skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I'm not trying to equivocate at all. I'm just trying to show that 'evidence' works fine in the large -- at the society level. But it doesn't work at the individual level since most individuals don't actually have evidence -- they choose to believe what their culture calls 'evidence'. Call it faith, belief, whatever. But the individual doesn't have evidence.

It's easier to see when we pick something that the whole culture hasn't coalesced on yet. Like string theory and worm holes. Some people believe there's a worm hole at the center of our universe. They have 'evidence' that supports their theory. I can believe or not, but I'll never know one way or another. 100 years from now, if everyone believes the _exact_ same theories we have today, with the _exact_ same raw data, my great-grandkids will say they know the worm hole exists and the 'evidence' is obvious. The only difference between now and then is how widely those theories are dispersed and accepted. Yet today I (and you?) wouldn't say we know worm holes exist. And my great-grandkids won't 'know' any more than you and I do.

In other words, my 'evidence' is what is commonly known and accepted to be true. Yet I personally don't know it to be true -- I trust that it is. Isn't that blind?
Can I hire you? Money doesn't motivate you right? Minimum wage, no benefits and 80hr weeks are required.
For solving local search problems, I use tabu search (hill climb with a "recently visited" list) or beam search (simultaneous hill search). Both are simple techniques that show remarkable emergent behavior. Many search problems are better phrased in terms of numerical optimization or what have you - if your problems maps a continuous space to a continuous space there's probably a standard numerical technique that solves it better than a local search hack.

For Machine Learning type applications, SVMs are very popular. Briefly, both sufficiently deep neural nets and sufficiently dimensional SVMs are arbitrarily expressive, but SVMs give you a better perspective on what is actually happening with your problem. If you're interested in Machine Learning, you should check out Andrew Moore's very well-written tutorials:
http://www.autonlab.org/tutorials/list.html
No we don't. Currently messy systems ensure that caveat emptor is alive and well. Buying, selling and all the other activities on the internet may be easier to implement from a computer point of view with a centralised ID, but it's a very good thing that people employ caution in online activities.

You cannot eliminate fraud, deceit and risk. You cannot create a utopia. These things are impossible, and all the best intentions in the world usually have bad unforeseen outcomes. Natural growth of systems is the best way forwards. A company like PayPal tries verification by depositing small amounts, it works, the consumers don't mind, so it stays. Another company tries something else, consumers don't like it, it goes. At no point is a central committee involved. This is the way it should be.
FAB capacity?

Most ARM CPUs are manufactured not by ARM itself but by Samsung, Qualcom, Texas Instruments and the like. These guys certainly do have all the requisite capacity as they provide the silicon for all of the world's mobile phones.

Granted, the Big Gorilla is faster to shrink the processes, because they have no problem dropping a few billions on a brand-new fab, but what good did that do? On both supposed benefits of the smaller process (cost and power drain / performance) ARM CPUs are still winning.

This whole situation is a replay of the Pentium 4 Megahurtz madness. Back then Intel was pushing raw performance disregarding power consumption, then they hit the heat dissipation wall, AMD snuck in from behind and punished them in a major way with Athlon-64. Intel regrouped with Core* series, won back the market share, pushed AMD back into oblivion, and relaxed about the whole thing. Now they are doing the same thing - prioritizing performance at the cost of power drain, and this time it will be ARM who will punish them. It's not clear how long it will take Intel to change their ways this time. The last time they still had Pentium 3 / Pentium M group of engineers to lean on, and that they did rather well. This time they are not so lucky - they have actually sold off their embedded CPU division a few years back, and now I doubt whether there is anyone left inside Intel to insist on a much needed pivot.

[EDITED for typos]
> but is quick to dismiss global warming, apparently on the basis of a single webpage

Actually, he didn't. FWIW, he provided more evidence in support of his global warming skepticism than he did in support of his other skepticism, skepticism that you didn't question.

But, I'll play along. How much support should he have given for each of his arguments to satisfy you?
Money is a terrible motivator? lol. What's this nonsense? Give me your name and address, I'll write you a check for $1500 free and clear to take back what you just said.
Note that the "inequality" here is strictly age related -- in other words, if you live according to prescription, then you too will have that amount of wealth at a particular point in your life. In other words, everyone has the same opportunity for upward economic mobility. When most commentators talk about inequality they're really talking about the lack of upward economic mobility.
altho I'm primarily an investor now, I was also a programmer from around 1980 thru 1995.

that said, I'm sure DHH can/could code rings around my sorry ass.

still, that has limited bearing on our respective positions.
My favorite book was Robert Whitaker's Anatomy of an Epidemic.

The book is about how, for a confluence of reasons, psychotropic drugs like antipsychotics and antidepressants actually, long-term, exacerbate the mental illness they're trying to cure.

What I love about Whitaker is his approach. He doesn't say 'these drugs are bad, footnote 11'. He explains the studies he talks about. He indicts other studies. He's EXACTLY what I look for in an academic paper (he's not an academic, though). Definitely worth a read.
So to summarize, even in an ideal equal world, inequality exists. Just pointing out that the top 20% owns more than the bottom 20% means literally nothing, because even in a totally equal world, that is true.

If you introduce random variation into the performance of the stock market, then the ownership of the top 20% would increase even more!
How can I make my code explain why it wasn't done some other way, or two other ways?
That's not necessarily a bad thing. I've always been rather fond of pg's quote which says something to the effect that "if I had to choose between bad high schools and good universities, like the US, and good high schools and bad universities, like most other industrialized countries, I'd take the US system. Better to make everyone feel like a late bloomer than a failed child prodigy."
This is also backed up by history/every biography I have ever read.
Wow! That is pretty amazing! It seems to run very well in Chrome except that I don't have the sound working.
Under no circumstances, outside of tax purposes (employment, banking, etc...) can you legally be required to provide an SSN in the united states. Any time I've been "required", I've put up a fuss, and eventually been granted equivalent avenues to provide assurance of payment or reference checks. In most cases this involves a three to four month deposit on the service. Annoying, but given that the organization is entering a commercial relationship with me without knowledge of my credit worthiness, bearable.

I detest these centralized government tracking systems on my activity, and hope that this next attempt on a national ID is quickly defeated.
2666 by Roberto Bolano - makes you think or reconsider something on every single page

The Rings of Saturn by W.G. Sebald - a fascinating way of looking at the world
Basic legos.
As the author of Devel::REPL, I've never seen that error or have it reported.

If you want to email me (address in profile) I'd love to figure out what went wrong so nobody else has the same problem in future.
> 1 + 2 - 3 * 4 than (+ 1 (- 2 (* 3 4))).

Most humans think that, but no humans know what a << b | c ? a : 5 && j *k < z ^ r % u means.

Until they learn differently, most humans also think that training wheels help.
seconding dewdney's planiverse. Also, I loved rudy rucker's spaceland.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spaceland_(novel)
http://www.sinfest.net/archive_page.php?comicID=75
The next step is to decompose the wealth inequality into two metrics: inequality within an age-band, and inequality due to different life stages. In Equalland, the former is zero, so all inequality is due to the latter.

So, when you hear that the top 20% have X% of the wealth, keep in mind that the bar isn't 20%. A better bar is the 64% from Equalland.
So.. like IMGUR.COM before the owner had to cover hosting expenses with a few ads. Am I missing something?
If the job was something he absolutely loved doing, that might be an attractive offer.

What if the job was laying in a park, testing out the effectiveness of new marijuana strains?
And we could threaten someone's family to show the counterpoint to that point.

Money's a great motivator until you're near your threshold earnings, and then other things start slipping in, like, for instance, the ability to make a point. Then, of course, is the discussion about why anyone wants money...and the fact that there's more direct ways to affect the value in someone's life. Hate to sound the sociopath, but money doesn't stack up against a family.
I like Google's viewpoint on this... "incorrect documentation is a bug, and should be fixed." Complaining about the code diverging from the comments therefore comments are worthless is silly imo.

While documentation should not be over the top and code should be readable, I am sick of seeing completely uncommented functions that are non-obvious. There is a happy medium of having easy to read and well styled code and accompanying documentation that explains any gotchas and difficult sections. Sometimes just a written out purpose for the function can be surprisingly useful.

If you've worked in a company with a large shared codebase, you learn to love good comments.
Mining-the-Social-Web (Python)
Everyone agrees that some wealth disparity is a good and necessary part of a healthy economy. But there is a lot more going on here than the straightforward "some people are older, some people save".

Of course. And if you read to the bottom of my post, you'll see that I agree that there's too much inequality in the world.

The point of this post isn't to argue that the existing level of wealth inequality is appropriate -- rather, it's to point out that the appropriate level of wealth inequality is surprisingly high.
Actual Genetic Algorithms are not really applicable for this (or most other) AI problems.
Fine. But you're missing my point. My point is that this would be useful for providing government services online. If you feel that online voting is a bad example then so be it.
What does he do now?
That's odd; Felix Salmon writes almost exclusively for the financial industry, and used to run his own blog. Reuters hired him for his finance industry audience. It's surprising that he would make elementary errors regarding his industry of primary coverage.
man I am glad my parents were nothing like this nutty woman
Something along those lines has been a common idea for a while - it was one of the major use cases for RFID tags when they were still fairly new, for example. I'm surprised that it doesn't already exist, given that I first heard the idea several years ago (possibly >5, I don't really remember).
The tablet bubble - a billion dollar lemmings race
Intel has been trying to reach ARM's power consumption for years. Not so easy with legacy chips. Anyway, if ARM gains a strong foothold in tablet computing and Chrome netbooks, for example, what's the motivation for switching to Intel in 3-4 years? Intel needs to be a lot better, not just competitive.
Indeed. It baffles me how many people think being skeptic means believing the opposite of what's commonly believed.
I totally get downside, but it's somewhat limited if FB is making $500m on $2b in 2010, and 100%+ growth in ann revenue, along with likely biz model improvements & increase in per-user economics.

reasonable floor is prob $20-30B, whereas upside could be $100-250b if growth & profits hold up.

downside at .5x vs upside at 2-5x seems like a reasonable bet to me.

DHH seems to ignore most of these metrics, except for saying that 100 P/E ratio is high. however that doesn't really acknowledge growth or biz model changes that will bring down P/E ratio over next few years.

to say it's high is perhaps reasonable. but to ignore that they are dominant, that multiple market participants have set a value (not just GS), and finally to call Rushkoff's recent article about Facebook "fading" a "thoughtful"... all of these strike me as more biased than not.

of course my opinions are biased as well -- I've worked with Facebook running their incubator program in 2009, and I used to work for Founders Fund, one of their early investors.

anyway I thought it was fun back & forth, given the limitations of the medium.
I'd argue, as a 22 year old economist just entering the workforce, that the fact that people just entering their retirement hold the most wealth is quite a social problem.

For instance, the ability of the older wealth to influence politics.
Mine are cliché, but they really did help me in 2010 and hopefully will continue helping me in 2011 and beyond:

Rework - Jason Fried and David Hansson

Linchpin: Are You Indispensable? - Seth Godin
Would this story be interesting if he hadn't worked at Google? The only thing unique about this story is that he hit the IPO jackpot.
From last month: "Ask HN: Best book you read in 2010 and briefly why" http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1973516
That 353-808-A331 is the lower 64 bits of your ipv6 address anytime you do anything online. You won't have to login anywhere! If you need to do something important you'll just sign with your private key and the gov will graciously provide the public key keyserver. I've been trying to tell that to everybody for years.

Your Fair Score is actually your TerrorScore. Would you like to sort social media profiles by TerrorScore? They will undoubtedly use Google PageRank like Eigenvectors to calculate it based on who you're linked to and your ipv6 traffic profile.

I hate to be an Ipv6 cynic but after all, Ipv4 NAT is the best thing that ever happened to online anonymity.
You seem to suggest that cost and power consumption are not that important in CPUs. What do you think matters, then?
So you're saying Nouriel's prophetic vision includes the entire economic world except the government?

Wow, what a flaw. Almost as bad as kryptonite.
The best feature is that you can tell it to do a "zpool scrub poolname" and it will go through the entire set of drives in that pool and check the checksums, correcting as necessary. Given that there are errors that can occur silently, ZFS can detect and correct them if they are single-bit errors.
Why require context-dependent sigils when you don't need to?

That's a circular argument. So is "Why not require them when you need them?"
We do this for the safety and security of the site.We can't just allow any sicko to start posting inappropriate pictures on our site.

This is our way of keeping track and providing a safe and pleasant environment for everyone.

Thanks for asking.
Sebastian, I hope you don't take offense to a small criticism, but on this submission, did you ask yourself, "What does this have to do with hacking and startups?"

I personally find titles/articles like this to be culturally and/or racially divisive. They promote a false sense of competition.
While I agree with you and disagree with the original poster, indeed, not everyone agrees that some wealth disparity is a good and necessary part of a healthy economy, I think the discussion merits more than a dismissive "Nope". Perhaps, if you are one of those that disagrees, you could lay out your position and argument.

It is difficult to see how to avoid wealth disparity. We can argue all day about whether that is good or evil, but it is a dangerous and destructive proxy for the complex question that, I believe, most of us actually want to answer: How do we get the most good to the most people while simultaneously preserving most or all of the autonomy, freedom, and privacy that Western cultures traditionally also value?
I'm not sure I understand your question. Please rephrase.
Pandora Saga
- E-mail/calendar/docs: Google Apps

- Hosting: Linode

- Invoicing: Google Docs, Billings Pro

- Project management: Pivotal Tracker, Basecamp

- File-sharing: Dropbox, UbuntuOne

- Version control: Git (via Github)

- Instant messaging: Skype, AIM, GTalk/XMPP
ARM feels like its attempting to have a offering that would have tons of cores, but lower clock speed ( ie- a 24 core, 1ghz processor ) whereas Intel has the advantage in clock speed- In a few years I would not doubt Intel to hit 5ghz+.

The graphically intensive games of tomorrow are not optimized for many cores (still) and will need the raw power of a higher clock. This is especially true for strategy games like starcraft that make heavy use of the CPU.

As time moves on, I do imagine the ability to run x86 operating systems / applications will be worth a lot as well. Yes, there may be virtualization as a option but I am not optimistic in the performance of such a feature.

Back to your question. When you asked what the motivation will be to switch to x86 in 3-4 years, I think the answer is:
Even in 3-4 years, the amount of developers familiar with x86 and the sheer amount of software already available for it will trump the offerings of ARM.
http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2082119
The problem with the hidden menu in Android is that Google set a precedent of bad UX by hiding primary tasks in the menu. It's ok to put secondary tasks in a context menu, but primary tasks should be visible at the top level. Desktops have the same problem with putting too much functionality in the right click context menu.

It's like making a painting app where the only way to paint is to select the brush and colors from a context menu. Or making a web browsers where the only way to navigate back and forth or change the address is via a context menu. Or a tabbed text editor where the only way to switch files is via a context menu. You don't have to be an Apple fanboi to agree that that is just bad UX. People who disagree are probably developers and developers should not be designing UX. That's why open source programs have notoriously bad UX.

Fortunately, Google recognizes this problem and is fixing this I newer versions of their apps. For example, you can now finally locate yourself in the Map app without going to the menu.
After reading your post, I'm tempted to tell my boss to compensate me instead with hugs, rainbows, high fives and other family-like perks. Since family should motivate me more than money can.
I read the article and it saids absolutely nothing about deflation.
Hong Kong, or Switzerland.
Daring Fireball: Bull's-Eyes and Crosshairs
> Most ARM CPUs are manufactured not by ARM itself but by Samsung, Qualcom, Texas Instruments and the like.

Not quite. With the exception of Samsung, those companies design ARM-based systems-on-a-chip, but do not manufacture them. They take an ARM core, perhaps modify it, add on a bunch of other stuff like graphics accelerators, memory controllers, ethernet MACs, and so on. Then once the design checks out, they send it to another company, like TSMC, UMC, or GlobalFoundries, that actually does the manufacturing.

The capital costs of building each new generation of chip fabs have grown tremendously, which led to this centralization and commoditization of chip manufacturing. Intel is one of the few holdouts, and they're usually a bit ahead of everybody else, which is one of their big competitive advantages.
Did I say that money provided no motivation at all? People perform better when they're doing what they love. At a very minimum, money is a terrible motivator when it's the only form of motivation a person has as the person I was responding to seemed to suggest.

And for the record, nobody paid me to write that comment in the first place.
There are plenty of other streets on that map that end the same way, but are thinner.
How Shellcodes Work
I found this book to be quite tedious. The whole class analogy (a satirical story line in which many-sided polygons are regarded as more refined than, say, triangles and squares) was just unbearably long-winded to me. I've read the whole critique so many times before.

And the notion that the reader will appreciate the three-dimensional space we live in (or 4-dimensional space-time, if you're like that) by going through a novella-length treatment of a 2d world...did not work for me, let's just say.

If you like the book, and many do, I'm glad. But it's not unanimous.
Oh, so we're playing the reductio ad absurdum game now? Ok, I'll bite. I'll pay you $1 million to jump off the Golden Gate Bridge. Wait, what was that? Money can't motivate you to do that?
> "His job is to make Android's interface so good that companies like HTC or Samsung don't have to spend so much time improving it."

An admirable goal, but IMHO never going to fly. HTC, Samsung, et al are desperately fighting not to become commoditized as merely hardware manufacturers (Foxconn style). They desperately need to differentiate themselves and convince consumers that they're buying a unique experience, as opposed to simply doing the hardware fabrication for the Google Experience.

I mean, look at their current changes to stock Android - IMHO nothing really compelling. In fact, most of these OEM-specific UIs seem like just cruft on top of the Android experience. Wholly unnecessary even without the Honeycomb makeover.
DragonFire SDK for Windows iPhone Application Development
We give DragonFire SDK development services for various user needs. Depending on customer specific needs our specialized DragonFire SDK team is capable of developing all kinds of advanced DragonFire SDK-based solution from a small application to composite mobile application.
Metamorphosite changes its layout and design for each user.
Well, there is 2 points here. Are you talking about server applications (Dell) or consumer machines (ie- what you buy at CompUSA)

If you are speaking about server applications:
ARM doesnt really have a shot here. The sheer computing power differences are too much to have users downgrade to ARM. Yes, you can save XXX on your power bill but most people rent servers, not colo. Additionally, you will likely need 3-4x machines to equal the power of the x86 machine you are replacing, negating any power benefit.

Regarding consumer machines:
No, power usage does not matter. Except in the rare cases ("think green" crazies), Nobody checks the power usage of a computer they are buying at best buy. They check processor speed, memory and harddrive space. (and price)

Regarding price:
Consumer machines are heavily subsidized by pre installed software, volume discounts to both distributor and manufacturer (ie- HP and best buy ) and other factors. The cost for desktop machines, is already very near what ARM could be (if you need performance- We are no talking about 100$ netbooks here).
People pay a premium for quality and speed. Thats the reason MBP's cost 25-33% more than a comparable dell/lenovo.

In regards to mobile:
Battery life is important, but I think most people forget to check this statistic before buying a phone. Regardless, as intel gets more and more into this area they should be able to match/beat the offerings of ARM.
Let not forget that ARM isnt all that amazing though. Just look at the power usage on a EVO for instance. ( http://techcrunch.com/2010/06/09/dont-buy-the-android-evo-it...)

Anyways: All my comments above hold, even considering that intels power performance isnt near what it needs to be yet. As it gets better and they enter mobile it will be taken more seriously.