skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Hey, I remember reading that post (I subscribe to Bram's blog). I had never heard of Mark Cuban before, so I ended up only remembering him because he is terrible at writing.
Thankfully, however, we're not actually forced to choose between laissez-faire capitalism and communism.
He and Buffett/Lynch are talking past each other. Buffett's strategy has always been buy & hold, but only buy when the price is right. So in the tail end of a bull market (like what we got in 06-07, or 97-00), he just refuses to invest and holds the cash income his stocks churn off instead. So when the market turns downwards, he has plenty of cash to invest.

Mark Cuban's referring to the suckers who believe in putting every dollar they have into the stock market, whether it's high or low. Those people end up with no cash when the market turns down, so they can't take advantage of the opportunity.
i can safely say that you, seeking not performance but "keybaord stability" in a laptop, are a market of one. its so sad to see the fanbois try to justify their iSlavery, almost like a battered wife telling the judge she reaaaallyyyy stiiiill loooooves hiiiim.
GO BACK TO VALLEYWAG
the $25 trillion point is pure speculation. i merely suggest this as a tipping point
Unfortunately for your eunuch idea, the part of your anatomy that makes you think and act like a genetically independent agent is much more problematic to cut off.

The flip side is that human reason and imagination are powerful enough to be able to model socialist societies fairly well. You can actually build an army, or a Shaker community, out of genetically unrelated humans, which is more than you can say for, e.g., cats. But human large-scale social altruism is dependent on culture, law, ethics, and reason, which makes it much more unstable than the ant version.
1. I don't know.

2. I don't care.

3. Why should you?
Interestingly, I tried rewriting one of my C++ codes in Python one day, using numpy. It was mostly manipulation of largish (~1000 x 1000) matrices.

On the upside, it was 100 lines instead of several thousand.

On the downside, it was several hundred times slower.

I didn't bother trying to write serious simulation codes in Python after that.
This doesn't sound too good, but it's easy to get past.

You need a YES or NO answer on this question to the founder: Do you have your equity package already?

If YES:
Then you state that he needs to immediately prepare your stock agreement, and if he is unable to do that he must prepare a very brief document stating what % of equity you are being granted and on what vesting terms and at what valuation subject to the common shareholder agreement all other employees are or will be bound to. In other words, you can't be singled out at a later date.

If NO:
Then you ask him to draft a letter where he commits to providing your equity package concurrently with his own, and to immediately spell out what % of equity you will be granted and at what vesting rate. Demand that your terms me similar to all other hires brought on board at the same time or before you.

Overall, this stuff is just process and if he or she can't get it done, that's a bad sign.
The NDA might be legit; but he should be prepared to hand you the stock agreement within about 2 seconds of you handing him the NDA. And of course, you don't have to sign the contract first.
Not necessarily. Most of the aggression centers in the brain are triggered by testosterone. Cut off the testes, and testosterone levels drop dramatically.

Similarly, experiments that injected testosterone found that they could "manufacture" aggression in normally mild-mannered men (and women! that's one of the side-effects of steroid use in female athtletes).

Also, Shakers were celibate, which is perhaps more evidence for a connection between reproduction and aggression.
the time you save is definitely worth $3k
treat the c++ standard as an assembly language of sort, from which higher level langs are built, like boost. if you look at it this way, you can carve out a sane section and deal with it. if you try to hold the entirety of it in your head and code, its hell
and where are they now
indeed. and lets remember that all of the built-ins in perl, php, python etc are written in c and compiled and optimized and debugged.
Very good point. You definitely don't want to be the one who initiates a breach of the contract, any court will frown heavily on that.
In good faith I continued to work. This was after I was lied to and screamed at. This was in hopes that they would turn around and be more agreeable. Clearly not the right thing to do. It's not greed, it's about getting what I was promised. You're right though about one thing ... paranoia breeds more paranoia. I've been nothing but forthcoming and honest.
Palin, Obama lead in election-related spam | TechJaws
Has anyone read the books by E.O. Wilson? Any good ones?

I read The Insect Societies, and while I'm sure it was very useful for biologists, the ratio of detail to intellectual insight was much too large for me. I didn't dare to tackle the other ones.
When someone is screwing you, they never say "ha, ha" until the very end when they think they've gotten all they can. Before that, this is some temporary instability, this is an important time, don't you trust me, it's coming, we're waiting on the lawyers, that language is boilerplate, this is how the business works, you don't understand the nuances, etc.

Stop listening to what they say, look at what they do. Either they do or do not produce a stock options contract and make good on their other promises -- and I'm sure there have been a few that have been delayed "for now", right? And I bet that either this company has the founder, one or two of his very old buddies, you, and maybe another worker or two - or there's the founder, his buds, and a 1-3 dozen people with 95% turnover every few months.

Your founder sounds like a sociopath, someone who lacks a conscience and will say anything they think they can get away with manipulate people into doing what they want. Read the book The Sociopath Next Door, it's a decent intro (skip the bunk "origins of conscience" chapter) - until you realize they literally can't be like a normal person, you'll keep thinking they'll make good on their promises and the golden future they've described will arrive.

I worked at a startup owned by a sociopath for most of a year. There were some huge promises and I was excited to be part of it. Except that sometimes the founder was a huge jerk sometimes, except the business didn't feel quite right, except agreements never worked out like I understood they would. I finally realized something was badly wrong when, instead of the long-promised stock options, they offered employees the opportunity to invest their own money in the company. That was fishy enough, and when I went to do it and found out the CEO would hold stock 'in care of' employees. Just a legal formality, the lawyers said it had to be this way for anyone investing under $X. When a few folks asked about investing more than $X, they were privately told a different reason they personally had to accept this assignment scheme to buy in. The company was all friendly and nice (unless you wanted promises fulfilled, then you'd get pulled into the stairwell or out into the parking lot and yelled at until you were back in line) but nothing ever quite seemed to happen as promised for reasons that were plausible on their face.

So take stock: what's happened as promised? I see in other comments you haven't been paid, that puts you in a great negotiating position as you own the copyright to everything you've built. But this isn't some bump in the road you'll fix and get on with: as soon as they have copyright you won't be a team player, you'll be canned, your options will be revoked by subclause 2.4.c(iii), they'll hire some . Have your lawyer draft an agreement that you give them copyright when a check for $X clears, and find a good startup or start your own business. They've been screwing you for a year to great effect, why would they change strategy?
Don't do it for the promise of their future activities. There is a chance that they might never deliver (you're the only one in a position to estimate this).

Think of it in terms of an equity investment. If they invest $X on a $Y premoney valuation, they own X/(X+Y) of the company. After the investment, the company then pays partners based on contributions (e.g. it pays you a salary and pays them sales commissions based on success - or any other means you choose.).
Do you live in South Africa yourself? If not I'd run for the door
This (from their example)

// Create a class called Point
Class("Point", {
has: {
x: {
is: "rw",
init: 0
},
y: {
is: "rw",
init: 0
}
},
methods: {
clear: function () {
this.setX(0);
this.setY(0);
}
}
})

looks a little bit scary, compared to native

function Point(x,y)
{
this.x = x;
this.y = y;
}

Point.prototype.clear = function()
{
this.x = this.y = 0;
}

I will better wait for JS2
Interesting. I always thought the reason for playing the lottery was lack of education. (which correlates with income) Evidently not!
What about those who receive the MacArthur "Genius" grants. Every one that i've read about was impossibly smart and successful in science and academia.

They basically get a fat sack of cash to do with what they please, so their job title is akin to "Genius".
Ok, I'm calling foul here. I had a friend who was trying to buy some new RAM for his older system. He is not super-nerdy so he took the RAM stick to Best Buy to see if they sold a similar module, or could at least tell him what sort of RAM it is. The Geek Squad guy took a look at the module, noticed that it was old, and immediately gave him a pitch about buying a new computer. The the PC platform has arguably a better set of tools and third party components out there to make more use out of old equipment, but Best Buy is still a company that sells computers, and thus make the most money by convincing people to throw out their old systems.

It ended up being an RDRAM module and thus could only realistically be found online, but people who are trying to upgrade an old system don't appreciate being given a sales pitch, especially if, god forbid, they are poor.
Perhaps I'm not as talented, but it seems it'd take far more than a day to write a robust, production-quality cms.
every tried NumPy? guess that's what you need for the matrices stuff ...
Well, I think the only major competitor to Bloglines these days is Google Reader which is in... C++ as well. Well, I would guess also probably a few bits of Python in between. Any googlers here? :)
Hmm, I'm not sure if $3k is all you'll ever need for Java hardware. If the application is big enough you're likely to have keep on spending on vertical scaling. But then again, that's what big enterprises like to do: spend money on big boxes.
Ancient Peru Pyramid Spotted by Satellite
Can anyone recommend a book that deals with the web/server-side aspect of C++ coding? I'm nearly half way through Thinking in C++ by Bruce Eckel (wonderfully well written!) but it doesn't look like it's getting near there.
ANN: LightMediaScanner 0.2.0 released
I have a rule of thumb for business: No exclusive partnerships, unless they offer an amount in excess of what I'd be willing to sell the company for.
I need to make up a cool title for what I do. How does neuro-user-experience-engineer sound?
Which leads me to point that out that Java is far from suitable for a start-up. I'm beginning to think that Python plus C/C++ might be the golden bullet for startups. Ruby's C integration is easier than Python, but there's something to be said about the overall language model and performance. I tend to have a main RoR app for the website and a few Python daemons in the background for the really heavy stuff, and now it's finally the time to think about offloading some of that load even further closer to the machine, in C/C++.

I'd really love to come up with a standardized way of deploying small, context-specific RESTful API servers in either C or C++. I'm starting to think that a possible C++/Python bridge via Thrift is likely the best option. But then again, if I just managed to keep it all in a C++ application without needing to run the Python interpreter, it could totally rock (for an application that is supposed to serve 100k+ users on cheap hardware).

It's cool to see cloud computing going mainstream and now applications written in any language can be reasonably fast with the help of EC2, a load balancer and memcached. But I still think there's great value to coming up with truly lightweight solutions that really use nearly all computing power a single node can possibly offer.
In the words of Eric B & Rakim:

"It ain't where you're from, it's where you're at."
make sure to think about a downside scenario. what happens if they get an exclusive partnership, and then don't use your application? how can you exit the partnership?

might consider including a minimum revenue stream necessary for the partner to maintain exclusivity. or a term for exclusivity (e.g,. 18 months).
Why are you just presenting one side of the story? You are making yourself to seem like an angel and they like devils. At least balance your story a bit, it's getting a bit suspicious now.
I'd argue that you have a leg up being an immigrant. When American tech workers think of "immigrant" it is very probable they interpret that as "some guy who is better than me, works longer hours, requires less pay, and has no capacity for laziness or stupidity thanks to his brainy robot genes, who is going to steal my job". Americans, on average, are honestly probably lazier, less educated, and demand higher pay than their foreign-born counterparts, but I am pulling that out of my ass so feel free to cry foul on me.
I always (well, recently) thought it was because of discrete marginal utility functions.

For most people, the material difference between making $600/month or $570/month isn't much. You're still poor. You might get to splurge on one more restaurant meal a month, but that won't make you feel any richer.

The difference between having $0 in the bank and $60M in the bank is enormous, however. You've gone from poor to rich, and can do whatever you want with your life.

So for most people, the tradeoff is between certain poverty or a very small chance of escaping poverty. Squares with the article, too: by making people "feel poor", they were highlighting the contrast between their present life and the life they would have if they won the lottery.
Is MapReduce going mainstream?
I also look for a good keyboard in a laptop before I look at most other factors. This has kept me with Thinkpads until recently, and now I'm on a Fujitsu T2010.
Installing Adobe AIR 1.1 For Linux Beta On Ubuntu 8.04
We actually used these for a project that we did at my university. We have been doing a lot of research with high altitude balloons and we used these to create a mesh network between the balloons so that we could sync the data and get a more 3-dimensional view of the various measurements that we were taking. It worked perfectly on the ground, but a few of the devices had communication problems at high altitude. This was almost certainly a fault of higher levels of radiation and increased distance between the equipment than any flaw in the devices themselves. Overall, they are a very handy product.
I read Consilience and had a similar impression. Useful for entomologists, not a terribly great read otherwise.
This really doesn't make a lot sense. Java is also easy to bind to C / C++ and its performance is better than Ruby or Python. The logic behind that seems to be ... that scaling in memory usage is important but not CPU usage? I'm not really a Java apologist, but it just seems another one of those languages that people bash because it's cool to bash.
Kleiner Perkins' Secret Plan To Make Billions Saving World
Thanks, those articles were very helpful.
Thank you. You're very insightful.
How I Met Your Mother Episodes
Clich here for more information
Power Rangers: Tigers Fall, Lions Rise
Whiger steals some of Casey’s Tiger spirit. Pleased, Dai Shi becomes the Phantom Beast King. He makes Camille a Phantom Beast General. Evil battles it out with the rangers stronger than ever. Weakened with the loss of his spirit, Casey must summon all the energy he has left to stay alive.
It actually depends on which game you are talking about, but it's true that the majority of MMO makers are very anti-bot. Undoubtedly, Blizzard is not having an issue with botting itself, they are having an issue with a tool which can be used for gold farming (see: Bittorrent). The various forms of fraud that gold farming shops use to get accounts (such as credit card fraud) result in non-trivial amounts of chargebacks; I can't name figures, but MMO companies lose enough money from fraudulent players, namely farmers, that combating them justifies the hiring of full-time fraud specialists.

Players, and probably moreso, game designers are also interested in combating farmers in order to maintain the 'purity' of their in-game economy. I guess what I'm basically saying is that gold farming is the real enemy in this battle. Players and designers could also be bothered that bots allow players to make progress in the game without actually having to put in the time to play, but this plays second fiddle to gold farming.
I've mostly lived a first world life, so I think I'm just as susceptible to laziness and complacency. I think I do have some slight advantage just because I've seen the world (and not just as a tourist - I've lived for extended periods of time in Europe, Asia and North America).
For all those who are hating on the free-market and greed and selfishness, I advise you to check out Ayn Rand's collection of essays compiled into a book called The Virtue of Selfishness.

http://www.atlassociety.org/cth--406-FAQ_Virtue_Selfishness....
LightMediaScanner 0.2.0 released
Was I the only one who read this as "Rules of Lego Design" only to have my excitement crushed into a fine powder?
How about neuro-user-interface-architect?
I just talked to an automotive manufacturer, ok, my brother. He is paying about $1.60 a pound for 6000 series aluminum extrusions. It was higher but is headed down.

I think the price works.
The advice I consistently give people when buying laptops is: Remember that you can't change the hardware. If you hate a trackpad, you will be stuck with it. If you hate the keyboard: though luck. Too slow a CPU? oh god, no chance in hell you'll be able to change it.

I write code and analyze problems for a living. Hence, my need for a fast CPU is not that important as I spend most of the time in emacs and use languages that can compile fast. Do we happen to be a minority? Perhaps so. Had I been a media executive, then my priorities would probably not be on the keyboard at all but on how much RAM i could cram into the beast.

Apple is selling a brand as much as they are selling a laptop and an OS. Notice that the marketing focuses on what you can do with an apple mac. They know how much you are buying an identity for your money in addition to a computer. The Apple marketing is primary recruitment unit for the "fanbois" you mention because what they can do with the Macs matter to them.

If you look at Lenovo's sales pitches, you will see an entirely different focus as they are targeting a different user base.

And for the record:

jlouis@succubus:~$ uname -a
Linux succubus 2.6.27-4-generic #1 SMP Wed Sep 24 01:30:51 UTC 2008 i686 GNU/Linux

jlouis@succubus:~$ dmesg | grep thinkpad_acpi | grep model
[ 26.622322] thinkpad_acpi: IBM ThinkPad X40, model 23716EG
Power cuts feared in UK nuclear plants crisis
I'm pretty sure Massachusetts is the most educated state in the country, and yet it has the highest per capita lottery expenditure (over $600 annually is spent on the lottery per MA resident!).

The science behind why people play the lottery is extremely well researched by private contractors. I worked in the space for a bit and it was pretty sad. The private contractors are very scientific about developing the most addictive products per demographic group(seriously, some scratch off cards are directly targeted at certain ethnic groups, ages groups, sexes, etc.). For instance, "Match 3" cards are aimed at poor, uneducated minority groups who find games with numbers too complex.
> Why do we splurge on games of chance and rack up credit bills?

I don't.
You should talk to the Investor.
$30/month is a big deal when you're that poor. it means, say, getting a mac instead of a PC.
You may want to Google ISAPI, NSAPI
I can actually pronounce that. :) I spent an hour one afternoon learning how to, and now it's instinct.

http://llanfairpwllgwyngyllgogerychwyrndrobwyll-llantysiliog...
What's wrong with Welsh?
All the visual appeal of oatmeal with fingernail clippings mixed in.

Actually, I do prefer ASCII for anything that isn't already a convention in math -- parens to group expressions, curly braces for sets, etc.
Scroll up a bit, by the looks of the comments it seems like it's another case of "clueless journalist makes a hokey-sounding story about a real technology".

This is why I don't generally ever read online articles about technology written by 'normal' news outlets.
A coat of Chrome for Firefox.
Ask YC: Ads and The Internet
I just sat through a 30 second flash animation advertisement on salon.com before I was even prompted the option to skip the ad before it looped back to the beginning.

Internet advertising has and will probably forever remain the bane of user experience. But in some degree, ads have always had an escape plan. Be it clicking the close button, finding another site with the same content but doesn't force ads on you, or just clicking the "Skip this ad" button.

Lately, escape vectors are becoming harder to find and content providers, in the sake of "keeping content free" have begun to sell out and cheapen the user experience by providing no means to escape advertisements. Personally, I think this is bad behavior chiefly because it encourages bad tactics that will probably only get worse.

That prompts me to ask this: while we respect the objective of advertisements on the internet, do you think forcing advertisements on sites is a bad strategy? What are your thoughts on giving users no escape vectors to see the content they came to see?
My conscience questions me what did I accomplish in my life.
These days we have the advantage of popular open source licenses, and thus there is a strong culture of "if the source is available, it's okay to write improvements and re-release it. In fact, the source should always be available and free to be improved upon.". Whenever I read about software battles of the 70s and 80s I always feel like the engineers of the day could be pretty petty and against improvement and innovation. No, you can't look at my wheel, go reinvent your own one, freeloader!
You're not the only one to mention memcached. Please go read the article, that's part of what I'm complaining about. They had memcached, and so many other things, including a very advanced commenting system, and yet they lost the opportunity to scale and go mainstream, and remained a niche site which consists largely of support groups and fanfiction. (Again, nothing wrong with that, but it could have been so much more.)
Unfortunately, the python one is much less functional. Complain to your local python guru about the lack of real lambdas, today!
Free Markets make sense when Race To The Bottom is prevented.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Race_to_the_bottom
How could anyone have known? He has vowels in his essays!
> The “->” is supposed to be read as a lambda (λ), since relying on unicode characters in code is generally bad news.

Interesting. Why? Personally I would radically prefer the λ and any competent editor could make it a single keystroke if it doesn't already.

I really wish we did use more unicode in our source code. "≠", for example, is much clearer to me than "!=".