skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
It was used fairly successfully by both of the two most famous early Web cos, Netscape and Yahoo. In fact it was their example that made the idea popular.
This is exactly what we had in mind. The latency of hitting the server for each kanji conversion would make it difficult to compete with a native implementation, but this is just a hack to fill in the holes when no such implementation exists.

Aside from other language support, we're thinking of eventually implementing a passive feedback mechanism that would tell the back end about conversion preferences, so that users could teach the system merely by correcting suggestions.
facebook, youtube
"I do not understand this logic of 1 guy with normal vision = 5 blind guys."

Well phrased.

The big problem I see with outsourcing is that it's difficult to cultivate passion in a remote team, and passion is what leads to attention to detail, refactoring, and all of the other things that make high quality software.

This is what people miss when they say, "open source teams work from different countries all the time and produce high quality software, how is outsourcing so different?"
I'm asking a bunch of entrepreneurs, not a bunch of programmers.
Nate Silver (of FiveThirtyEight) on Colbert Report
this is pretty fantastic. のほんごああかりません、いごねがいします。

that it can be turned on and off with the same click is great. double-plus good.
I found this to be really annoying! You're presented with such ridiculously selective and misleading information on the two innovations. You're then coaxed into making the apparently wrong choice of innovation.

Who makes decisions based on such little info anyway? And the info presented was the choice of the author.

Then... the rest of the post basically says don't make decisions based on such little information! I found that pretty pointless.

Finding a flipside though, this guy's creating a demand for his own content by offering a question with a seemingly obvious answer then shaking it up with new info. That I like: create a problem which you then solve.
The people that complain aren't probably the ones taking the money, but the ones that can no longer afford to buy a "first home" in their (increasingly deserted and dehumanized) hometown.

I'm for taxing "nth-homes" exponentially to n. It would only hurt speculators who overall destroy value anyway. If you'll be using a house for two weeks a year, you should rent it.
you should license this to Rosetta Stone immediately. not kidding.
Technically, it's a misspelling for こんぴゅーたー (konpyu-ta-), which converts correctly into katakana.

But I really got a kick out of seeing someone use the tool itself to give us feedback...
I've met more than a few fraudulent SEOs, but you cannot support this generalization merely because their are a few bad apples in the cart. Every profession has its share. I've also met some invaluable SEOs, especially in the magazine and publishing businesses, that thrive in large corporations as the bridge between the editorial staff and the tech team. These people can be characterized as smart, undervalued and overworked - as they often perform a largely thankless job that has direct impact on the bottom line. In many cases, these people are as close to a starter upper that you'll be able to find in otherwise stagnant labor pools.
The Global Discussion
well, $10,000 is surely the average. I believe it would be more accurate to say that once peoples income exceeds their basic living expenses by some factor it does not make them any happier.

how can I take this article seriously when it has "experts" spouting this? So most economists worry about how taxes discourage people from working, but in fact, taxes can be encouraging people to have a less feverish pace of life and to focus more on time with friends and family rather than consumption.

I don't even know how to respond to that sentence.

then there is this:
a dollar is worth 10 times more to a poor person than to a rich person whose income is 10 times higher

the idea of a decreasing marginal utility for money is not based on any scientific research.
When you say he can't sell enough houses - does he not have enough sellers or buyers?

With such high foreclosure rates, I'm assuming it's a lack buyers. Being a property investor myself, I can tell you there are a lot of people I know personally who are biding their time and getting ready to pounce on bargains.

I'm based in the UK and so far the US market has tanked so much more. If you can package the deals and market them to UK investors I think you could be on to something.

There are definitely people wanting to buy, they just might be out of your typical geographical reach. Knock together a site with some example deals and get some exposure. Or post on loopnet.com or similar.

Google "bandwagon raiding machine" and see some products being marketing in the UK. I got access to one and basically all it says is find people in the US to source foreclosure deals then buy them.
The commies just won't give up. After the obvious failure of state planning in the 20th century they were short on angles. First they tried their government heavy brand of "environmentalism" as a way to boss everyone around. Now they've found "happiness research" as a propaganda tool.
Ah, you caught me. I'm way out of practice ^^;;

"コンピューター"

Sure enough, it's my spelling which was at fault.

Some documentation on the key commands available would be handy - I was able to figure out a bit about the space bar and arrow keys but I'm sure I'm missing some features. I'm on my Ubuntu/Firefox box at work currently so that's the environment I'm working in. I don't currently have an IME set up here. I did have difficulty trying to type romaji, such as "typd.in" in the midst of the kana. A shortcut key to transpose directly to katakana would be handy. Trailing 'n's didn't convert directly to hiragana while typing in most cases - I had to follow with another character to get it to take, which was kind of jarring.

The bookmarklet is very clever. I'm going to post it to a message board I frequent which has lots of aspiring Japanese students, if that's ok. I'm sure you can get some good feedback from them.

One thing that would be a killer-app to someone like me whose writing is atrocious would be a feature to display definitions of kana in both english and japanese when displaying possible readings. Sort of like an on-the-fly rikaichan.

Anyway, very cool app. Good luck!
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Principality_of_Sealand
Why do we need to do more than add a few additional regulations limiting the risks banks can take?
I'm still going to use electoral-vote.com to track the election, because it is so much easier to see who is going to win and to check out the map.

The stats are of course interesting, but isn't it insane to have a "win percentage" down to the tenth of a percent?
What don't you understand?
this is going to used as fodder to claim that all money earned after $10,000 should be much more heavily taxed.
Ach, I wish a subscription to the New Yorker from outside the U.S were not so expensive. Such articles would be perfect for reading in the train, I can't read it now with so many shiny things on the internet.
Why not just print a few out?
> in most cases

In 9/15 cases PHP is >= 2x faster
In 6/15 cases PHP uses less memory
Infinity is Not a number
> e.g. thread startup cost

There are 2 which require threads, there's no PHP program for either of those so why do you think "thread startup cost" has any relevance?
Sun undaunted by Linux momentum, claims many users switch back to Solaris
EBay got big slowly...they went almost 2 years between initial launch and VC funding. Also, they're one of the few companies that was profitable before the founder quit his day job.
This research immediately reminded my of Daniel Gilbert's Stumbling On Happiness, which is a wonderful read. The book details many of the myriad ways in which we fail at predicting the affective result of various outcomes. For example, people will predict that they'll feel just awful for months after an election if the opposing candidate wins, yet report no change in happiness in as little as a month after their candidate loses. Amazing stuff.

Another salient point is that we almost never take into account the fact that we accommodate to the conditions around us. We truly believe that if we win the lottery we will be happy forever, even in the face of mountains of data to the contrary.

The most surprising result, I thought, was that (in the late 1990s U.S. dollars) happiness begins at $40k per year, and increases only slightly for incomes up to $100k per year, and then is essentially flat. One of the drivers for this was that, at $40k per year, you typically get health insurance through work, and this removes the primary worry that brings people's happiness down.

I think the really interesting thing would be to see if you could convince rich people of this so that they voluntarily, without legal compulsion, would give up some of their wealth to make others happy. I'd be interested to see if I would do this, if I ever became a .com/web 2.0 zillionaire.
One can learn from crises
Finally, a way to prevent goatse...
couldn't the difference be more to do with the documented 10 years of practice needed before truly mastering something?

the early bloomers could simply be the ones who started when they were 10, while the late bloomers simply the ones who switched careers.
But perfectly hitting the advertiser's target market, and also still supporting a significant part of the internet.

Sadly, I think this localisation will continue to be a part of online TV, as otherwise it ends up costing the content provider high bandwidth fees for ads that are not reaching the expected audience.
Microsoft set to release Silverlight 2
Popular iPhone developer splits up, sells off assets
it's used as a number to simplify conversations. instead of saying the limit of the expression 1/x as it tends to zero is infinity, we simplify that statement and say 1/0 = inf. it's nothing to get mad and write a scathing dissertation over. if you want to delve into it you can if necessary.

there are infinite stars in the heavens. decidedly untrue if you actually were able to make a count of them. but by the limits of our ability, it is understandably true.

it's about context i think
How to get a job without applying for any
So I am starting a new job tomorrow at Nudge London. Wonder how I got that job? I can tell you that it did not include putting my resume on a trillion job search websites, then sending it out to unsuspecting companies in a hope that they notice me. No instead I got my new job through a combination of factors, including a lot of luck.
Any populist arguments completely fail to take into account the sheer volume of poor people. Even if you had a 100% tax on all income over 50k a year and a 100% tax on all corporate profits over 50k a year per employee, you wouldn't have enough money to give everyone a middle class lifestyle.

and that is if we don't even take into account the extreme inflationary forces that would take hold if everyone made middle class money. If you tried this in reality all that would happen is that prices would rise until that middle class income reflected the buying power that a lower class income previously did.

You can't magic a high standard of living into existence by giving away money (see Iceland). To think that you can is a fundamental misunderstanding of what money is. Steve Jobs doesn't make millions of dollars because he got lucky in an unfair game with arbitrary rules. He makes it because he creates millions of dollars in value to people.
It's truly not the same holding a magazine compared to holding some sheets of paper. I could also read it on my iphone. But the experience is different. A magazine is easy to hold and to change pages. Sheets of paper, not really.
Wall Street, though most people don't think of them as all that smart these days. ;-)
I never wanted to type Japanese but if I ever needed to... now there is a handy web service - good idea and work!

How about adding Chinese too?
Sorry, that sounded like a left rant. What I meant is 'isn't that outside the law?' The law says debts get paid, then shareholders can split what's left. I believe bankruptcy court is supposed to handle what debts go first. But it shouldn't theoretically make any difference to shareholders what debts go first.

Obviously the trick is to make sure your friends (the employees) get paid first by settling that debt before declaring. I can see how that might be legally troublesome. But it's the vendors, lenders, etc. that should be complaining, not shareholders.
Rules to live by:

1. If someone feels the need to point out, at the end of an essay, that they have a PhD, they're probably a kook.

2. That goes doubly for anyone who feels the need to tell you which prestigious institution their PhD is from.
> but you won't see anyone run towards either of them...

Avi Bryant did.

http://www.seaside.st/
Is it really right wing? Why? I've just read multiple articles about how slow Dr's are to adopt it even though, empirically, it is more effective. I figured they rejected it for the same reason people always reject things: "that's the way we've always done it".

Now granted, those articles could have been biased, but I had no idea there was any sort of left wing vs right wing thing going on. Stupid politrix.

The entire movement reminded me of Moneyball by Michael Lewis.
Tomorrow's Apple Notebook Event: Please Don't Call These Predictions
the article is obviously a provocation - we all know what a job is a what is not. SEO consultants have an horrible reputation and this is the direct result.
I'd guess Gladwell would disagree. In his example, Cezanne and Picasso were both painting in earnest by age 20. If it only took 10 years of practice, Cezanne would have been at his peak by 30, not 60. Likewise, Fountain was writing for at least 20 years before he had his breakthrough.

It also doesn't explain why (in the anecdotal evidence in the article) late bloomers start weak and improve over a long time, while early bloomers peak early and decline.
mildly amusing, yes. dead on, no. like watching a train wreck in slow motion, yes.
"Galenson’s idea that creativity can be divided into these types --- conceptual and experimental --- has a number of important implications. For example, we sometimes think of late bloomers as late starters. They don’t realize they’re good at something until they’re fifty, so of course they achieve late in life. But that’s not quite right. Cézanne was painting almost as early as Picasso was. We also sometimes think of them as artists who are discovered late; the world is just slow to appreciate their gifts. In both cases, the assumption is that the prodigy and the late bloomer are fundamentally the same, and that late blooming is simply genius under conditions of market failure. What Galenson’s argument suggests is something else --- that late bloomers bloom late because they simply aren’t much good until late in their careers."
Some recent images of the Sun in more active times
I feel the same way about the Economist.
Thanks for pointing that out, the expanded (and properly attributed) quotation is even better.
Not when the WPCT is based on 10,000 state-by-state daily simulations with every new stream of polls included.
The problem is that most people spend the money they have, expecting more possessions to improve their subjective well-being.

There are some exceptions to the "money doesn't buy you happiness" rule, my favorite of which are:
- Spending a lot of money on loved ones or favored charities does tend to make people happier
- Having a lot of savings makes people more apt to handle negative shocks

It is, however, extremely difficult to resist the temptation to spend excess cash even if you know of and believe the research that it doesn't make you feel any better.
One can also look at other profiles on Facebook. I rarely make changes to my profile and spend most time on Facebook (usually about 2 hours a week or so) looking at other people's profiles. Guy is just a narcisist, I think.
lawyers and doctors typically work 60 hours a week or more. I seriously doubt that the money isn't a huge factor in working so hard.
Personally I think Sequoia's goal with these slides was to calm people down and provide reassurance during tough economic times. I don't think they were trying to really get people to change their spending or strategies. The people at Sequoia are definitely smart enough to not recommend major business changes based on the events of a few weeks.

Kind of saying "Just stick to the basics and everything will be fine people". As a vc, I would imagine there is some incentive to keep the confidence of your portfolio companies up in tough times.
<snip>how can I take this article seriously when it has "experts" spouting</snip> [that] $10,000 is surely the average [income per capita] is the average [and that] once peoples income exceeds their basic living expenses...it does not make them any happier.

This seems to square well with Daniel Gilbert's work on happiness as well. $40k/year for a family of four it $10k/capita. And I think we can at least take it seriously (even if we disagree) because there really is research behind these claims. Maybe we don't like the policies that the conclusions seem to warrant, or maybe we can point to methodological flaws in that research, but dismissing the claims outright is a bit premature.

So most economists worry about how taxes discourage people from working, but in fact, taxes can be encouraging people to have a less feverish pace of life and to focus more on time with friends and family rather than consumption.

I don't even know how to respond to that sentence.

Though the construction is a little awkward, he seems to be saying that taxes do reduce the incentive to work, but that this is a good thing, because they are inadvertently spending their time on the things that do empirically increase happiness. In other words, the proposed indirect approach of reduce taxes -> increase hours -> higher income ->increase happiness may be less effective than the proposed raise taxes -> more free time ->increase happiness. I'm not saying I agree with either one, just that it's not incoherent.

the [sic] idea of a decreasing marginal utility for money is not based on any scientific research.

From the article: We now have evidence that shows the extent of the difference, which is roughly that a dollar is worth 10 times more to a poor person than to a rich person whose income is 10 times higher. Remember, we're not talking about the power of a dollar to buy goods, but rather its power to buy happiness. Marginal utility certainly applies to the goods purchased, and the starving man's steak brings more happiness to him than does the CEO's.
Kijiji is a name you can stare straight at, and still not be sure how to spell it.
Has Google's browser peaked already?
If you can't make payroll, you offer no health insurance, and you have no money, your "full-timers only" rule locks out a huge portion of the talent market. People with talent and experience have better startup options than you seem to be acknowledging.

If you're just getting started, and you have no leverage, picking up part-time founders makes perfect sense.
Browser Paint Events
How I Make $2,000 Every Year Without Doing Very Much
America May Get Broadband for Free, But Porn Will Cost You
I think it's important to note that this was not a public meeting for all CEOs of all companies everywhere - just their portfolio companies. Sequoia asked the CEOs to keep everything private, but then the notes leaked, then the slides leaked, and then Sequoia was forced to discuss it. Splitting hairs, maybe, but I think it's an important distinction.
Cisco grew profitably from before they took Sequoia's money. Some years they grew rapidly, but always profitably until the dotcom crash.
I think they run something like 10000 simulations per polling update, so having the win percentage down to a tenth of a percent is significant.
Confirmed: Obama Is Campaigning on Xbox 360
How about installing Silverlight and you have it for all browsers, running reasonably well in a managed JIT compiled environment instead?

Not saying this isn't impressive, but I just don't see the point ;)
Are you trying to say Seesmic should have raised $50 million? :)
YC Winter 08? Starts already? So, 280 North already got accepted?
Since when are populist arguments about starvation?
last I checked the majority of poor Americans are fat.

"we now have evidence" counts as evidence? I'm sorry but I need to see that evidence because it is exactly the type of study that can lead to wildly different conclusions based on priors.

I've said this many times: relief should go primarily to the children of outright destitute people. Children should not pay for the ignorance of their parents. If we have any money left over? great. But the kids need to come before the drug addicts.

My mother is on government assistance and vacations in europe every year while children go hungry.
he other point makes the simplistic assumption that because advice is do A, when A is universally good, that it's useless advice.

When Sequoia (or anyone) advises to now reduce debt, focus on positive cash flow etc. etc. What they mean is not that these things are suddenly good things. What they mean is that they are suddenly more important. Your ability to raise capital has just sunk. The likelihood of new, highly funded competition has just sunk.

The post just makes a silly sort of a 'positive cash flow? wasn't that a good idea yesterday?'
Maybe microsoft installed it itself in my xp but i will never install it by myself. They bundle it with messenger, live id, explorer toolbars or who knows what.
538 is pretty awesome, and Nate was doing great work even when people thought he was named after a pepper (he went by "Poblano" for a short period of time to maintain anonymity).

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.
You know what's fucked up? Writing about cutting back an engineering team as if the worst part about it was all the effort you put into recruiting the engineering team. Best part: "You can also use this opportunity to upgrade your team. Take a few months, see how you do with a smaller team and if you have the luxury to hire again, you will probably find some great people."

Here's a great new question to ask during your next engineering job interview: have you ever "cut back" your engineering team? Did you continue taking a salary?
Webmaster Tools API updated with Site Settings
Webmaster Tools shows Crawl error sources
wait what? what do you call the CEO of the pencil company? none of those individual workers would have jobs if the need for pencils didn't exist and there wasn't someone who was capitalizing on that need. That fact that the most efficient way of doing business in modern times involves shipping materials from many parts of the world is a testament to the efficiency of the market.
most people running browsers want to make sure that it will run everything they normally do before committing to a switch. i run chrome, but i keep firefox close at hand, and IE as a 3rd backup as well.

i like chrome, and i see where they're going with it, and it's pretty ambitious. just wish it didn't make my hard disk thrash constantly when i use it. looking forward to its future, you'll see great things. it may just herald web 3.0 yet
Thanks everyone for the fantastic suggestions!!! The inspiration for the site actually came from wanting a way to print pg's essays without wasting so much paper. If you find any bugs or can't believe we left out your favorite feature, please post it here or contact me at admin@printwhatyoulike.com.