skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Krugman's article seemed to be a relatively unbiased summary of an academic area called Optimal Currency Area: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Optimum_currency_area

A "Currency Area" has benefits and drawbacks. The benefits are mostly microeconomic in nature. For instance, if I can contract to buy something from you in the future without having to hedge currency risk or change money, that's a benefit.

The drawbacks are mostly macroeconomic in nature. For instance, Germany is doing OK now while Greece is suffering. However, they share one currency (the euro). If they had two currencies, Greece could devalue its currency, which would boost its economy.

The drawbacks can be mitigated by things like labor mobility, e.g. Greeks fleeing Greece to go to Germany where the economy is better. This happens in the US all the time. However, Greeks and Germans don't share a language, so this limits labor mobility.

Similarly, price/wage flexibility is important, but again, Europe does poorly on this test because its unions and work rules.

Another way to mitigate currency area drawbacks is for the region to have a "transfer union" that can use fiscal policy to spend more money in struggling regions. However, Germans don't like the idea of giving money to profligate Greeks who waste it (this is their view).

All in all, most economists don't think that Europe is an Optimal Currency Area and that weak countries will be kicked out of the Eurozone.
If you are in depression, do continue your regular treatment and anti-depressants till the docs allow you to stop. Once you are treated, then mindfulness/ being in the Now, can move you to happiness and freedom. I say this because no one (I've read) has said this cures depression. And the root of depression can be bio-chemical.
However, in the long run, you would give up medication (hopefully in a year), and then the "present moment" is the key. The beauty is that is becomes easy and natural after a while. If you've suffered (been unhappy) then you have the motivation not to give up, to take this through to completion.

Go through Eckhart Tolle and Mooji (on youtube). "Power of Now" is good. Start this moment.
Didn't check out Licorize yet but from a first impression this looks a bit different with the "projects" and "todos" ... or maybe i don't understand it fully.

Did you check out the content extraction, instant-search or posting a youtube url for example?

Thanks for the feedback.
Huge war over whether Java is pass by reference or pass by value.
Only now are we about to see the real battle between iPhone and Android
Ah - sorry - I was being a bit t'ick, and didn't twig the time thing. Should I require it, I will keep it in mind. Thank you.
Reminds me of our bridge making challenge:

Given a set of Popsicle sticks, glue and metal wire we were to build a bridge that spanned 3 feet. The winner was the one that could design the bridge such that the force (uniformly applied in the middle third of the bridge) divided by the squared weight of materials used was the winner.

I had the bright idea to totally minimize wood usage, wrap every single joint in wire then cover it with five layers of glue, and prestress the entire bridge to get the most out of the wire.

Our bridge was so ugly that when we put it down the prof and all the viewers from class just started laughing. We ended up winning (just barely though, someone else had a similar type of hack that I can't remember). Of course we didn't hold that much weight (33 percentile), but ours was by far the lightest.
Why I Am Switching to Interleaved Email Replies and Why You Should Too
Good call. His blog is also phenomenal, but it would probably be difficult to fully understand unless you've read his book first.
One more thing: I'm also using it for things like a shopping list where you can add a sentence with hashtag (like on twitter) and it automatically generates a tag out of it for you to filter.

http://thinkery.me/nader/4d2b4a6e747759286c000000

or something like an amazon product: http://thinkery.me/nader/4d1d0ec2747759af42000000
Unfortunately the original Quest for Glory games ran on Sierra's SGI and not the AGI which is used for the games here. This link has a good write-up about game interpreters: http://oss.sgi.com/LDP/HOWTO/Linux-Gamers-HOWTO/interpreters...
You should put SPOILER somewhere in the beginning of your comment, because it does contain them, on some of the best parts of the game too
Tablets will finish off netbooks in 2011
Uncluttered benefits of learning people’s names
A tangentially related story:

Talented secondary school kids all across America end up doing egg drop competitions all the time. But the rules of each competition are each slightly different. A friend of mine was in a competition which was scored like this:

Score = (intactness of egg, as 1 or 0)/(distance to target)/(mass of egg-protecting device)

While everybody else designed careful egg encasements, but my friend played video games and read sci-fi novels. When it was his turn to test his "device", he grabbed the egg and threw it away from the target, into a nearby bush, which broke the fall and kept the egg intact.

His great distance from the target would have made his score very low. But since he didn't actually have a device, the judges were forced to divide by zero...
It might be hard to change now. They've been around for a couple of years and won an award http://www.mynameise.com/about/press
As a rant this was mediocre, as a rebuttal this was lame.
I have a HN litmus test: if the comment section hates it, then pay attention. Other themes that persist are google, facebook, twitter, zynga, dhh, ebooks, mba, and pretty much anything that's acquired.
Agreed, they should at least replace it with 0o777 or something. While they're at it I wouldn't mind 0b10101 notation either.

Considering javascript as a browser only language is shortsighted, especially given the existence of things like Node.js.
Create a simpler and flexible JavaScript API using Partial Functions
How I managed running a startup and writing a book - Sahil Parikh
at first I thought this was an Onion article...
See Something? Cite Something.
All the outcry over this I've read is basically a complaint that you can't ship one codec for HTML5 video, which you've never been able to do. That's what the whole argument over the video tag has always been about.

The only difference this makes is that this cements the split instead of everybody expecting Firefox and Opera to give up and adopt H.264. If you were willing to ship just H.264 and flash fallback for Firefox/Opera, why wouldn't you be willing to ship H.264 and flash fallback for Chrome?
And WebM is not proprietary how? The article did a brilliant job of listing the nuances of "open".
This looks like great info to have and we've been building out similar tools for both internal use and some tailored ones for our customers, but I won't know until later because the site's leading is so awful as to be unreadable and I had to throw it in instapaper instead to read later. You could drive a truck through the space in between the lines. So many sites mess this up and I don't know where the trend of insanely high line-height values are coming from, since I'm guessing it's usually not part of the default template styles.

It's really simple - keep the line-height down to about 120-140%. And the shorter the line length - like with this article - the less distance you need because the eye is wrapping back around from the right edge at quicker intervals, so it doesn't lose it's place on the left.
I have to disagree, the article points out a lot of flaws in the Ars. article. The premise of the article is self-contradictory: H.264 is patent encumbered, open web means open/free to use for anybody, these two don't relate to each other.

I find it dubious to suggest the following: we should use it, just because most other people use it.
Google dropping this codec actually helps prevent h.264's monopoly.
More:

Share everything, preferably on github.

Play fair and deploy an API.

Don't hit people with bait-and-switch privacy policies.

Put things back where you found them or use garbage collection.

Clean up your own mess by refactoring, documenting and commenting with a full test suite.

Sanitize your inputs before you insert.

Flush your input buffer.

Live a balanced life - learn some and think some and hack and paint and sing and dance and play and work every day some.

When you send data out into the world, watch out for packet sniffers, hold hands, and stick together.

Goldfish and hamsters and white mice and processes and even the little seed in the Styrofoam cup - they all die. So do we.
We're developing simple technology that will allow non-technical users to start building shared dashboards in a native web spreadsheet.

We would love to speak to anyone with a strong interest in this area - just give me a bell.
I think there's a difference between getting "supporting data" (or your own medical test results) and using a physician (and a university's name) without their express permission to both:

1. promote a commercial work, and
2. espouse an exercise regime that may be harmful.

Tim has responded to my comment on that original post:

"Matt,

To be clear: - Dr. Plato took most of the measurements in one chapter titled “Geek to Freak” - As she noted, I’ve contacted her several times (phone and email) in the desire to confirm data and even repeat tests. My last email to her was in March of 2009 and read:

“Dear Dr. Plato,

It has been some time since we last spoke, and I hope this finds you well! We did a number of hydrostatic weighings and circumference measurements back in 2005/2006, when I was gaining a lot of muscular weight as an experiment.

Are you still working at the Human Performance Laboratory? I will be writing a new book about physical optimization and will need to track things well. Do you have any availability for a visit from me and one other person anytime soon?”

If I wanted to falsify data, I wouldn’t include a specific person’s name. Too much headache for everyone. I hoped to actually work with Dr. Plato to present things, but she didn’t respond to my email/phone.

That is. Nothing sinister about it.

All the best,

Tim Ferriss"
By external representation I mean a representation of code and/or data that the programmer can see and/or interact with. With current technologies this almost always means some form of serialized text (an exception would be LabView where programs are represented through an interactive graphical environment).

An internal representation is a representation of code and/or data that is processed internally by a computer but is not directly visible to the programmer.

Example:

Internal representation:

(defun fact (n)
(case n (1
1)
(otherwise (* n (fact (- n 1))))))

External representation:

The set of linked cons cells that the above list gets parsed into by a Lisp interpreter.
The key insight is that you can control your own thoughts when you pay attention to them, and through your thoughts you can control your feelings. Your old habits will come back while you're not paying attention, but sufficient attention and conscious practice will change the habits your brain follows when you aren't paying attention.

Whether you use the language of Buddhism (meditation and awareness), folk psychology, or modern psychological (cognitive therapy), you will be using a practice that has not only deep traditional roots but also modern scientific evidence of effectiveness.
So you found a way to let me print with an iPhone? I don't get it.
I'm not arguing in favor of CS degrees -- surely, there is more pragmatic material to be covered -- but what you've stated is overly simplified.

What I would argue is that CS programs give you the background knowledge required to pick up whatever is needed for a certain task. For many, that task is not entrepreneurship.

Would a Software Entrepreneurship degree be cool? Of course, but it doesn't negate the worth of another degree.
He's artful in the worst way.
Just to clarify, because of the downmods.

Search engines rank the pages according to a variety of (hundreds) "signals", some of which are global (PageRank, ...), some "local" (local link structure, page quality, ...) and some measuring the relevancy of the page for the query (BM25, ...).

All these signals are blended together usually with a function which is regressed using some machine learning algorithm, to fit human judgements and (possibly) click data. Look for "learning to rank" on Google Scholar for details, there are papers by Google, Yahoo and Microsoft.

Google itself admits that PageRank is not very relevant (http://sites.google.com/site/webmasterhelpforum/en/faq--craw...):

> [...] worry less about PageRank, which is just one of over 200 signals that can affect how your site is crawled, indexed and ranked.
All in all, I like it. It's simple, useful, and the app gets out of the way to let me do what I want.

Some points of feedback:

- The tagging functionality is kind of buried and isn't labeled at all. I'm not sure how prominent you want to make it, but here are two thoughts: you could allow for dragging of an entry to a tag on the left (this would be even more useful if there was a way to add a new tag on the left) or you could add tagging functionality before the edit page (like above or below the preview panel on the right)

- I put in the wrong pw on the delicious importer but didn't see any error message.

- Again, I'm not sure if this is a direction you want to go, but it seems like there might be some interesting collaborative elements you could incorporate; like logged-in users being able to leave notes on public items

- Mobile would be nice, as would a browser plugin or desktop app that allows me to dump in content easily.

Most of my feedback would put you on a path to be more of a bookmarking service and maybe you want to leave things more open than that. Either way, congrats for making a great app and good luck going forward!
I can't register because my email address is too long 30 chars, it says "please fill out all fields appropriately" I'm running Chrome
cant believe he issed 1337
Definitely need a mobile version. I write most notes on the go, and I'm sure that's true for a lot of people.
Firstly, I love the easy use of adding and searching items.

Recommendations:

* Use more width for your design. It does have too much white space on the right side and therefore too few space for your content (Firefox 3.6.13 on Mac)

* There is text beneath your footer

* your logo on /titncs is blurry

* Maybe you could add an "processing" message, especially for amazon links
>I also find it puzzling that Google is being accused of giving users fewer choices, while Microsoft and Apple aren't even mentioned. They refuse to support WebM, after all.

Err, Microsoft has already declared that WebM will be supported if a compatible plugin codec is installed on the machine. They just don't want patent trolls (successfully) suing them for shipping hundreds of WebM decoders. After all, Google is not indemnifying users of WebM from patents(like Android OEMs like HTC were left on their own when Apple decided to sued) like Microsoft does with Windows Phone 7.

Opera is being disingenuous by spinning this as if Microsoft blocks WebM from being used in IE9 for the HTML5 video tag.
Compared to Perl?
IBM's Watson Wins Jeopardy Practice Round: Can Humans Hang?
Yes but I thank that is a rather minor point. I don't think people are usually thinking of character level syntax when they say that Lisp is homoiconic and C is not.

Also it seems like it would be possible to define a variant of C that did use identical external representations for source code and strings. Such a language would still be essentially C and would be no (or at best only marginally) more homoiconic than is conventional C.
I started to earn bucks for living doing PHP development. In the beginning I tried to work as perl dev, but quickly realized that wordpress and drupal for freelance is much easier since there so much projects. And even with huge competition with indian/pakistan $5/hr devs, I was able to keep my rate at $50/hr..

Now corporate - probably, but I was doing freelancing work, not full time employee. Nor I had any product to sell to corps (this is what I want to try tho eventually).
On the value of confidence
"Google dropping this codec actually helps prevent h.264's monopoly."

How about a Google monopoly? At least h.264 is owned by a number of different companies. Never mind that almost everyone agrees that it is the better codec.
Logrolling:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Logrolling
Is the title supposed to be "naive" or "native"? The two words mean vastly different things.
Mobile apps would definitely be a priority for me, with an emphasis on fastest speed for adding things (should work well with the tags). Also, the paranoid me can't find an explicit privacy policy. Are private notes encrypted?

In addition to the Ubuntu issue already pointed out, the copyright overlay is blocking the bottom of your pages on various browsers, specifically "Get your own thinkery now >>" on the main page and "embed.ly" on the About page.

Tagging and display looks very useful. Overall I like it, and I'll be watching in the future for the mobile apps.
Try it out/Login buttons seem broken to me.

http://imgur.com/aKDjW

Firefox 3.6 on Ubuntu
screen resolution 1280x768
Why not drop Flash too?
Wow, long e-mail address :)
Gonna fix that, btw you can check thinkery without registering by simply typing something into the input field.
Hackers not having sex? That's a stupid myth. I would be very surprised if you show some facts showing that hackers have less sex than the average population. Sex is not the point the author, it's just an extra.

Learning Haskell is tough, yet there is still not much demand for Haskell programmers yet. If there are so many hackers interested in Haskell is because there is something else about it along the lines of what the author describes.
I don't understand your question. Where do you see a "competing API"?
!Flash != HTML5
Love the dropdown for the "see it in action" video.
Delta Wants Your Seat, Takes Bids For Bumping
Here's an easy place to start: detection of plagiarism. I think Joel Spolsky said something about SEO spammers copying content from stackoverflow then editing it to be search engine optimal and posting it without a link back. It seems feasible to detect this situation and actually exploit it!

It should be possible to 1) extract the optimizations and make them available to the original site and 2) start bringing the legal hammer down on the SEO spammers for violating the terms of service of sites like stackoverflow.
His business is convincing people that his luck can be replicated on purpose.
One of the examples of what to enter into thinkery, "Who the fuck is JSON? #thought", is in poor taste and I'd recommend changing it to something else. Not that I personally find the word "fuck" offending, but it does feel unnecessary and out of place.
Seems clear to me that the original advice was, "don't make something that only dorks would like," i.e. don't make it overly complicated. He then took that lesson and applied it to other parts of his business that don't really have anything to do with "dorks" necessarily.

I think the original advice is valuable since it goes against the instincts of most hackers.
Maybe they are different in other countries (and maybe you have fewer options in other countries) but in the USA they are very, very inefficient, have had a few scandals, and few people seem to know or care.

Just google the fiasco with what they did with the millions they got after 9/11 when people had impulse to donate but didn't bother to research alternatives. Local chapters kept funds meant for 9/11 and the national headquarters used some of the funds to buy nice furniture for themselves.

The reality is if you want your donation to go towards a specific cause, you are always best off finding a local charity that is smaller and highly optimized and already has "feet on the ground" in the area.

Randomly throwing money at causes to make oneself feel better is wasteful and defeating.
Those who seem to be opposed to Google's decision are often in the Apple camp (disclosure: I am in the Apple camp) but are also the same people who wish Flash to die because of it's closed/proprietary nature.

So why can't we just envision ourselves embracing H.264 and picture what it'll be like in 10 years? Which camp will be trying to push it out the door because of licensing issues? There will be licensing and royalty issues. MPEG LA is a business at heart. Google is as well, certainly. But WebM could be ours instead of theirs, no?

I think what people miss about WebM is that it isn't perfect - and no one is saying it is. It's not fully developed, but shouldn't we participate in fully developing WebM under an open source/royalty-free vision?

Can't we all just get along?
You can't have a monopoly on a product like WebM that's now open sourced.
Because most of his ideas and recommendations don't scale - i.e. if everyone who competed in taekwondo tournaments won by pushing their opponents out of the ring, then they would change the rules to prevent that from happening. Similarly, if everyone launches their own business selling high margin nutritional products, the margins would get squeezed and the business would cease to be profitable (thereby forcing nutritional supplement providers to find new businesses, like self help books.)

Encouraging large volumes of people to buy books with ideas which don't scale is pretty selfish, because with each additional book sale, while you make money, the value of the ideas contained in the book become less valuable. Lots of business self help books are pyramid like in that sense...
What a shamelessly self-promotional piece. It starts out pointing out how everyone else is slow for not noticing this as soon as he did, and concludes by reminding you that he was the very first to make fun of Google. Is no one else bothered by this? I find it hard to read without cringing because his goal is obviously to write history with him at the center, not to make any interesting point.

Furthermore, the central claim is a massive reference-less overstatement that I think is almost certainly false:

> The vast majority of users are no longer clicking through pages of Google results: They are instantly getting an answer to their question:
The "intuitive" explanation I've heard is that (N-1) is the number of degrees of freedom of a sample with N data points, so when you divide by (N-1) you're normalizing some valuation of the "spread" of the sample against a measure of the potential for the sample to "spread."

I think how "intuitive" this idea is depends on how well you understand thermodynamics. I, clearly, do not.
Runet: Why the Russian Internet Doesn't Need the West
Google's build-out has been nothing short of astonishing. I remember when Google indexed the web once a month - and the web was much smaller then. Now my sites get crawled several times a day - and new articles on my news site are in Google News within less than an hour. The mind boggles.
I like his point that the core of the debate should really be about choice. But then he lost me when he characterized the MPEG-LA as a ruthless cartel.
Ubuntu devs discuss the change from GNOME Shell to Unity
Shix, it's too late to edit... but you're right. Got carried away writing this, and didn't think far enough - sorry!
Android (and Windows 7 phones) leads to too much hardware choice
How to get a good job, in 10 easy, self-effacing, identity-denying steps
Right now, it's basic indeed. You can add a simple logo, contact info and social networking profiles to the cards. We're working on more advanced customization, and adding other metadata to cards, e.g. a Facebook campaign. Would love to know how exactly you define 'marketing tool'.
the way I read the instructions is that you have to create exactly 4 triangles.