, but I do know that most of our recent economic growth has been driven by a massive credit bubble, and that consumer credit is effectively gone right now. If people can barely afford to feed themselves and drive their cars to work, it's only a matter of time before they stop spending on technology.
And that's exactly why some people want every eyeball they can get. Because they don't know.
Two bloggers, a copywriter and three PR people?

Imagine how much could've been done if those six had been replaced with programmers and/or designers!
If the company doesn't allow external internet access, it isn't relevant to anyone deciding what browsers their website should support.
At my Fortune 500 company, permission to use Firefox is only granted to programmers who can convincingly argue that they need it for compatibility testing on Internet-facing applications. It's IE6 for everything else. The reason is that Firefox is a security risk(!).
Well if it is trying to be a clone of twitter, then the downtime is necessary.
Ask YC: wiki software for structured data
does anyone know if there is wiki like software for structured data? has to be open source.

ie- mediawiki is basically for a blank page of information.

im looking for something that is like wikipedia, but the data entered is a set group of fields. ie- title, link url, description, phone number, address
A Rails 2.1 case study: upgrading the Insoshi social networking platform
Why eCommerce is a Lot Like ICanHasCheezburger
Google's strength, thanks to PageRank is in Ranking, or, in other words, determining the best page to answer a given query.
Like I've argued here before (and I'm no Microsoft fanboy) Powerset's version of Wikipedia might just be enough of a base for Microsoft to topple this. How, you ask?

Simple... As most people will agree Wikipedia's content is pretty good. By having it semantically linked Powerset effectively turned it in to a giant fact database. Now... Microsoft engineers can with a reasonable amount of work use this database to, in a way, fact check the pages they come across. Pages with good content will be ranked higher, while pages with poor or inaccurate content will be ranked poorly, regardless of the number of links they might receive. This would, of course, spell the end of the "Google bomb"...

... and would make a lot of different in what is usually called the "dark web", where, by it's very nature there aren't many (or sometimes any) inbound links.

Now, you might argue that Wikipedia doesn't contain all the facts in the world. And I would agree with you. You might even argue that not all the facts there are trustworthy. And once again, you would be correct. But it's a damn good starting point, and, in the right hands, it can "spread" by validating other sources of information. Say, if one page that contains a "new" fact has a large number of correct facts, it might be ok to assume that the new one is correct as well. Specially, if it is formulated similarly in different places of the web.

In summary, you can imagine it as the seed of a "factrank" that is then used to rank pages. As you well pointed out, however, inertia is a relatively large deal on the web, but not as much as in the physical world. People didn't used to be in love with Google until a few years ago... I'm sure that give the right arguments they can fall in love with another search engine.

The big question is... does Microsoft have what it takes to pull it off?
I think it was because they just got everyone in the company to work on it and those are the people they've got: with lots of PR people because their main business is running events.
i'm assuming 37 signals doesn't kick people out of the building and/or prevent them from doing extra work at home. But it's nice to have the option to work 4 days a week and short hours.
Not at all. I'm just questioning the veracity of an article from a supposedly credible source that makes conclusions based upon outlying cases while completely ignoring the central issue.

I offer no personal view of Vietnam. I'm just saying that it was the central issue affecting the breeding ground of the subjects of the article.
No, its rotten alright. The Danes have just learned to appreciate it.
Because some people just don't want to leave a dime from every dollar on the table. That's all.

But at some point, if that dime has to come at an increase of 20% or 30% in effort, it stops being worth it.
DANSKJÄÄÄÄÄVVLLLAAAAARRR!!!!
You say "I offer no personal view of Vietnam." but you said it was an "illegal, immoral, and unwinnable war"

Are you really unaware that people disagree on all 3 of those points? They are political positions.
What the parent asks is not about value in the Syrusian sense, but whether the aquisition price was justified - whether the acquisition will in actuality increase Condé Net's value by more than this amount.

Obviously, whoever gave a green light for the purchase must have thought so.
I'm waiting for one of the hackers here to make 'how to build a web app in four days for $500' ... This project wasn't ran "skinny" or even like a startup - but still nice, I enjoy the time lapse desktop video.
Google Talk Goes To iPhone
Hitwise: Yahoo Properties Get More Traffic From Google Than Yahoo Search
That was the argument of the protesters, not mine. Sorry. If only I could write prose as well as I could code. :-)
Its a matter of information.

During the War Between the States, the Lincoln government spread rumors in Ireland and other European countries that the streets in America were literally paved with gold. When impoverished immigrants showed up on Ellis Island, they were offered a choice between slaves wages in factories, and the draft.

Without complete information, people don't always make the best decisions.
oh it's been done - you just haven't heard about it because the team of hackers didn't have 3 pr reps!
hi Guys...I am the founder of tablerush.com. Looking for investors or funders. Anyone interested? Contact me at sachin@tablerush.com. We can surely look at it.
I think it would be good to be notified, say by email or a separate section of HN, when someone replies to one of my submissions/comments. It would also be nice to be able to have some submissions monitored and be notified whenever someone comments on it.

I believe this would make the discussion and exchange of ideas flow much better.
Opera: please use bug detection, not browser detection
I am not sure if this is what you need, but I have found http://twiki.org/ to be useful. Drupal is another solution - can be made into a wiki with a few additions (which, however, can add up to quite a lot of extra time).

hopefully this helps,
deyan
Ours surely offers more services than open table too..
I thought it was interesting for the comments/discussion triggered by the blogger's error. Maybe that's why he posted it?
agreed. sure many times - If I had to put together a team today it would be

1 designer
1 developer

too simple? the more people the less perfect communication?
Ah, well all you need is a "what they saw as".

And for the most part, I don't think any of those other points was nearly as important as the draft. It's one thing to think that a current war is a bad idea, it's quite another to know that you might be forced to go and fight in it.
In the last few years, developing the product has usually been the easy part.

Now building a useful product, identifying a market need, and finding users/customers is the hard part. Lets see them do that next time because they missed the ball this time around.
Hi My name is Sachin Chopra, founder of tablerush.com, which is on the same lines as opentable, but offers more value and services than that and we are looking for funding. you can contact me with your profile at sachin@tablerush.com and we discuss this further.
Why is Google Discontinuing my Favorite Google Product?
I wouldn't put much stock in those numbers. I have no idea what Reddit sold for, but I'm told that the numbers reported varied widely and were almost all very wrong.
Why are people so afraid of their medical records leaking out? Honestly, I'm more concerned about my YouTube viewing history than my drug allergies.
I think they did little with a lot of people. Sorry Carson, I like your stuff, but this is a bit weak in my mind.
What is really amusing about those stats is the 77 visitors still using IE 3. I don't even have a 12 year old computer that still functions, let alone a 12 year old browser.
Ask YC: Ideal location for a non-VC startup?
I've seen some discussion here on the bay area, and how it's not necessarily the right place to be for a non-VC-backed startup. So the question is this: if you had the choice of running your company from any city in the U.S., which one would it be and why?

I'm in the process of deciding where to move right now, and was wondering which places have the best social and professional environment for geek-entrepreneur types?
Ouch... that has to hurt Microsoft after what they paid for ad rights.
Nvidia down 24% because "significant quantities of laptop GPUs are defective"
Yes, you should worry. Other countries are gutless followers of whatever the US tells them to do. If we make a law over here, you can bet the US will make you pass a similar law.
here is a link to the source research:
http://www.bigresearch.com/news/big062508.htm
Because the people that do desktop support don't want to support more browsers than the minimum possible. I'd bet a decent proportion of desktop support calls are about 'problems with the internet' (read: browser) and starting every one of those call with "are you using IE or Firefox?" would most likely get answered with: "I dunno! I want to use Google!"
More signs that HN is becoming Reddit. Seriously, why is this on HN, and why are people voting it up?
Word cloud created from all Paul Graham's essays
Not really. The press reporting a $15 billion valuation was bullshit; it assumed that the only thing Microsoft was getting was the stake. In reality, it got a lot more, including the advertisement contract.
It's not hard, but how many people will really spend the time reading about it?

In my experience, customers with a non tech background don't care about the details, but rather if it will be better or not. If it will, great.

But I agree, it's being slightly disingenuous to the people who do want to know why, or are curious what 'web experience' they are missing out on.
Anyone disagree that this is a good reason to stop using Gmail/Hotmail/Yahoo Mail/Google Docs/etc?

It's a good reason to remember that you don't have any privacy when using other people's servers.
http://flamenco.berkeley.edu/
I've just finished my freshman Java class and was severely disillusioned at how far from 'programming' it felt. I picked up a copy of K&R and have been enjoying myself since. I actually feel bad for my fellow majors who think that Java/OOP is the only way that things can be done.
People make decisions that they think are in their best interest, even if those decisions aren't actually in their best interest.

People move to where they think their lives will be easier.
I think they've got the cause and effect backward there. Harrah's low rollers account for so much of their overall action because their casinos are so bad that high rollers avoid them. You can't simply assume that because all of their action comes from low rollers, they are pursuing some sort of brilliant strategy that nobody else is by not courting the high rollers (when they could easily go after both).

I'm guessing the 30% of low rollers that return very frequently are largely locals or near-locals (Harrah's has casinos in damn near every gaming jurisdiction in this hemisphere). Harrah's does a great job of catering to them.

Much of the other 70% would probably be mid-rollers, who I'd call value gamblers. They give the casinos just enough action to get some good freebies and nothing more. They end up spending less than if they had just booked the hotel and paid for food like a low roller does.

Harrah's does comp those two groups much better than anyone else. That also makes them the easiest to abuse comp program on the strip.
The problem is with the law and the legal system. Not using Gmail, etc won't fix that problem. If you think your home computer is somehow safe, you are wrong.
Try submitting an AJAX get request with a variable than ends with UTF-8 data (chinese glyph) and has been fetched from the DOM.

I hate IE6.
9. YouTube goes out of business.

10. People pirate TV clips somewhere else.

11. Wait, Google wasn't the problem here.

Makes perfect sense to go after the users. After all, they don't have VC money to defend themselves with.

Considering the FBI didn't get very far prosecuting people who viewed a (fake) child porn site, I doubt millions of people will be sued for perhaps viewing 10 minutes of a TV show. Especially since the TV show was being broadcast through everyone's brains anyway.
I printed this out a while ago, but never had time to seriously rear it through. I will have time next week though, its actually in my "must read" list at number 1. Number 2 is SICP. But that one i don't have printed out.
I was also going to suggest twiki but I don't have any first hand experience with it.

I have also looked at Roundup in the past.
http://roundup.sourceforge.net/

WikidBASE is a fairly new but also in the same vein.
http://projects.nickblundell.org.uk/wikidbase

If a hosted solution is acceptable you can look at Dabble DB or Coghead

http://dabbledb.com/
http://www.coghead.com/
If that was their argument, and it's a political argument, then they were "playing politics". That's all.
Perhaps choose something like dekiwiki and mod it to suit your need?
Firefox Did It, Set Guinness World Record, 8002530 Downloads!
How to build a Twittering Teddybear
Google must divulge YouTube log
Reddit, Stumbleupon, Del.icio.us and Hacker News Algorithms Exposed!
Ask YC: outsourcing.asia - invest or bail 
It is land rush => auctions on .asia domains.

outsourcing.asia is at less than 10K USD. I expect it would close at 12-13K. I saw this happening with careers.asia which again I could have bid.

I would have wanted to invest and put up something on these domain. But have been tight on investment - time and money.

If any of you are interested I am ready to trade.

PS: During .asia land rush in Feb, I booked a couple of domains on GoDaddy. But all of them have ended up in an auction on pool.com, so they were all popular ones: careers(sold), trade, buy etc..
Most of the article is "why I think learning assembly is important". I don't know assembly, but I do know how computers work (and I even know you have to trigger an interrupt to make a system call). I think he should just get to the point and say "people should learn how the computer works", rather than suggesting that you learn a programming language that makes you aware of some aspects of how a computer works.

It's like a very sharp knife: you can cut yourself as well as whatever it is you're trying to slice. It's really easy to write broken or inflexible code in it.

This is true of all powerful tools. I've seen horribly unmaintainable Lisp and Haskell. I've also seen very clean and maintainable Perl. C is no different than any other programming language, although it does actively discourage good code. You can ignore the discouragement, but why not use a language that encourages maintainability, or at least automatically deallocates memory when you're done using it?

Anyway, I don't think this article shows why the author likes C, or why someone else should learn C. Sure, learn C if you want to learn C. But you can also learn about your computer by just learning about your computer.
you forgot to mention GPU's :-)
I actually feel bad for my fellow majors who think that Java/OOP is the only way that things can be done.

I feel bad for people that think imperative-style programming is the only way things can be done.

C is not the anti-Java. It's Java minus modern features and with more rope to hang yourself with. (Then again, someone actually told me that spending an entire day with Valgrind hunting down a memory leak was fun.)

If you want power, non-Java-ness, and modern features, learn a language like Lisp, Haskell, OCaml, etc. And learn Perl for actually getting things done.
http://www.nationmaster.com/graph/imm_new_cit_percap-immigra...
Languages that leverage shared state in their concurrency model are made for concurrent processors. Languages or frameworks that do not are made for concurrent systems.
"Without users or site owners owning the copyright, there can be no reasonable expectation of privacy, nor of your conversation not being spread far and wide in various forms."

The license is a red herring.

If you publish something on the internet (whether by twitter, identi.ca, email, blog, or whatever), you have no way to positively control the distribution of that content. All you can do is take actions that tend to limit distribution, in many cases.

Privacy is dead: the sooner people start living their lives as though everything about them will eventually be public, the fewer unpleasant surprises they'll have.
I never fail to be confused by this assertion. Why is it that coders expect to be paid for developing apps, yet anyone writing or taking pictures or creating music should just assume they are creating it for free?
I agree. Iraq is no Vietnam. Iraq doesn't affect anyone in the US except for the volunteer military made up of mostly people who are more than happy to be there, so the harsh reality is that no one cares.

I know if you asked the students at my campus if America was at war, they would probably give you a funny look before continuing on to their frat party. This doesn't mean they are stupid or apathetic to politics in general, but only that nothing is threatening their way of life right now.

People participate in politics for selfish reasons. I would say it's a good thing that college students aren't erupting into protests every day. That means they must be content and happy, right?
That's so sad...
LOL. Actually, you just made the point. If you have to be on a "right" server or a "right" channel, that's the definition of kludge. Mainstream adopters don't want to figure out what's right and wrong.
The one near your biggest customer(s).

But, some other factors make the valley great for tech business, and similar elements in other cities would be similarly valuable. Good schools nearby, nice culture and decent weather so smart people like to live there, low friction living so those smart people can focus on their work rather than on getting by (this can mean a lot of things, but I think places where long commutes are the norm is probably a negative), enough of the support infrastructure necessary for running a tech business (tech-knowledgeable legal services, accountants, PR/marketing, etc.).

I'd think this narrows it down to a few areas in the US, roughly in order of goodness: Silicon Valley, Boston, Austin, Research Triangle in NC, Seattle (sucky weather, though), New York, Chicago, Houston (too spread out, so long commutes, and hot muggy weather), Pittsburgh, Dallas/Fort Worth, Portland (too cold!), Boulder, and probably a few others.

But, again, your biggest customers can determine your success or failure more than almost any other element, and being near them makes them more likely to work with you. If you're working for oil and gas companies, you'd want to be in Texas (Austin, probably, but any major city will do). If you're working for the federal government or military, you'd obviously want to be in D.C. or Virginia. If you're working for car manufacturers, Ann Arbor (because Detroit is still too much of a shithole--though you could get some bargains on housing, and it does seem to be having some sort of resurgence). I'm working in the hosting industry, so I need to be in Texas or the bay area (or both--which is probably how it'll shake out by next year).
In restrospect, it's easy for us to sit on our butts and call it "playing politics". But for many of them, it was literally a matter of life or death. Going to college or fleeing to Canada were their only options (unless you shot your toe off). Makes red states/blue states seem kinda lame, huh?
So is vi. So is PINE. But I want better tools.
Ask YC: Scheme on blackberry pearl?  
Hi - I was curious if anybody had scheme on their blackberry pearl. I have a long plane ride tonight and wanted to play around with scheme. Thanks!

edit: Bonus points for OTA installation.
OpenDNS 2008 Sysadmin Awards - Nominate Someone!
article reminds me of my granddad complaining that us youngsters don't know how to kill and clean chickens because we can just go to the grocery store and buy them already ready to go.
You can use MediaWiki and add Semantic MediaWiki extension to get something closer to what you want. We use this a lot and get all sorts of structured data (with RDFs, etc) when we need it, but freeform data around it.
My understanding of downvoting is that it is meant to tag/reinforce negatively any behavior that is not in keeping with what is considered the ground rules or standards of the community. This definition should promote keeping signal/noise ratio high. The definition of downvoting that says downvote=disagree seems to be a problem. There is also some grey area, for example do you downvote claims that are known to be incorrect factually? This is different from disagreeing on matters of opinion. I would say lay off the downvote in that case and consider writing a reply to correct the error.

Maybe there should be a small color coded menu that opens for down votes, to specify the reason for downvoting. That would serve two purposes. 1: it would be slightly more difficult to downvote and 2: the color coded downvotes could be used to paint the text, indicating in which way the comment is considered off the mark. On second thought, painting the text would draw unwanted attention to it, but use the colors somewhere on the heading maybe?
I'm not familiar with OCaml, so maybe I'm missing something.

But why does no one gush over Erlang and Javascript when the FP hat gets passed around? Is OCaml really much better than either of these?

(Javascript, granted, has no shortage of warts. But it's the browser language we have, so it's worth learning to love it.)
Send it to your old gray-hair SysAdmins...