skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
>This approach takes people out of anonymity and potential incorrect contributions

Well, I'm sold. I'd hate to have something politically incorrect corrupting my precious bodily fluids.
I agree with this to some extent, but I think the author goes too far. The purpose of math education is not to make theoretical mathematicians. Only a small number of students in math classes will become mathematicians, and the rest are acquiring a set of tools that they'll use to solve problems in the real world. Proofs and conjectures and abstract reasoning, interesting as they may be, are irrelevant to most people's needs.

Here's a better analogy: a mathematician is a composer, and people who use math are singers and instrumentalists. There will always be a few people who love composing, and their work is important. But the majority of people have neither the ability nor the motivation to write original compositions. They'd rather just be given music to play.

For the composers among us, this can be hard to stomach. Writing music is so exhilarating, and playing is so mundane! How can anyone prefer the latter to the former? Well, the fact is, most people do. The rest of humanity really is different from us, and we need to accept that.
Sliding Economy Continues to Push Long Islanders to Nevada, Elsewhere
Do the rising costs of living on Long Island have young people thinking about moving to another part of the country? You bet they do. The economy is showing 2008 to be one of the toughest years Long Island has seen in a very long time, local economists say, and the outlook is not getting any better for the year ahead.
I like the idea, the problem is if I owned this I have no idea where I'd go from here. To be honest, I don't want to sit there and watch 12 second clips from my friends on what's up so I'm trying to think of how this would keep me coming back after the initial fun factor is lost

I'm not bashing your site, it works great .. but I am just curious how it will pan out in the long run.
NFL player IQ by position
Exactly my thought. What percentage of GDP is taken by entitlement programs, also "new" ideas in the last century, such as medicare, social security, etc. etc. etc.
I don't necessarily agree with the article. Math was my main subject at the University, so while I work as a software developer, on paper I am a mathematician.

I don't agree with the premise that math is an art, and that "Better to not have math classes at all than to do what is currently being done." First and foremost, Math is something which learns one to think abstractly in patterns. And this I believe is indispensable and useful for almost everyone - even if the concrete pieces of knowledge will be forgotten later or not directly applicable to one's work or life. Even the so-called "drill" is somewhat useful.

Also, during my work in software companies, I was able to notice when someone didn't receive solid Math at university level - they were lacking in the area of their ability to think more abstractly and thoroughly about more complex problems.

Of course, the education could be improved by having better teachers with passion and ability to explain the ideas, no doubt about that.
Seriously! This gets to HN top stories? http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=256481 is way better reserched.
Be me :)
Are you still working on Arc? You've been absent from the Arc forum for a long time...
Google is selling ads on pages they host that are reached by their search engine. Conflict of interest?
It is greed that will become the downfall of Google as they comprise many aspects of their service to generate revenue.

Honesty, integrity, reliability, trust, et al, are values they should not compromise to push their products. We know "don't be evil" is dead, but perhaps be less evil than you are being now.
Loved the last sentence: Is what it does worth doing?
Christopher Laurie son of Church’s leader dies in car crash | Daily News Blog
Someone made a nice graph, which was posted here not so long ago. Military spending added up to about 60% of GDP, spread over several departments.
It is the poisoning of culture that will be their downfall. Do you really think if Google was run by engineers they'd release something like this upon the world? Heck no. There's no technical challenge in Knol.

Google! If you ever see this, bring back the old Google...the Google that created GMail and a damn good search engine.
The amount of "data" (whatever that means) might be small, but it's a highly redundant signal, that's the way it works. You can't compare the two.
That's unfair. Pg's essays do have a recurring theme of "startups are a good idea", but he covers the subject much more broadly than DHH. Not to mention the discussions of lies we tell children or why nerds are unpopular.
I don't own the company I work for, so perhaps my outlook is different, but I certainly love my job and find that a lot of the time it's the most interesting thing I do.

I am quite a boring person though!
What is deep mathematics?
Does PostgreSQL do production-ready replication?
I do not see fractional reserve banking as a monster but the mechanism that makes banking a viable business. I have no problems with it or fiat currency

If the bank is unable to reclaim the physical money backing the loan, for example by foreclosing and reselling or having and investor cover the loss, the physical money would be destroyed. You see this happening now with banks raising money by selling equity. In other words if the loaned money bought things with no value or less value than paid then physical money is destroyed. If the loaned money buys things with more value than loaned then physical money would be created. This is simplistic description but I think accurate.

There has to be a mechanism for money and value creation and destruction. Money cannot be conserved. There is clearly more value/wealth and money in the world than 100 years ago.
Has anyone else seen http://www.mittzombie2008.com ?
"I don't see how anyone could argue that selling was not optimal for security. Sure, you could gradually save money, but that's not optimal; it's not more secure than getting a lump sum upfront."

That's a pretty bold statement. If you think that an offer on the table is greater than all the net income you're comfortable your company will generate (discounted to present value of course), then you would take the money and run. If on the other hand your company is creating value (net income), and you are confident it will be creating more value (net income) going forward so that the discounted future net income the company generates is way more than the upfront lump sum, you wouldn't sell and it wouldn't be more secure or optimal. I think the issue is that most 'startup' owners aren't focusing on the net income part so they don't view their company as a cashflow generating entity which can be rationally valued against an upfront lumpsum, which means they'll take the money and run just about everytime; why wouldn't they?

I'm sure 37signals could have sold their company right after launching basecamp in 2004 for a multiple of revenues at the time, guessing a couple of million dollars. However, for some reason that wasn't optimal for their security, and by 2007 (doubling revenues every year since 04) chances are they've earned/pocketed the value they could have sold the company for in 04 (if not a majority of that value) and they get to keep that cashflow generating machine going forward (which means more cashflow + more valuable equity).
I welcome Knol, in my opinion this move from Google is well within their mission of organizing world's information - they are creating platform for experts organizing their knowledge on google-hosted servers. Isn't About.com and others doing the same?

I wouldn't be surprised if they will place Knols even above other search results in SERPS - it's their right to do so and I don't have problems with that.

I think Wikipedia is not threatened by this, since it's rather different service. While Wikipedia is very useful, it also has its flaws, for example it is not really open - entity is not allowed (or even persecuted publicly) for editing entry about itself. I hope Knol will not have such a restriction.

I have been using Wikipedia as my starting point when researching subject I know very little about. In the future I might use two starting points - Wikipedia and Knol. From user perspective, that's only good.
There is another knol out there, it's called "about.com", and all 3 points the author is making (including high pagerank) isn't working for them.

Most of content on about.com is utter junk: a bunch of bored housewives trying to make a buck are desperate to write something, anything.
In the case of 37signals and their product line, there's no fuzziness that they are most interested in their business. They say 'NO' to all but a few of their customer requests and implement the ideas THEY want to implement, WHEN they want to implement them.

Pg says make something people want and will find useful, while DHH says make something you will find useful and stick to your intuition.

I think 37signals and their manifesto make them much happier than trying to please others.
What's up with this headline? The original article's headline is "3 reasons why Knol will beat Wikipedia". Changing it to "3 reasons why Knol will beat Wikipedia's ass" is just plain immature and makes HN look like Digg or Reddit. We're talking about two competing companies, not a celebrity boxing match. It certainly makes it less likely anyone is going to take the article, your submissions and comments seriously.

If people here want to keep this place from turning into a cess pool like just about every other social news site it's up to us to keep crap like this off the front page.
Not to defend the original comment, but yes PostgreSQL does have production quality replication through Slony-I. In fact, that's what is powering reddit right now.

Again, I don't want to defend the original comment because it was just a flame and I think the database-fights are just as stupid as the language-fights.
Google Should Do This
No.

AFAIK, Google said they want to organize world's information. They didn't say that those informations cannot be hosted in google.com domain.

Moreover, nobody is forced to use Google, or buy their ads, or click on Knol links in SERPs.
#1 as of Fri Jul 25 09:03:39 EDT 2008.
Freud was once asked what he though a normal person should be able to do well. The questioner probably expected a complicated, a "deep" answer. But Freud simply said, "Lieben und arbeiten" ("to love and to work"). It pays to ponder on this simple formula; it gets deeper as you think about it. For when Freud said "love", he meant the expansiveness of generosity as well as sexual love; when he said "love and work," he meant a general work productiveness which would not preoccupy the individual to the extent that his right or capacity to be a sexual or loving being would be lost.

(From "Identity and the Life Cycle", by Erik H. Erikson)
Does anyone have a link to more information on this? Does it compare favorably with CouchDB?
The ascent of scripting languages
Message boxes are dead
I agree with all, but: grading is currently a horrible means of evaluation, but still some sort of evaluation. Without evaluation --read, accountability-- no forced studies can acomplish anything. And currently school is nothing else than forced studies. Demeaning, even.

On the other hand, if you make school optional and create a culture of liking or perceiving as essential to attend school for one's well-being, then motivation is way different, and grading is then really an impediment.
Oh how many businesses spend countless thousands on incompitent contractors when all they needed was someone to simply run EXPLAIN.
No real surprise that the player who is tackled the most (Tailback) has the lowest IQ.
Fugitive spam king found dead in apparent murder-suicide
The freelancing business part 1: pricing your work
Both MySQL and PostgreSQL are absolutely fantastic pieces of software. Both have their pros and cons, but in general, they are neck in neck.

There was a nice quote that I forget where I read it, but it goes as such:

"Choose MySQL if you want an open source product, PostgreSQL if you want an open source project."
We're starting to get the first user reports from owners of iPhone 3Gs, and they are being particularly harsh on battery life. Considering how draconian Apple has been on trying to oblige apps to be low-consumers of power, I will be very interested to see how Android's more open platform goes. I note that in the article they mention that location aware and social apps (the kind that need notifications) are very popular.

Despite Apple's best efforts, these apps hurt the battery life of the iPhone. What will this do for Android, which has much less control over hardware, and much less control of apps that can be put on the system?
That's quite interesting what you write.

It makes me think about gold backed currency. Suppose someone builds a house, there is now more value in the world, but there is the same amount of gold. So if all currency was gold backed it would cause massive deflation as new value was created in the world, but the amount of gold remained constant.

That makes me think that money is not backed by nothing - it's backed by all sorts of physical stuff all over the world.

Am I wrong?
The Wikipedia entry for the Wonderlic test has some interesting information as well: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wonderlic_Test

There's also a "fan-made" sample test online: http://www.efplfp.stealingisgood.com/wpt.html

While somewhat indicative of the types of questions you could expect to see on the test the real thing is much more difficult. The questions start out very easy and get progressively more difficult. Many of the questions are not multiple choice either. You write in your answers.

Wikipedia says one football player, Pat McInally, got a perfect score. That's an absolutely huge accomplishment. There is only a relative handful of people in the world capable of that. In fact, the vast majority of people don't even finish. Mensa uses the Wonderlic as one of their admission tests and you can qualify with plenty of room to breathe even if you've left 10 questions blank.
What this and other articles on the subject don't seem to explain very well, is why this has happened.

A 1973 article from Time concluded :

"Today, outside the mortgage field, U.S. usury laws are full of holes; business loans, car loans and charge accounts are almost always exempted. As borrowers have been discovering since the federal Truth in Lending law took effect in 1969, they pay as much as 20% on loans from finance companies and even 36% annual interest on mail-order loans. So long as such rates are permitted, usury laws are useless and should be scrapped."
http://www.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,907860,00.h...

So guess what? People in government listened (or listened to the financial industries lobbyists...), and they did scrap the few remaining usury laws that were still effective.

25 years later we are seeing, in graphic detail, why all those usury laws weren't so useless after all.
Myob indonesia - myob swicki - powered by eurekster
No. This games the system. I could make automtons in HTTPUnit to spawn a bunch of browser instances, perform a bunch of searches, and vote on a bunch of search results, which then would aggregate into google's system, giving my automaton search result hits more weight. So I could make my automatons search for "John McCain" on N browser instances, then click on some hit-job site about McCain, which would then "weight" the hit-job site more, so next time a real user searched "John McCain" she would have a higher probability of finding the hit-job site than an actual site with the information she needs. Weighting results on a local instance might be a good thing. Aggregating people's search result clicks into a global weighting system is not.

Besides, google is nice because of clean, uncomplicated "look and feel". Cluttering this with vote checkboxes and so on not only allows for "gaming" the system, it is just plain ugly. An optional plug-in that collates data onto the local machine of the user is one thing. Anything beyond that is asking for trouble.
This goes overboard. A program isn't perfect if it doesn't have "bindings" for "OCaml and Smalltalk"?
The worst comments are the ones that say, "this is awful, will fix later".

I try to datestamp my comments, but I've seen some of the above with dates three years old. Why?
Linus Torvalds is my god now.
Interesting.

Yet in this study the Wonderlic is keyed to position, not performance in that position.

We know that people largely stay within their positions, and we know that metrics like the Wonderlic and the drafting Combine strongly influence both draft decisions, and fielding decisions. We know that such metrics are designed to correspond with existing ideas: in this case, that quarterbacks were smart and tailbacks not so much.

It is plausible that this correlation represents bias in the decisions of the coaches, not real ability.

In fact, that's what suggested by Malcolm Gladwell. He points out that if you sort by Wonderlic scores, those who come out on top haven't really panned out as great quarterback. If we then look at some of the best quarterbacks of all time, you find that, on the Wonderlic, players are all over the map.

Malcolm Gladwell discusses this, on his talk about 'the mismatch problem'. I highly recommend it. http://www.newyorker.com/online/video/conference/2008/gladwe...
Myob indonesia - myob swicki - powered by eurekster - Mixx
On the other hand, throw a perfectly successful jungle inhabitant into the middle of Harvard and he might also fare rather badly.

To the contrary, I think the denizens of Harvard might fare badly, not the perfectly successful jungle inhabitant. Professors got nothing on panthers.
This is a fantastic little write-up. So many kids these days miss out on the benefits of understanding what is actually going on under the hood of that flash DX/OGL GUI. There are bits and bytes, logic and complxity. I don't know what I would do without the technology of computing systems; maybe try to invent them?
I don't like "unless". Why do you? Every time I have to actually think about what's happening, I change it to "if" so all the logic is actually written visibly.
EBay in Hot Water Again | TechJaws
Technorati: Ping Form
Death of a Spammer | TechJaws
This is a very informative thread for anyone having ACPI problems with a Foxconn board, but it's a stretch to say they've gone out of their way to deliberately sabotage their own product in order to inconvenience the tiny percentage of their own customers who choose to use Linux. More likely, this is simply incompetence.

I've been using Linux for almost 10 years so I'm very familiar with this sort of experience and understand this guy's frustration completely. However, he is jumping to a lot of conclusions based on very little information. Before even asking for help he sent off a complaint to the FTC. Foxconn's support tried to work with him after that to fix his problem and he acted like a total jerk.

With these chicken little types of articles and forums threads being plastered all over every social news site it's no wonder a lot of hardware vendors don't want to officially support Linux. When something doesn't work people always assume the worst and they get burned for it. The more likely scenario is that many of these companies don't have enough Linux experience to ensure the same kind of quality they can with something as familiar as Windows.
Actually no. PostgreSQL and MySQL are certainly not neck to neck especially in performance. See http://tweakers.net/reviews/657

Summary: MySQL comes close to beating PostgreSQL (in speed) when there is little contention but gets absolutely clobbered when there are multiple users simultaneously.

My addition: Even with 5.1, MySQL is still severely lacking when it comes to ANSI features as compared to PostgreSQL and other commercial solutions like Oracle and DB2.
I'm quitting my BigCo job in one week to do exactly this for exactly those reasons. It's almost creepy how well you described it.
Can you also put the list of links in an iframe of the same size as the article pane?

So that the browser window does not get a scroll bar, and instead you have two scroll bars - one for each pane.

And BTW it's quite possible to have it auto size the iframe using CSS. You should not need to have it fixed.

Set:

HTML, BODY { height: 100%; }
Then give the two iframes height's of 100%, and add a padding to the article iframe giving you space for the two orange bars, which you put in place with position fixed (either on top, or on bottom, as needed.)

i.e. if each bar is 10px high, then either do padding-top: 20px; (space for two bars), or padding: 10px 0px; (10 on top and on bottom)

Hope that helps.

Oh, also get rid of the padding/margin around the body.
When asked about the balls he dropped in big spots, he responded, ‘What about the ball I caught?’” So while an exceptionally score on a standardized test might suggest dyslexia, the guy’s an egotistical bonehead even without mitigating factors.

And that is why Manningham is in the NFL and OP is the one writing about him. Excuse someone for wanting to focus on their accomplishments and not their failures and for having a little backbone -- must be a terrible thing to have. Great athletes who aren't uber confident (whether or not they express it externally) aren't great athletes.
I agree with what you say about a gold backed currency, or any static currency supply, leading to deflation as new value is created.

I also agree with your other statement that money is backed by all the physical things. I would have said that money is a representation or abstraction of the value of all things that it can buy. As the number of things that can be bought increases the money supply needs to increase to maintain acceptable valuation. If the money available is static the value of things that can be bought would have to deflate to accommodate the new things that can be bought. It seems that the number of things that can bought increases with time so we have to live with one of the two scenarios and seem to prefer the the first. For most people the deflationary scenario would seem more unsettling than the inflationary one.
Not entirely. But most message boxes acted as modal interfaces for non-modal tasks, making them incredible annoying. Good riddance. However, message boxes still have a place when dealing with the rare modal task.

Back in 1995, Alan Cooper mentioned this trend in _About Face_ (his book on UI design, still a good read today).
http://antitrust.slated.org/www.iowaconsumercase.org/011607/...
I also added this rule but then I started going to anonymouse.org for browsing
Interesting charts on these very points at http://perotcharts.com/ (Yes, that Ross Perot).
I need to build a house, what kind of hammer should I buy?
"Natural selection can’t fix problems that arise late in the animals’ life spans"

Another common theory is that the rate of aging in a given species is optimized for rate of predation: if you are likely to be killed by the end of the year, it makes sense to allocate more energy to reproduction. Whereas, if you are likely to live to be 400, it makes sense to allocate a large portion of your energy intake to self-maintenance.

The actual mechanism by which this optimization is implemented could easily vary between species, but it is worth noting that caloric restriction (while maintaining nutritional requirements) prolongs lifespan and vigor in all species tested.