skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
The real problem: asking people "are you happy?" isn't a good metric of their well-being. The answer you get is determined mostly by (a) their personality and (b) what's happened in their lives over the past few days (whether good or bad).

But that isn't the same as saying that there are no differences in well-being throughout someone's life. If I lose both my legs tomorrow I'll probably feel bad for a while but after a couple of years learn to cope with my new situation and return to my baseline level of happiness. That doesn't mean that chopping off my legs is essentially a cost-free exercise to me though.
Side Note: This is an example of how war fuels economic growth through technological innovation. The production line house produced by a war veteran is an example of wealth creating technology.
http://www.techcrunch.com/2008/10/10/yamli-makes-it-easy-to-...

If you come out with this web application first, then, you may be featured on Techcrunch before Yamli.

Yamli enables you to type arabic on the net.
SourceForge anounces hosted apps
To avoid seeming to beg the question, I'll call late bloomers experimentalists and the early bloomers (pure) conceptualists. Okay.

It may be that conceptualists have a very natural peak in their early years because of two factors: a learning peak and a neural peak. For conceptualists, concepts are grasped, mastered and built on quickly, but are explored in their learning. Once they absorb a subject, they get tenaciously attached to worthless novelty, they find new things, or they're just not able to think about things in the same creative way. That's what I mean by a learning peak.

Second, to go further out on a limb, could there be a neural peak? There are many late-blooming artists, but how many late-blooming mathematicians? Not many. Since theirs is the epitome of conceptual work, there might be something natural to it. One suspects that the, let's say, spark of creativity in conceptualists may actually consume neural connections which cannot be regained.

It's interesting to think of and compare some notables in these terms. Edison, Fuller, Kubrick, Lucas, etc. It would be instructive to see examples of late-blooming non-experimentalists, for example. I also think that there are many fields where artists are encouraged make the transition from one approach to another, such as the actor that becomes a director. Perhaps this subject encompasses much of the difficulty of the artist at mid-life, maybe even that of Malcolm Gladwell.
> you wouldn't have enough money to give everyone a middle class lifestyle.

What's a "middle class lifestyle"?

I ask because poor people in the US have a lot of things that might be considered luxury items in other places, such as TVs, microwaves, cars, and so on. (One of my favorite examples is someone who ranted "I'm homeless. Me and my five children have to share a two bedroom apartment.")
Yes; arguably, the goal of initiative in startups is to reduce the need for it. Like programming.
funniest power point ever
"Nothing is any good if other people like it." http://store.dieselsweeties.com/products/nothing-is-any-good...
"We're still hosting our OSS stuff there, but I wouldn't choose it for a new project."

We're welcoming all SourceForge projects and their maintainers over at GitHub :-)
The cloud isn’t for everyone
Speculators are helping price-discovery.

How do you want to distinguish between 'nth-homes' and landlords?
I don't know where exactly you live, but for any house worth $600K, the land value is probably at least $400K.

The difference in cost between building a smallish 3 bedroom house and a hugeish five-bedroom house is quite small as a portion of the total cost (<$100K). On the other hand, in any major metropolitan area the difference between having a small backyard and a big one is huge. Hence, new construction tends to be huge houses on tiny lots.
> * To mess with people

Please do not troll.
The "winter" session begins in January, thus we were in the program beginning 10 months ago.
Reflections on Being an AI in a Box
6 Scripting Languages Your Developers Wish You'd Let Them Use
Yeah, I live in Palo Alto now and was in SF for the last two years. Drop me a line at jesse@20bits.com
Ask HN: What Makes A Great Admin Interface?
I'm curious what you all think are the finest admin interfaces in web applications.

If you can, please post why you admire a particular interface.
I love how there's SEO links in his adsense ... ha

This guy doesn't have a clue. There are a lot of SEO "hacks" out there, but that doesn't de-legitimize the truly skilled people.

I've done a good amount of industry-specific SEO with good success (both for the customer and myself). Not only that, buy I've created educational materiel that let people learn how to do things themselves. So, yes, SEO is a job–in more ways than one.
We get it: 37signals hates VCs.
Aside from being open source?
I agree that the numbers reflect the model. But there is no way that the model can fit reality that well. So it is a misleading number.
Or the mathematician that becomes a teaching Professor and textbook author.
By that logic, wouldn't you have to claim startups aren't businesses unless they have funding? I mean, I guess that's arguable...
I will throw in one that I like.

RadiantCMS - http://radiantcms.org/

It is clean, quick, and simple. The design is really basic with only the items needed and nothing more. This simplicity does not come at the sacrifice of functionality; it still does everything you need it to.
Accident. Fixed.
Let's be honest - they knew what was going to happen. It's Silicon Valley.
Try this link: http://www.newyorker.com/reporting/2008/10/20/081020fa_fact_...
That could be true, but they're a bunch of successful idiots at the very least.
> The assumption (made by bankers to justify the subprime model) was that after paying lower prices for a few years, the borrower would have some equity built up in the house, so they would be a better credit risk, and they could refinance at that point for a lower rate.

No, that's not what happened. Folks got loans where they could afford the teaser rate but not the regular rate. Even if they'd put down 20% and the house didn't go down in value, they couldn't afford what they'd bought.

If housing prices had continued to appreciate, they could have done a cash-out refinance and used that money to help them pay for the new loan, but that just delays the inevitable. ($50k doesn't go very far when a payment that you can't afford goes up by $1k/month.)

Or, they could have sold and taken the equity to buy something that they could afford.

The only way that they could have kept those houses (without significantly increasing their income) is if they'd been able to do no-cost refis with teaser rates until they were paid off. Since many/most of those loans were interest-only....

Note that most of the teaser-rate loans had prepayment penalties.

The amount of equity that one has in a house has very little effect on the interest rate. The big driver is interest rates in general.
But the Economist is affordable all the world over. At least the subscription is.

I read that in a book (http://www.amazon.com/Everyday-Ingenuity-Solve-Problems-Smal...) that the usual TV station makes less than a dollar for an hours advertisement per viewer. The Economist makes more than five dollars in advertisements per issue.

Most people would rather spend a dollar to get rid of one hour advertising on TV, but not many would spend more than five dollars to get rid of the relative unobstrusive ads in the Economist.
It was broken, but is now fixed. Sorry about that.
It would be great if every site offered a printer-friendly view. The web would be so much more usable. But I also believe the ultimate authority on how a page looks and prints should be you. What if company policies force designers to include ink-draining advertisements on the printer-friendly version (cough cnn.com cough)? What if you don't like the font a page uses, or only want to print part of the page, or want to merge multiple pages into one print job? A printer-friendly stylesheet won't do that for you, but PrintWhatYouLike will.
I totally agree that PrintWhatYouLike will mostly be used to get around poorly designed sites, but print stylesheets are only part of the solution. The other part of the solutions is giving you the ability to take a designers page and customize it to suit your own unique needs.
I'm addicted to this site.
It wasn't docstoc's fault, it was mine. But yeah, I shoulda used scribd. For some reason it just totally slipped my mind. I saw the Sequoia one on docstoc and just used it.
Is the snow intensional? Or is it just my computer?
Well I think its worth noting that the framework's only been out for about a month. Only so many people will have had time to even take a look at Cappuccino yet, much less create something new with it. Not to mention, 280 Slides is, as you said, a fairly complex app. Something of that complexity can't be put together overnight, even with Cappuccino.
If it's being reviewed in the New Scientist, I'd hardly say it's failed.
What problem? Authors have to use their issues.

Think method acting.
Further info: an article listing the goods and services the poor tend to have access to. Not bad at all.

http://www.heritage.org/Research/Welfare/bg1713.cfm
I find it despicable that people are burning other people's karma for simply voicing their opinions on a freakin' message board.
I think your comment was very immature and unwarranted.

The man's wife was wrong to leave him. The younger and prettier woman was smart and fortunate enough to have found a worthwhile man.
exactly, by all reasonable metrics we already have achieved the ideal of a baseline below which people can't fall. the cries of more aid for the poor when the aid already given is distributed inefficiently and unfairly seems disingenuous at best and power seeking at worst.
I love that book. And I love Honest Tea.

It's still significantly more expensive than the average magazine in the States.

http://www.micro-gems.net/servlet/the-386/The-Economist-1yr-...

Now certainly $80 is affordable (if you have a job), but most of the magazines I used to subscribe to, I paid $5-$20 per year.
"We have all been lied to with this 'Ruby is slow' stuff."  Yehuda Katz MerbCamp keynote video
Aargh. I thought the over quota issues had been fixed :-( GAE is a great service, and it makes deploying and hosting an application dead simple, but how it actually works is a big mystery. GAE doesn't give any indication that your application is at or near the limit of a quota. Even now, while PrintWhatYouLike is giving over quota errors, the GAE dashboard for PrintWhatYouLike says that everything is a-ok. DocSavage, I wish I would have taken your advice a few weeks ago:)
The Programming Aphorisms of Strunk and White
I'm working on porting a desktop app over to Cappuccino. It's important to remember that Cappuccino doesn't include all of the components found in the Cocoa frameworks yet. This makes it a little hard to port an app over directly.

For example, I just spent my weekend writing a few hundred lines of tableview code, since that's one of the classes that's missing from the framework. For my app, tableviews are essential.

I wouldn't expect my port to be done before December. Moving a desktop app over to the web isn't just a matter of slapping it in a browser. Some things have to be fundamentally redesigned to fit within a browser window.
Good point. Where are you from?
RjDj Generates An Awesome, Trippy Soundtrack For Your Life
Or you can live in Alaska.

In 2008, the oil dividend was a record $3269 per person.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alaska_Permanent_Fund
> But, when housing prices dropped, many of these houses were now worth less than the outstanding amount on the mortgage, even after a few years of paying down the loan.

If you look at the loan amortization table for a 30 year fixed loan, you'll see that there's very little pay-down in the first several years. There's zero pay-down with interest-only loans, which many of the teaser-programs were. There's NEGATIVE pay-down with interest-deferred loans (which many of the teaser-programs were).

> Basically, it is easier to afford a house if it maintains its value after you buy it, because the equity gives you more flexibility in refinancing.

Refinancing makes a house more affordable only if interest rates decline, and then only if you don't take money out.
economist is weekly. 4x20 = 80. it is exactly on par with most magazines. and considering the quality you're getting a bargain.
What to do attribute that to? The situation: They're an overseas code shop, strategic desicions are made in the US, etc or the corporate culture of the Indian office or something else.
As a 45-year-old with an interest in startups that borders on the unhealthy :-) I am more than happy to see this kind of validation in print.
Dude, don't condition yourself. And the answer is right there in your words, you picked a great analogy. Start now training for next year! Make a plan. Have a progress log. Make a mockup. Make a prototype.

- A marathon runner
How to make $ 700 in 90 days
Update: There's now a downloadable/desktop version of Luminotes for both Linux and Windows.
I agree... that blog post came off a bit arrogant and naive TBH. It doesn't sound like Jason has an ounce of experience outside of 37signal's success.

On the flipside, I've seen wayyy to many inexperienced but well-funded companies burn through cash like it's never ending and with little purpose or direction. So in that regard, I do agree with the general point of his post.
But should a competing centre emerge in Bangalore of Beijing, it'd be hard to beat.
Why not outsource everything?
Subscribing to the economist is on par if you buy all your other magazines from a news stand - yes.

I agree it's well worth it. My original argument was that it's expensive compared to most magazines, which it is.
I'm going to attempt rational discourse. So far you guys don't seem to like it so much.

I'm not an economist. I don't read the guy. I'm sure he's the bees knees and the next best thing to sliced bread.

I simply make the observation that the word is out that the Noble prize is a little myoptic. I've also heard that Krugman has become a reliable shill for the left. So when I heard he got the prize, I laughed. It seemed funny to me.

Maybe I'm completely wrong. Glad to admit it. Let's let history be the judge. Or -- you can accuse me of trolling and downmod the crap out of my comments. I'm not looking for an argument. If you can understand that, we can talk reasonably. If not -- well, you always have that little down arrow to click on, right? That beats saying something intelligent.

Thanks for the reply.
You might regret the offer. We're pushing something like ~2.5TB a month off of the SF mirror system.
"Anybody today can achieve excellent search engine ranking for his own blog or website in his sparetime"

That is something that always gets me. How can easy (implied) be a meaningful term for anything that is competitive. This is not like run a mile in x minutes (if x is big enough, anyone can do it), This is like run a mile faster then everyone else. By definition, not everyone can do it.
Bill Gates on the financial crisis
As an independent, I would be extremely bummed if I was never allowed to travel or live in any of the blue states (on the site page). Can't say the same for the red states.
Not quite, a syndrome is a set of correlated symptoms.

Basically, consider the sumptoms of deafness, impotence and tingling in the hands and feet (D, I and T). Suppose that deafness, impotence and tingling are all independent of each other (P(D | I) = P(D)). In this case, there is no syndrome. If, however, they are strongly correlated(P(D | I) >> P(D)), we have a syndrome.

Basically, "deaf and impotent provides no information about tingling" == no syndrome.

"Deaf and impotent implies a high probability of tingling" == syndrome.
It's a probability estimate. There is no reality to which it corresponds - that's the popular vote and electoral college projections. And there I expect the model will do exceedingly well, as it did during the primaries.
Of course you can always use Conway's surreal numbers (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Surreal_number).

I can only recommend reading his book 'On Numbers and Games':

"On Numbers and Games is a mathematics book by John Horton Conway. The book is a serious mathematics book, written by a preeminent mathematician, and is directed at other mathematicians. The material is, however, developed in a most playful and unpretentious manner and many chapters are accessible to non-mathematicians." (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/On_Numbers_and_Games)
Crappy post. The cream of any UI crop is able to combine both pretty and usable. The line "The interface is too beautiful, there’s too much of it - it’s distracting because you cannot easily focus on the news stories" is bullshit and I know so every time I use my iPhone.

If there's a problem with the newspond interface then its not usable enough - not too good looking.
What the? Did you even read the article?

It's actually quite a basic problem with the unlock screen and shows why ethnographic research is so important -- real world scenarios are very different to the lab. I can often see the smear of where I unlock my iPhone. It is not a stretch by any means to imagine you could see the unlock pattern quite easily on the G1.
Back to the opt-out vs opt-in debate.

One that should drive the pure theory guys nuts. In theory, it shouldn't make any difference. In practice, it would.
If it is rented, it isn't an nth home.
ZFS & MySQL/InnoDB Compression
Little Known Ways to Ruby Mastery by Stuart Halloway
>However, seeing this posted by pg makes me think that this is the post that people will point to as an excuse for posting politics on YC.

This is election silly season... things will calm down after Obama wins next month. At least until there is more info about his proposal to eliminate the capital gains tax for startups.
Microsoft’s Next OS To Be Called “Windows 7″. Seriously
Unfortunate situation, but they are handling it in a very mature way.
I know a lot of ppl in India who work in outsourced companies. They are pretty smart than many American counterparts I've seen, but they lack confidence and decision making. Thier confidence also gets shattered by doing crappy report generation,formatting,testing kind of work while only some of them are motivated enough to side projects.
Austin is supposed to be pretty good.
Both Aardvark and Nuke Anything are super cool tools, and I stole a lot of ideas from them while creating PrintWhatYouLike. But PrintWhatYouLike also adds a whole bunch of new stuff no other service offers. Here are a few of the new features:

* pwyl is a webapp so you don't need to customize or install anything and you aren't tied to any particular browser

* merge pages together - you can combine multiple pages together into one page, and print them as one document. Your changes from the first page are automatically applied to any additional pages.

* pwyl is easy to use - there is a full toolbar, and you can see what you have selected. With Aardvark you have to memorize keyboard commands

* extra features like change text size, font, remove images.
Oh, please no...
The so-called insurance is a promise by the central bank to print money to cover your deposit. That is, to steal value from everyone else holding cash in order to pay for the losses of those that choose to invest theirs unwisely.

It's not like an insurance company that keeps enough real cash reserves to cover potential costs. For example, the FDIC only has enough in reserve to cover ~1% of the deposits in US banks.
Out of curiosity, what exceptions do you take to left-leaning ideology? From an economic, social, or military standpoint do you find major problems with it, and why?(Just trying to drive understanding, not argument.)
I wasn't stating which the outliers test, I was saying how to read the graph.
Thanks! This change will appear in the next release.
"I can forgive Alfred Nobel for having invented dynamite, but only a fiend in human form could have invented the Nobel Prize."
Again, you seem to be conflating the Nobel peace prize (awarded in Norway by one committee on the basis of inherently political criteria that you may or may not find "myopic") with the Nobel prize in Economics* , a prize given by a completely separate committee in Sweden on the basis of technical criteria that have been more or less uniformly judged uncontroversial, objective and non-political. While I'm sure there has been the occasional argument about who deserves it more, I'm not aware of anyone anywhere who's made the argument that the economics prize is a "little myopic", nor do I know who might be spreading that "word" either.

Basically: you are making a baldly partisan, political argument where none is appropriate. If you admit to not knowing enough to decide for yourself, the proper judge is not "history", but the experts on the committee who do know this stuff quite well.

* Strictly, not true. The economics prize wasn't endowed by Alfred Nobel, but added more recently using funds from the original trust. Or something to that effect.
There is a different strand of criticism of Krugman (and the neo-Keynesians in general) that is quite apart from his politics. At some level, this is a criticism of the modern economic profession itself, and its worship of mathematical models. This is conceptually analogous to but quite distinct from the Wall Street addiction to quantitative/stochastic modeling, which is behind much of the present mess. Krugman represents the pinnacle of that mathematical tradition. To be fair, Milton Friedman, ideologically the polar opposite of Krugman, has also faced similar criticism.
Personally I find the left and right very willing to take away my freedoms. The right wants to take away my freedoms to protect me and to keep our nation's religious heritage. The left wants to take away my freedom in the name of the greater good, the environment, redistributing wealth, and being "fair" ("fair" is a word that is used to evoke emotional a response)

I don't listen to talk radio, I don't visit those sites that were mentioned, and I don't subscribe to anything more political that RealClearPolitics.com. So my comments were in no way meant to be controversial. I thought I had a right to share my amusement (and ignorance, for that matter)

In my opinion, we do the best when we get both sides arguing with each other to find solutions in most of the problems we have. As such, I treasure dearly both my conservative and liberal friends -- ideologies are never completely correct, but honestly comparing different opinions kicks ass, whether its politics or startups.
Founders in Mountain View area: share your tears with us
The founders of Fuzzyshot.com would like to throw a pizza party for the poor suckers, err we mean entrepreneurs in the Mountain View area that want to get together to share stories of pain, suffering, and misery.

We only have a few requirements:

1. You are working full-time on your startup.

2. You have not been funded by any outside investors.

3. You enjoy eating food that was purchased with somebody's life savings. :)

When: OCTOBER, 21, 2008, 7 P.M.
Location: Mountain View, CA

We don't know if anybody would be interested in something this, but it's something we would've liked to go to if somebody else had thrown it.

http://anyvite.com/events/home/8tiyoj6eud/worlds-smallest-violin