skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Basically, algorithmic traders are disrupting what traditional traders used to do. In the future, Wall Street will be replaced with a couple of big server farms, and a Demand-Media style bidding system for commoditized stock analysts.

Imagine it - "Earn cash in your spare time - estimate the future profits of Fortune 500 companies, and plug them into a structured database! Senior members represent us on boards of directors, telling CEOs what the computer thinks they are really worth! (payments contingent on the long-term value of your work)."
I think that what's uniquely jewish is the implicit model of spiritual development that's glorified in so much of modern culture.

That is, in judaism spiritual development comes from fully engaging with the physical and secular world, and immersing yourself in all of its problems and opportunities. In protestantism, spiritual development comes from contemplative experiences (e.g. thoreau) that are set apart from everyday life, that hopefully allow you to connect more fully with both the secular world and your religious values once you get back to mainstream society. And in fundamentalist christianity, spiritual development comes from the active and purposeful rejection of secular society.

I think the reason we have so many extremists in the GOP right now is as a reaction to the existential arrogance of modern liberalism. E.g. not only do fundamentalists see things like Starbucks and Michael Cera / Seth Rogan movies as endorsing an implicit set of values and model of spiritual development, but they see also them as basically purposely shitting all over their way of life just to rub it in. That's partly why we're increasingly getting politicians like michele bachmann and rick perry.
In the hard SF category you may also like Neal Asher's work.
Show HN: Play Bejeweled with pics of your Facebook friends
What Is The Benefit Of Social Bookmarking?
Social bookmarking serve many benefits that can be extremely beneficial to a web. Let’s discuss the each benefit with easy example
�Toda la comida r�pida engorda?
Another very valuable source of new material for me has been The Year's Best Science Fiction anthologies[1].

Perfect for finding new interesting writers (Bacigalupi was one of the nicest discoveries)

[1]: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Years_Best_Science_Fiction
Sure, just like they should be encouraged to take the family car apart and put it back together to learn about mechanical engineering.

Yeah, that'll go over well.

Spend the $25 on a do-what-you-want-to-it R-pi already.
Editing services
Editing services we provide are of extraordinary quality; we are very attentive to errors and we email revised documents on time!
Good job on mentioning Eon. I just finished it a few days ago and I liked it quite a bit. I bought it a long time ago as part of Gollancz's space opera series. The whole series features awesome cover designs by Sanda Zahirovic http://bookcoverarchive.com/sanda_zahirovic

I highly recommend reading Tau Zero by Poul Anderson and Stone by Adam Roberts.
This new 'power off' isn't meant to be a full hibernate. It only stores the kernel-related RAM, not your data. So you would only lose your kernel data, which would be reloaded in the 'full' boot. Full hibernate is still a separate entity (or at least, a part of standby as i'd predict).

This is not a change from now; if you hibernate and then change your hardware, yes, you will lose data.
Anathem is the second-best Stephenson after Diamond Age in my opinion.
Animated GIFs have never crashed my browser or cause it to perform horribly though.
Powered Paragliding is much much cheaper, and much more like flying like a bird does. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TlbQ0xbbpOQ
Ask HN: Advice for a one-man services startup?
(Apologies for the amount of text; questions are at the end.)

I'm a fairly "high-end" Linux/network admin with a very broad range of experience. I've no formal training, but in less than 10 years, I am now responsible for 1000+ high-security servers.

That said, I'm getting pretty tired of having my fate and job satisfaction rest in someone else's hands. I make good money, but I'm willing to walk away from some of it (especially temporarily) for higher job satisfaction.

So, I've decided to start my own IT services company. My last job was as the lead engineer for just such a company which focused mostly on small-to-mid sized businesses. I think I'm going to emulate their model as it was wildly successful and there's a lot of companies out there that don't need a full-time IT person and/or full-time a specialist, but need someone to do the work. That's where I come in.

Here's a summary:

1) Pre-paid, hourly contracts
All work and time spent is documented and then signed off by the client on completion. I keep an inventory of hours and initiate re-upping of contracts when the client's hours "inventory" become low.

2) Rates
My last employer offered "tiered" hourly rates ($125-$200). I'm thinking of a flat $150 per hour for most clients. Scheduled after-hours work is x1.5 and unscheduled emergencies are x2 (most clients realize it's not really an emergency and will schedule when reminded of the "unscheduled emergencies" clause.)

3) Regularly scheduled appointments
Two-thirds of my last employers business was from regularly scheduled appointments. I'm planning on focusing on the same type of arrangements (with one/two appointments scheduled per week). I may set up ticketing systems for customers to submit tickets for non-emergencies for me to prep for and tackle when I get on-site (or remotely).

4) Not a re-seller
I don't want to be a re-seller. I've found that clients (rightfully) don't trust most VARs because they profit from the sales. Instead I'll make recommendations and the customer buys the hardware. They just pay me for what their IT guy would do. If they prefer, they can pre-pay me cost of hardware and I'll facilitate the purchase, but for a 10% fee (full transparency).

I've already got some interested clients and my minimum know-I-can-make-this-work threshold is 10-15 billed hours per week. Once I get to 25+ hours, I may consider bringing on an employee.

The great thing is that I need almost nothing to start. I've got a name, the domain, and a laptop. The only thing is I need to save up a bit more seed money and/or pre-secure a few clients.

That said, I've got lots of questions about how to form the company (LLC?), business insurance, accounting practices, and many of the other business issues.

I'm very good at this and I had previous clients beg me to start my own company so they could work with me exclusively. I'm confident I can do this. I just need to get the details and timing figured out.
While there are definitely Japanese influences in American culture, I don't see that as a "Japanification", certainly not to the extent that was feared in the 80s (cyberpunk had megacorporations, etc).

One of the reasons for the endurance of English-speaking cultures (in particular) is the ability for both the language and the culture (which are distinct yet related) to absorb other languages and cultures.

Take as a counterexample France. There is a Ministry dedicated to keeping the French language "pure". There is plenty of lip service paid to the preservation of French culture. Basically France is acting like its language and culture is under siege... because it is. There are many examples like this.

English as a language seems to have no issue with absorbing the concepts and words of other languages. Once that have been here for centuries have long since been anglicized but more recent adoptees often preserve the original pronunciation.

So what you see as Japanification I see as English-speaking culturue and language simply absorbing another language and culture. This changes the language and culture but both remain firmly "English".

One could even characterize this as "cultural hegemony". It's not really any different to Romanization that took place 1500-2500 years ago.

I would even argue that as much as you might think of this as Japanification that Japan is probably becoming more American/English than we have become Japanese. Japan is still obviously a very different place to the US but many things have changed. There is less of the "job for life" thing that was very popular only decades ago, just as one example.
Absolutely so. I've seen this policy many times and it always results in less vacation around. Not only that but in his very post linked to he makes clear that he considers a proper 6 week vacation (I take off August like most civilized people do, and I take off a bit more at other times) is unacceptable because they are tracking a metric called "pace" that proper vacations would interfere with. He then suggests that what they really prefer is that you work at least half time (possibly this is 8 hrs a day instead of 16?) remotely from wherever you are taking your "vacation". Um, that's not a vacation. Vacation is no contact whatsoever with work, otherwise you are not recharging at all. There is no such thing as vacationing half time. That is working half time, not vacationing.
The problem there is maybe that the novel length treatment of the idea is not quite as amazing as the original short story.

One author that I find sadly missing from the list is John Brunner. Each of "Stand on Zanzibar", "The Sheep Look Up", and "Shockwave Rider" would arguably deserve a place on this list.
The Last Question is perhaps the short story with the most mind-bending finale. Highly recommended.

http://www.multivax.com/last_question.html
Curious what you guys thought of this. The link shows what it's like with my friends, but if you click the "Customize" link in the popup you can use your own Facebook friends. Seemed like a lot of games just give a tiny integration with Facebook profile pics into games like Restaurant City. Thought we could increase that just a bit.
Online University
Anathem is fundamentally about the philosophy of mathematics. To someone like me who's actually interested in it, it was amazing.
Amazing Android App Lets You See Invisible Outer Space
Good post Chris.
And if you have to hire one, which one do you prefer.
Some days ago, I've posted this:
http://garron.me/blog/designer-vs-coder-hiring.html
I get that all the time but it seems to be a problem with Chrome. Some people say clearing the cache would fix it but that doesn't work for me. I have no such problems in Firefox though.
I just want to comment that policy like this will cause you problems in recruiting a certain type of talent. Of course, that will be imposible to measure, but I can tell you none of my friends (we are little older but not so much) will not work for a company which has a policy like that. We just had a beer talk last Friday about that.
Looks like somebody was fired and is pissed off by that
Yes that's very true - I have a Dropbox Pro account (and CloudApp Pro and Google Paid Storage and Evernote Premium - yes, I do see the overlap in all this cloud storage) myself, but then it does feel like Dropbox have vastly more free users than paid - while this is of course brilliant for momentum, it feels as though Dropbox isn't taken as seriously as it could be as a paid storage service, given their generous free quota leaving most users without a real need to upgrade and those with greater storage needs eschewing Dropbox for other, older, more established alternatives (who also often provide more storage space). It seems that those of us who really cherish Dropbox's unique features are the ones left going after Dropbox Pro accounts...

Also, for that matter, Dropbox did initially put out their current set of paid storage plans as an 'interim' measure, until they could settle on a wider range of rates more suited to the general public (there is a fair amount of opinion suggesting that their prices are rather steep, even given the awesome extra features they provide...)
Digital Gifts Vs. Physical Gifts
What if Google plus and Diaspora can be combined in a certain way. Obviously they can't be merged in the real sense but they can interact with API's(Although google api is not there yet). Google has a service through which i can export data, and if Diaspora allows me to import that data it would be a major step for Diaspora which will allow consumer to easily shift. I think world would be a better place if there are two systems, propriety(Google Plus) and open source(Diaspora) while data remains under the ownership of the consumer.
In what is probably a related but separate revamp effort, the mobile site is no longer usable on my phone. It just spins and spins, and I'm not the only Android user that has this problem.

Not to mention what a pain it is to try to go back to where you were before which, while irritating on the desktop if you forget to open a new tab, is a significant disruption on the phone.
100x IM engagement using Live Messenger's Facebook Chat integration
No, I'm arguing for a clock cycle that presents an inherent limit on transitory gaming and also allows smaller participants to compete on an equal footing (at least, with regard to order processing).

Once a minute, or something else. That's something the big brains can sort out -- earn those salaries in a productive endeavor, for a change.

Nickle and diming retirement investments does not, in my perspective, contribute qualitatively to society. (A bit baldly, and narrowly, stated, but a significant part of my point.)

Of course, in an increasingly global marketplace of trading, this probably does not have legs.

I see the market as connecting investors with investments. Spending heavily to leverage momentary arbitrage does not, in my perspective, add significantly to the base function of the market.

Such a stepped clock might also allow/aid some monitoring and capping of flash changes -- the continuing dread of many, that an unbalanced algorithm or combination will take the market down.
would be very cool if you could do a voice over of the presentation or something like that. nice work man!
Yes, his idea was assembly line, which by Eric Ries was completely overrated?

And Google - how do you make better search engine by "listening your customers"? No, you don't, you need an idea of pagerank foe example. Without that worthless idea you are toast, no matter how much you listen...

Oh and that thermonuclear reactor that we all dream about and what will resolve all energy problems on earth. No idea how to build it. Listen customers? Good luck with that.
Holes in scientific publishing
A better one might have been: "Ideas aren't (successful) companies"... couldn't agree more on the continuous deployment.
This is the exact reason why these policies claim there is no specific time. No allocated days legally means zero days. Companies use this "flexible vacation" policy specifically so they don't have to comply with pay out in jurisdictions such as California. It's a big scam, which is why the real question to ask and answer is how many days on average are taken, and if they include "half days" as "vacation time" in the response, they are being intentionally highly misleading. Working half days is NOT vacation. It's work.
I expected the first comment to be the old Henry Ford quote about a faster horse.

Therefore, "Slower+buggy is not an improvement," took a minute to parse.
Great deck for those of us working toward a switch from a service model to a product model. It's rare that the lifestyle aspects (marriage, home, children) are covered in decks about startups or bootstrapping, but those are such HUGE considerations if you have (or want) a life outside of your work.

I'm not a Sifter user (different needs), but I've gleaned a lot of professional insight from your posts/interviews/presentations in the last few months. Thanks for sharing so openly.
70/month, I've not seen in that way.
Good analysis.
People usually only see the upfront price they are paying, sometimes the ROI is good enough to make that payment.
That doesn't really show how they measure liquidity, but even if it did, I'm not particularly interested in how the framers of the article you linked measure liquidity.

I freely admit that if you want to measure liquidity as the amount of buyers in the marketplace, then HFT definitely increases liquidity. However, to suggest that HFT is the only source of liquidity, as I've said twice before, is farcical.

Also, it is totally accurate that HFTers reduce spread in the marketplace. They also increase the spread when they are driving the price of a stock up. Also, HFTers aren't unique to affecting the spread in the market. Every large scale buyer can change the spread.

Not only that, but my original point regarding the provision of liquidity and HFTers claiming they provide the essential job of supplying it (ie: without HFT, there would be no buyers) and I used the short period of time of the average stock position holding to suggest that the liquidity exists regardless of the existence of HFT.
Dropbox debuts a slick new mobile web app for iOS, Windows Phone 7 and Android
Blanswe19
It seems to me that the reward for no sick days would create an incentive for people to come in with a cold/flu and spread it around.
it's like reading a slide show of my current life up to about 33% of the way through... I'm starting the next 67% now. I got more questions than you've got time... but..

we're you ever scared of promoting / launching your product in case people thought it wasn't good enough (yet)?
Our Insurance Agency Takes The Time To Remember 9/11
Mother tongue comes from your prehistoric father
Django-forkit - support for model instance shallow and deep copying
I agree that it's a risk, but they haven't done it so far. Even if they did, Safebox might still be useful for people using other cloud storage providers (or even corporate file shares).
I am confused by the point that the author is trying to make. Perhaps someone could clarify?

The argument seems to be:

1. It took 2--5 years to add lambdas to Java.

2. Therefore, Java is like a comb-over. It's old and trying unsuccessfully to cover up that it's long in the tooth.

3. (Possibly?) Java programmers should not program in Java.

I'm not sure that any of these things follow, or if they do, that they have anything to do with Java specifically.

At this stage, Java has existed for 15 years. Once a language has seen serious adoption by regular programmers for a decade, it obviously becomes very difficult to change (for training, IDE, etc. reasons). It's also unclear if programmers of the language necessarily want it to change.

Now, let's be clear. I absolutely despise Java for a variety of aesthetic reasons. I'm as happy as anyone else to have a chance to make fun of it.

However, if we look at C standards, there's C89, C99, C1X. C++ standards, there's C++98, C++03, C++11. These languages, used by millions of programmers (and with very similar syntax, feature set) change every 5--10 years. What exactly is special about Java? Why is the headline here anything other than: "Java: Used by millions, evolves similarly to similarly popular languages used for similar applications"?
The PageRank paper directly references customer concerns and their approach: "Some argue that on the web, users should specify more accurately what they want and add more words to their query. We disagree vehemently with this position."

Section 3.1 - http://infolab.stanford.edu/~backrub/google.html
Yeah, certainly CD quality is good, I'm not arguing that. I'm just saying that it's not anything to write headlines about (literally, in this case).
Ah, I see... so there's no one specific method to success?
I agree with you on this - this is THE problem. What I meant is that it shouldn't be so already with this legislation.
Dear Twitter: Here Is How to Fix Your API
Lactose tolerant milk-drinkers in India and Europe share a common ancestor.
An interesting idea for a less invasive / technically transformative change.

(And a new meaning for the term "jittery market". ;-)
Hi Garrett. I was at your presentation at Schnitzelconf last year -- if I remember correctly, that was just after you quit your day job to work on Sifter full time. Now one of your biggest concerns back then was availability – first your application's, and then yours, because of the former. You mentioned that you were quite concerned whenever you were away from a computer or even a mobile internet appliance.

You mentioned this concern in the slides, especially at the very end. What's your current situation in this regard, both from the personal (worry, sleep lost etc.) and the technical side (high availability, outsourced admin etc)? And what's your outlook on that for the near future?

This is one of the major benefits of having a "proper" startup, as you can share the load. For a bootstrapped single founder, it's a pretty big issue – or at least it appears to be one (most web apps don't really need five nines – unless it's your web app).
How very nice that they bury the horrible news toward the end of the article.

Getting a valid patent is an expensive prospect. Today, many times, small businesses innovate, use their innovation, but never file for a patent because of the prohibitive costs.

With this new law, there will be absolutely nothing to stop a large firm, a competitor, or just a random patent troll to notice your invention (which you are using) and then file a patent for it. And then, guess what? You're screwed.

IBM happy about the new law? What a shock.
Shameless (and I mean shameless) plug for my latest project that collects statistics on what domains people mistype: http://typed.it/ (Log in with demo@typed.it/demo for full access.)
Top 100 Science-Fiction, Fantasy Books (According to NPR)
Tumblr hits 10 billion Posts
Think of your continuous deployment server as an assembly line. The more you automate things the more you can innovate.
From an ActionScript developer's point of view it still takes too long to develop anything interactive in html5. So for the sake of time cost/income, I'll continue to push interactive content out in flash, while using html5 for linear stuff.

With the recent news of unity for flash, the whole thing is about to embark on a new adventure.
Kepler spacecraft discovers invisible mini-Neptune.
Great slides! I especially enjoyed the "great decisions"/"bad decisions" part, I catched myself currently doing some of the "bad decisions" - like focusing too much on short term ups and downs.

Can you share the PDF? The link on SpeakerDeck doesn't work.
c.f. the Saphir Whorf conjecture, those Java programmers who know that simplified access to anonymous functions will make their lives better is by default restricted to that minority that has encountered them elsewhere. Many of these people, in my experience, would rather not be writing Java.
I accidentally happened across the series and couldn't put it down. It explores some of the densest philosophical implications of technology I can recall. Vast arenas, complex growing characters, implications in the concepts that don't hit you for weeks after reading it.

I was particularly struck by the concepts that came from the Atkins character, as the sole entity in the universe's military. The magnificent display of unbelievable power, not as planet cracking explosives, but weapons so precise that individual neurons could be severed from orbit, altering the course of entire conflicts. And the idea of the weaponry and strategy, though controlled by godlike machine minds, still needed the ok of a person to do the precision strike.

The only real weakness I felt was the Daphne character, she was flat, uninteresting and almost misogynistic in her treatment as an unbelievable ignorant and foolish female character. I found myself aggravated during her sections of the work, this stupid character in the midst of such magnificently crafted, almost baroque, prose and ideas.
Google Docs works offline now.