skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Yes, but you can't ramp up manufacturing so easily. And the weakness of the us dollar drove all available Wiis to Europe.

No puns were intended in writing the above. Damn Nintendo's Wii!
But is meeting demand 100% always the best goal to have? An increase in production is an increase in cost. Spending $10 million to sell 1 million units over 2 months is better than spending $20 million to sell 1 million units one month and 500k units the next.
Actually you simply need a google account to join this group (I joined it like that for instance).

This is far better than Delta Encoding and wait till you see some people take unfair advantage of this..
Your last paragraph is priceless advice. In fact, I'd recommend to anyone that they present new ideas or innovation in this manner.
I disagree.

I cut back from 4-6 sodas a day to zero for a little caffeine-free experiment I ran on myself. I was drinking no sodas for about 2 weeks.

I felt no different (after I quit having caffeine headaches, that is).

Thus, in my opinion, your difference is (very much nearly) all in the fact that you're now getting enough sleep.
Apple Accepting iPhone Apps Into App Store
he he :) ... even that would be a worthy offering in my view ...
Wow, those three things described my first job out of college perfectly.

It got really bad when I did nothing but surf the net for six months and no one noticed. That is when I knew it was time to change. My work wasn't being measured, I had no contact with my end user, and my boss didn't talk to me for weeks at a time.
Yea, but the OP is doing longer and more frequent (2hrs x 6d). That's hardcore.
Happiness, Not Wealth Creation, is the Sole Measure of Success
We have run some tests ... but lack of funds means that we have to be very very careful about our feature sets ... everything is designed to be as offline whenever possible
neither is marketing. :-)
Here in Canada, every Wii shelf is full.

Perhaps demand is being manipulated in the US?
ConnectU founders score spots on U.S. Olympic rowing team
That means you have to do F(x) TWICE, which is sometimes ineffective (when F(x) costs too much)
This is an old article but it's a long held Nintendo policy. They took the same route for the Gamecube and N64. The N64 really suffered as nintendo chose RAMBUS ram which rose in price near fabrication and they had to halved the memory to 'make money on day one'.

Because the Wii is largely an upgraded NGC it was easy to make money from day one as hardware R'n'D costs were a lot lower.

If you live in North America then there is a shortage of Wii's because the dollar is weak and Nintendo can make more money in Europe. Europe recently passed N. America in terms of number of gamers and money spent on games so I don't see this 'shortage' issue changing for quite a while.

Having said all that Sony are not in a bad position either. the PS2 and PSP are still selling stong. the PSP has recently picked up in N America and Japan (more then just the latest Final Fantasy can explain) and PS3 will continue to be refined to make it cheaper and more reliable.
What AVG wants from your site is the same thing that the users do

Then shouldn't AVG report the same User-Agent that the user's browser is reporting?
Logistics are in vogue with designers
Yes, and in the context of the article: the 'pay for every computer' pricing contracts Microsoft pursued to its advantage were not by themselves illegal. They became illegal when used by a firm with monopoly power to stifle competition.

Unfortunately there's no bright-line rule that lets you know that today, you're a monopoly. You might write such a sales contract legally on Monday, and on Wednesday cross the invisible antitrust line which (after years of later largely subjective legal argument) obligated you to stop doing the same things that led to your success. So signing the exact same contract Friday would be illegal.
What is the most inspiring biography of a successful man?
I've been thinking a lot about the reasons I want to make a lot of money. It's not because I need money (I don't), but rather because I want to feel like I achieved something by the time I die.

Do you know of any book about a man who actually achieved a lot? Not books about lucky men or books about well connected men who were well off to start with, but books about men who used their intelligence and discipline to become successful.

I'd much rather prefer if the person was someone relatively obscure, and not the common biographies that everyone has read.
The demand curve is the same as the marginal benefit curve and the supply curve is the same as the marginal cost curve. You produce at the equilibrium in this type of market since it produces the best result for both the company and society. This is introductory microeconomics.
The picture is changing quickly. In the fall there was an article about attach rate. It was something like 7 games per Xbox, 5 games per Wii and PS3. In December, Wii outsold Xbox 8 to 7 (I had to read the statistic twice because it's 8 games per system _sold that month_, not 8 per system in existence).

http://www.destructoid.com/wii-owners-bought-8-games-per-sys...
It is polite to sleep for a second between requests when scraping.
Without knowing the actual costs, it's impossible to answer. Usually consumer electronics get cheaper when you make more of them.

I would have bought one if not two (for a gift) if they were available. Now I'm not buying any. They not only lose out on the unit sale, but all subsequent accessory and software sales. So even if making an extra 500k per month cost them marginally, they have 500k more possible sales for all their Wii software and accessories.

I don't really care that much, it's just the first time I can remember this happening in CE. Companies usually wake up and fix supply issues. Nintendo of America is as confused as I am:

http://www.joystiq.com/2008/04/24/nintendo-of-america-passio...
ICANN moves toward completely opening top-level domains
Is is just me, or is .net the predominent technology there?
Yeah but they're selling them here (In europe) for a lot more cash instead.
Sounds like there is an easy solution to this problem... just block all IE6 users... kills two birds with one stone!

</tongue_in_cheek>
Also easy enough to get in the UK.
Then raise the price. They are selling higher than list on eBay still, which shows things aren't quite balanced.
Similar results for Germany and Great Britain:

Probing a more universal measure of knowledge, Gallup also asked the following basic science question, which has been used to indicate the level of public knowledge in two European countries in recent years: "As far as you know, does the earth revolve around the sun or does the sun revolve around the earth?" In the new poll, about four out of five Americans (79%) correctly respond that the earth revolves around the sun, while 18% say it is the other way around. These results are comparable to those found in Germany when a similar question was asked there in 1996; in response to that poll, 74% of Germans gave the correct answer, while 16% thought the sun revolved around the earth, and 10% said they didn't know. When the question was asked in Great Britain that same year, 67% answered correctly, 19% answered incorrectly, and 14% didn't know.

http://www.gallup.com/poll/3742/New-Poll-Gauges-Americans-Ge...
The lookup would remain O(1) fast, which will overtake O(log N) skiplist lookup, true. The insertion and other costs differ between the two as well, though. A hash table would be clearly best in a case where the approx. final table size needed is known ahead of time, most data is inserted upfront, and characteristics of the data are known (for tuning the hashing function).

Also, good point about string comparisons getting longer among close nodes.

Personally, I think skiplists are most interesting because they rely on randomness to make the underlying structure efficient. I wonder what over data structures that could apply to.
Maybe it's something else then. Perhaps Europe are more likely to use the online capability or buy the download games or something... Or perhaps there's some US boycott going on by Nintendo?
I think some of the meta-point might be a bit strained here. It's true that there's a lot of bloated software out there. And the example at the top, Acobat Reader, is one of the worst. It's a dog, and really easy to improve on. I've never heard of the "Foxit" product, but the poppler-based Evince reader on my Ubuntu box is similarly "snappy", even on huge documents (scanned-in D&D sourcebooks, for example -- yes, I'm a geek) where Adobe really crawls.

That said, there's a ton of common GUI software out there that really does deliver a pretty quick UI experience. Firefox 3 comes to mind as a good example here (especially given how hard it is to make some web content "snappy"). Likewise many of the smaller utilities on a modern Linux desktop are nice and quick.

Basically, the problem is real, but not as widespread as the article posits. A quick and clean desktop experience on modern hardware is both possible and available if you're willing to look for it.

But yeah, Acrobat is awful.
Right, at the end of the day, anyone can read anything on their computer. Encapsulation is more about clean abstraction and separation of concerns than it is about security theater.
Abe Lincoln? Not obscure, but certainly used his intelligence and discipline to become successful.
For those curious: http://bob.pythonmac.org/archives/2005/12/05/remote-json-jso...
In October 2006, Netflix announced it would give a cool seven figures to whoever created a movie-recommending algorithm 10 percent better than its own. Within two weeks, the DVD rental company had received 169 submissions, including three that were slightly superior to Cinematch, Netflix's recommendation software. After a month, more than a thousand programs had been entered, and the top scorers were almost halfway to the goal.

We've entered the long twilight struggle of the Netflix Prize. "The last 1.5 percent is going to be harder than the first 8.5 percent," Potter tells me. In the past three months, BellKor's score has barely budged and now stands at 8.57 percent. Potter, meanwhile, is at 8.07 percent, and his pace has slowed, too. It's entirely possible that neither will ever make it to 10 percent. After all, there's a certain inherent variability to human choices that even the savviest computer can't predict.

sounds like free labor to me.
I cut back on soda for two reasons - 1) my weight varies pretty linearly with my sugar intake, and I've been getting a bit pudgy of late. And 2) the caffeine prevents me from sleeping well. I can't say for sure if the drop in soda intake is responsible for my feeling of well-being but it certainly is easier on my wallet.
GASP

You mean there are multiple ways for a company to abuse its position as a monopoly or part of an oligopoly?!?

Get out, lolbertarian shithorn, government intervention to break up anti-competitive collusions and companies is a necessary response to market failure.
Let's do the numbers:

Dual Layer Blu-ray capacity: 50 Gigabytes.
Verizon FIOS - 20 Mb/s for $70/month, or 50 Mb/s for around $144/month.

So, how long would it take for a person on FIOS to d/l this?

@ 20Mb/s: 50000MB / (20 Mb/s / 8 bits/Byte) = 50000MB/2.5 MB/s = 20000 seconds. Which is ~333.3 minutes, or about 5.5 hours.

@ 50Mb/s, you have (20Mb/s / 50 Mb/s) * 5.5 hours = ~2.2 hours.

Yes, you're not going to get full speed, but even a factor of 2 slowdown is faster than waiting for netflix.

So, it seems that the network required to do this is already being rolled out. For example, Verizon market penetration is outlined in a recent press release [1], indicating that Verizon will offer these speeds to 10 million subscribers within the next week or so.

As you said, it may be ~15 years, but I think it will be a lot shorter - I'd guess 5-7 years. I can't imagine that comcast is sitting around while verizon makes inroads into their userbase. They will counter, driving prices down and increasing market penetration for these high speeds.

[1]: http://investor.verizon.com/news/view.aspx?NewsID=925
Those limitations notwithstanding, Otlet’s version of
hypertext held a few important advantages over today’s Web.
For one thing, he saw a smarter kind of hyperlink. Whereas
links on the Web today serve as a kind of mute bond between
documents, Otlet envisioned links that carried meaning by,
for example, annotating if particular documents agreed or
disagreed with each other. That facility is notably lacking
in the dumb logic of modern hyperlinks.

Otlet had some fascinating ideas that even now could change the way information is stored and effect how relationships between data are analyzed.

Another interesting thought: how do we find the modern geniuses like Otlet and learn from them now rather than waiting until they're gone?
.... until it comes back. Then we'll all be fretting about what to do about "global cooling", and how it's obviously caused by us not doing enough excersize any more which starves the planet of valuable body heat.
People are acting. They just need time, support, and possibly imitation.

1. Cheap solar power: http://www.nanosolar.com/blog3.
2. Moving the entire nation of Israel from gas to electric:
http://shaiagassi.typepad.com/.
Efficient power storage seems like the only missing link. But what we have now is already enough to move forward.
Google Media Server
What's going on here? Is it really the case that 18% of the populace has not been exposed to the idea of heliocentricity, or that they have but choose not to believe it? I am truly flabbergasted by this statistic.
Biography of Joseph Alois Schumpeter - historical context of entrepreneurship
It's probably a bad thing that I know so little about economics that I can't say for sure if you are disagreeing or agreeing with me. I'm leaning towards disagreeing, but I'll have to remedy that knowledge gap sometime this weekend.
But by increasing the number of pointers by log n, you reduce your cache hit ratio, do you not? It would seem that the only time this doesn't matter is when you've long since blown past the CPU cache and your RAM cache hit ratio is going to be in the <5% range, with almost every access to the data structure resulting in disk accesses.
You have already got money and your goal to feel like you achieved something is to make more money? I think money is just a means to an end. Think about your day to day life. Get up, eat, work, drink, be merry. As long as you have enough money to handle that, I think you're cool on money - unless your passion requires more. What is the end result here?

If you want to look up people who have inspiring biographies... what about http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Louis_Pasteur or http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Joseph_Lister ? Vivien Thomas has one of the most inspiring biographies out there... http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vivien_Thomas he really came out of nothing to contribute to the world.

Yes, if I had more money I'd be a doctor (:
Wonder how this inter-realates to the CIA's use of mis information and other information based forms of control or influence. Good read.
Mr. Untouchable is great: it's an autobiography of a heroin dealer (he's a bit player in American Gangster). It's a very 'pure' business, in the sense that you can quantify product quality directly.

Founders at Work is also good.

Lowenstein's hagiography of Warren Buffett is a great bio of a famous guy, but you should keep in mind that he did have some connections (and almost certainly would have succeeded even if he didn't).
> annotating if particular documents agreed or disagreed with each other.

I've had this idea before - a Techmeme-like site that displays the range of consensus, average consensus, outliers, etc. in the blogo or even twitter-sphere. I don't know much about linguistic processing but it seems that alot of Techmeme's "Discussion" Links is me-too commentary.

How about implementing an estimator for PG's DH0-DH6? http://www.paulgraham.com/disagree.html
Funny, rarely have I heard "excellent" in relation to HBR content. Every issue of HBR magazine tends to be re-hashing of various topics on "Leadership" from issues past. I did read "The Long Tail" so I'll give this one a shot.
I particularly like Aristotle Onassis. Especially when he was in South America and was working two jobs in order to survive and learn. Note worthy accomplishments - tobacco fortune, shipping fortune, own airline, married JFK's widow. Lessons I learned from reading about him: 1. if throwing dinner party, eat before hand so you have more time to talk while other people are eating. 2. Don't be afraid to fail as long as you commit to it and fail big. 3. Learn how to harness the power of OPM (other people's money)
I respectfully disagree, at least in part. Despite the overwhelming number of things that I have read to the contrary I have never worked anywhere where my accomplishments were overlooked. Honestly, in many situations I've found that merely being competent has lead to being rewarded as excellent.

I find turning things around and sharing the credit inevitably leads to more allies and a bigger pool of credit going around. If someone thanks me for something that worked out then I almost invariably thank them for supporting the project, being clear and flexible and understanding the times when things did not always look so rosey. Be public in praising people that make it easier for you to do the good work that you want to do and you will be rewarded exponentially when the chips are down.

My goal is to be completely anonymous because I find it almost impossible to get any coding done when I'm the goto guy with people needing my attention all day long. Quiet reliability and competence trump grandstanding over the long haul every time.
Looking For StartUp Job
Do you work for startup or do you have contacts in startup?

I am Java/J2EE programmer with good experience ( can prove it in interview :) ) and some hands on experience with Ruby On Rails. I am looking for opportunity in IT startup in NJ-NY area or ready to relocate other area.

Feel free to send me email on TheWebGuy@live.com
http://blog.wired.com/monkeybites/2007/10/steve-ballmer-s.ht...

Plus I heard that the DoJ settlement's API documentation has been delayed to next year. Or was that Duke Nukem Forever?

Plus ca change...
I've always wondered how much of that is due to poor reading comprehension and bad problem solving skills. In other words, simply that people know the answer but can't match up that knowledge with the question being asked.
Somewhat related to your last paragraph, I recently saw (on a mailing list) a diagram touting the increased productivity of using a wiki as a knowledge-base rather than informal emails with documents attached, and the way it had the workflow diagrammed, the entire productivity increase was due to not having to open Word attachments.
Blegh. I hate that attitude.

Everyone has a story. Dismissing people by calling them mediocre, unambitious, or lackluster says more about you than them.
Go Home, Bill: It's time for a new era at Microsoft -- if only the company were ready
Stop. There is no meaningful argument: the current, epochally high rate of CO2 release is driving current climate change.

Yes, the climate changes on its own. Sometimes it does this "rapidly". But
there is no known mechanism in place to produce anything like what we are seeing. Conversely, CO2 greenhouse effects have been qualitatively understood (even it quantitatively modelling it is a bitch) for many decades. I'm not sure which "most people" you think are ignoring the argument, but I assure you it doesn't include climate scientists. It's just that it doesn't make any scientific sense. We know with certainty that fuel burning is producing a rapid spike in CO2 levels. We know with certainty that CO2 is an effective greenhouse gas. We know to within reasonable error bars that the climate is changing rapidly. Do the math. Occam's razor demands that we look at CO2 as the undeniably best hypothesis. No one has a better one.

And the land bridge didn't melt, because it's made of land, and land doesn't melt. :) What happened is that the sea levels rose due to melting glaciers on the continents and flooded it. It's still there, it's just a shallow sea instead of a connecting lowland between asia and alaska.
List of acquisitions by Microsoft
I wonder what Microsoft were looking to gain from this.
And? Of course Word attachments suck. Pick your battle: do you want to convert your company from Office to wikis, or do you want to influence and complete the pricing model for your product?

Caution: while you will almost certainly succeed at the latter, your odds on convincing businesspeople to stop using Office, or to respect Wiki pages (which I tried) or email messages are not good.
Perhaps Nintendo believes that if people think the Wii is cheap but scarce, then they will be more likely to buy at the earliest opportunity -- unlike the PS3 or 360, which can be picked up at any time?
I'm not advocating grandstanding or hogging credit for things, but "quiet reliability and competence" empirically do not trump grandstanding in the business world. See: every issue of the Wall Street Journal from today back through 1882.

What have your roles been? In engineering and the sciences, quiet competance is indeed (mostly) the norm. We're not talking about that.
ConnectU settled with Facebook. It's over. Can we never talk about them, ever again?
I'm actually building a web app with a small start up, and we just do not have the time to make our service ie6 compatible. We are going to let users know that and redirect them to a very plane jane site where you can still get the information but not very efficiently. However our market is mainly tech savvy people so it should work out.
The most important question to me is this: what can we realistically do about it? Specifically, will major efforts on the part of the "first world" make a difference when we consider say China, which is rapidly ramping up to modern consumption levels without the commensurate environmental controls?
If only I could understand German.
This is not a rehash of previous topics, but is mathematically flawed. I commented on the blog itself since there were more comments there than here.
Bye Bye Bill (poem)
Where's yudkowsky... he'll be shocked to learn this news!
I discovered TED talks on the day of the iPhone keynote, searching for more info about multi-touch. So I would guess that video got a lot of its hits from other people doing that.
Random Questions & Answers From Real People
We can reduce consumption where we can, and pressure our governments to adopt appropriate policies. I'm less pessimistic than you are about China's ability to regulate itself, but even if you accept that China (or whoever) is going to continue burning coal as if there were no tomorrow, that's not an excuse for making things worse.

And in the worst case where we simply can't stop burning, there are at least ideas out there about how to reduce atmospheric CO2 directly. Planting trees in the tropics is one, burying biomass is another. There are even some borderline-scary notions about seeding blooms in the ocean with iron.

But it all starts with a recognition that action is required. Get off your butts, basically.
Yeah, it did that for me as well (Safari 3.1) and then it crashed.
Occam's razor demands

Occam's razor demands that, if the temperature of the earth has shifted wildly throughout its entire history, then it will continue to do so, today and tomorrow.

Occam's razor demands that the usual suspects are trying to seize control of the means of production and distribution. Again.

Occam's razor demands that, the same people concerned with global warming should be placing most of their demands against coal-fired countries like China, and in favor of Nuclear power. This is not happening.

When trillions of dollars are on the line, Occam's razor demands following it, and not the same "climate scientists" who were predicting doom from "global cooling" in the 1970s.