skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
lostinthewoods I don't know if what you posted is a joke or not, but I'm going to assume you're serious

Paulson may know more than Congress about finance but it doesn't take a genius to see that the proposed bailout is just a scam.

The Swedes got into similar trouble in the 90s and they solved it the right way (a bailout with a fair return for the government): "Sweden did not just bail out its financial institutions by having the government take over the bad debts. It extracted pounds of flesh from bank shareholders before writing checks. Banks had to write down losses and issue warrants to the government.

That strategy held banks responsible and turned the government into an owner. When distressed assets were sold, the profits flowed to taxpayers, and the government was able to recoup more money later by selling its shares in the companies as well."

http://www.nytimes.com/2008/09/23/business/worldbusiness/23k...

so you'd still rather put your trust into something without reading the fine details? Paulson isn't your uncle you know - not to mention both Democratic and (even) Republican senators are just pissed: http://www.politico.com/news/stories/0908/13789.html
This post shows how someone can use profiles to filter and experiment in Google Analytics, which is super cool. I love Analytics (sexy maps, pretty graphs, easy to access) but it's still important to know how to interpret and discuss the data beyond the Analytics page. I'm enamored with my Dashboard, but most non-techies (aka potential investors) don't care how many filters I have. Learning what you need from Analytics and how to explain that data to a broad audience is key. Metrics rock, but they need a context beyond the dashboard.
But they don't do blogs... they do comments. And they've expanded their commenting system outside of Wordpress-and that's something I.D. will have a much harder time accomplishing.
When reading that line, I too thought it was somewhat elitist but if you are hiring you want the best talent you can get and more often than not this means people who went to an elite school. Most of the early hires in all the outstanding tech companies followed similar pattern.

However, if you can prove strong or exceptional skill and achievement in whatever you have done tech related, I am sure it won't matter if you went to an elite school or not (and if it does, you probably won't like it there anyway).

For most businesses (startups in particular) that do not have the time or resources to filter candidates, an elite school is a general simple quality filter, but the world is full of examples of people who did not go to school let alone an elite school, from Richard Branson to Dyson to Jobs to the mass of not-so-famous.

Worry not, shine and hopefully you will be noticed.
The one that always makes me laugh is when a job spec asks for a "PhD from an Ivy League university". Apparently, no one only told HR that:

(1) "Ivy League" means absolutely nothing in the context of graduate programs, as the rankings are discipline-specific and many Ivy League grad programs are mediocre. For example, Harvard's computer science program is strong, but not remotely in the same league as CMU or UIUC.

(2) In any case, "Ivy League" is not a synonym for "elite college"; well-regarded universities such as Stanford, MIT, and Michigan are (surprisingly?) not Ivy League.

(3) Related to (2), emphasizing "Ivy League" pisses off nearly everyone who went to a good college. Those who went to non-Ivy elites (like me) consider themselves excluded when they see these ads. Those who went to Ivy League colleges generally dislike the snooty, stuffy connotations of "Ivy League" and don't like the sorts of people who emphasize "Ivy".
Social Media ABC's - K is for Klog
Whatever dude, everyone knows Etc U was a total party school
Screencasting advice from ShowMeDo founder
I'm in your target market, but I do not have any need for the features you're offering. Have you worked with independent software developers to identify the need you're satisfying with your product? For my own case, at least, it's not that we've not the time or inclination to create detailed timelines or project plans, it's that we would find such things less than useless since we're frequently changing plans to better satisfy emerging user requirements.

To use a tortured analogy, large companies are like container ships plodding along a pre-defined course [they know exactly where they're going to be four weeks from now] whereas smaller developers are on the scale of Leif Erickson [we're headed 'thataway', hope to find something really valuable in the process, but realize we're going to have to change course every day to adapt to the winds, current and coastline we're discovering if we've any hope of surviving this adventure]. If you're enabling large-company planning processes for independent developers, there may be a mis-match in your marketing.

If you've not yet sat down with some small software companies to find out just what they would find helpful, I'd suggest you do so before proceeding further. You don't want to find yourself creating the perfect product for a non-existent need -- that way leads to madness.
I guess for most people it's not the money, but the feeling of accomplishment and the sense of community - teaming up to achieve a bigger goal. I doubt that sweatshops would do this - they are busy breaking captchas and mining gold in WoW.
Maybe for today. But what about tomorrow as the product grows and they start to tackle other verticals?
Increasing Customer Satisfaction through Toll Free Numbers
‘Customer Satisfaction’ is the most sought-after thing among business houses. Business entrepreneurs strive hard to increase customer satisfaction and to gain their confidence. Because all of them know the importance of retaining their existing customers. Most companies derive 40 to 50% of their revenue through their existing customers. If all these customers leave then the company has to fill this 40% to 50% gap with new customers so that it won’t go on loss. But this is not an easy task; it is rather easy to retain the existing customers with right customer support. Business owners implement new methodologies in business process which not only provide best product but also the best services to their customers. One such tool is toll free numbers, where the call is free of charge for customer.
Commercial Open Source in Europe Vs. the US
In Emacs, press Control-h, let go of Control, and press t. That starts the tutorial, which will probably take about half an hour.

IMHO, the tutorial is useless. It spends too much time on C-p and C-n and not enough time on anything useful.

I recommend reading the Info documentation. It is very well written and very complete. You should also read the Elisp reference manual; having an understanding of the internals is helpful even if you don't intend to program emacs.
WARNING Main Street Host Scamming Statesboro Ga Businesses
I'm an ISV myself, and I created it based on my needs. If you take a look at the planning tab, you'll see that it's not how you think it is.

It's simple:

1. You add a deadline by which time you expect some particular featureset to be completed (for example, the user interface)
2. The you add a bunch of features to that deadline (like toolbar, about box, etc).
3. You have a series of tasks for each feature that need to be completed like a standard todo list

Normal planning does not work for ISVs. But the approach above works (for me at least), because it allows you structure the way you approach your coding. It's not about traditional planning in any sense, it just a way of organising your todo lists in a manner that fits with the way that ISVs approach their products.
Except, how do you know what the bigger goals are? I signed up for MT a while ago thinking I should give it a shot to see what it was like. I had no idea what the tasks added up to on a grander scale and I found that it really wasn't worth my time.

Edit: Are you sure that folks don't use MT to break captchas?
Solar wind blows at 50-year low
The digits of pi are conjectured to be "random" in the sense of being both uniformly distributed over {0, ..., 9} and possessing no n-ary serial correlations for any n, but as far as I know, this has not been proven.

Benford's Law only applies to leading digits, and only for numbers following a certain class of distributions.

It's important to note that the "Law" is not an innate mathematical property of anything, but an observed phenomenon with mathematical underpinnings. It doesn't apply exactly to any well-defined, real-world distribution ("physical constants" is not a well-defined distribution) but it applies approximately to a good number of them.

Benford's Law is exactly true on 10^X, where X is a random variable, chosen with uniform probability, from [0, 1). It's also true with X chosen from [0, n) for any integer n, because the leading digit of 10^X relies only on the non-integral part of X. When X is chosen from some other distribution that spans many orders of magnitude (say, N(4, 1)) the distribution of the fractional part (X - floor(X)) is approximately a uniform random variable from [0, 1), so Benford's Law is approximately true.
I became an expert at queuing theory during a summer of employment at McDonald's.
I'm not buying. As Howard Roarke, the protagonist in 'The Fountainhead' says, "The world is perishing from an orgy of self-sacrificing."

We don't need more altruism or nobless-oblige. We need more innovation. Google, who all but started the cloud computing model, is a leader in innovation. They should stick with what they are good at, technological innovation, and not have some kind of save the world guilt trip. The world benefits most by a Google that is focused on the one thing they are great at: search and a cloud computing dev environment.

Don't save us, google. Just keep up the good work. That way, by benefiting from your technology, we can save ourselves. :-)
or... just hit reddit.com =)
In Emacs, etags plus dabbrev-expand plus tags-apropos equals Intellisense (or close enough for shooting). A lot of Emacs' power comes from this Unixy ability to string together tools to create something unexpected...
Want to attract and retain Gen Y? Better rethink everything
Righto, old sport. Where do you summer?
I'll third this as well, for some reason I enjoyed vacuuming before close at Radioshack when I worked there. Normally I absolutely hate it.
I took a new entrepreneurial module for computer scientists in my last year of university.

It was a nice idea but in truth we would have all been better off if we'd been given a link to pg's essays and been told to go home.
Maybe I just don't understand why this is a big mystery. Suppose you have a range of numbers from 1 to some value between 1 and 100. If that value is picked randomly, you have 8/10 chance of including the teens, 7/10 chance of including the twenties, etc. until you have a 1/10 chance of including the eighties, and an increasingly low chance of including the nineties. Then you choose a number from that range - what are the chances it begins with 1? Far greater than if it began with 9, since numbers that begin with 1 are included 8/10 of the time.

Does this make any sense? Is there something I've missed?
Oh, I understand that, it's just amazing how Google was boasting about an increase of magnitude in js performance, only to have their asses handed to them in just two weeks :)
The Bailout Alternative: Virtual Mark to Market « blog maverick
I fed my feed back to my friend feed account. Each post showed up twice but that was it. No infinite loop, no endless recursion.
a salon.com article about the motivation of turkers has been posted here not to long ago:
http://www.salon.com/tech/feature/2006/07/24/turks/

It's certainly nothing for me, but it somehow attracts a lot of people. Is there something about breaking captchas in their terms of service?
Good question! In my opinion it must be billed time because the client should be the one paying for the quality software - and I don't call it cheating.
Half of Google's products are still in 'beta'
Your web app is cool at least it has all the proper functions. But, I am definitely not in your market. Why don't you try to use scalable web server like amazon or Google App Engine since you are writing it on Django? Google App Engine has very well support for Django web app. Anyway, all the best to you. If you have any problem, you can definitely email me - siong1987 (at) hotmail (dot) com.
take a look at e-junkie, I don't think they have to pay merchant account fees, they are just a pass through to paypal, goog checkout, authorize.net etc, they don't actually handle any of the transaction money, but they are still very useful for small time isv

They make their money through a monthly subscription fee.

It sounds like you are almost there, you just need to add goog checkout and throw on a shopping cart
It's a human-factors problem. Something is making the team unable to make a decision and hold to it.

My guess is that people fear to commit to a path -- endless noodling in search of a perfect solution is an efficient way to avoid the risk of actually doing something. "The perfect is the enemy of the good". If you build in in your head you are never confronted with the ways that it sucks.

If you're leading the group, the solution my be in your exerting firmer leadership, by setting a go/no go point for design decisions and shifting from planning to executing. Some kind of hell may break loose when you do it but this may tell you what the problem has been, e.g., group members who don't accept that there is a leader (you) etc. This is better than being in planning-loop hell.

I like tjpick's idea. I would amend shutter's comment to say "get your stuff out the door or fialure is certain".
It's funny, almost the exact same conversation is going on at Reddit:

http://www.reddit.com/r/programming/comments/72uv9/want_to_w...
I would focus just on the mailing list and build that feature into a full product for developers (both desktop and web).

Current mailers are too complicated and generally don't have any APIs for instance to tie my customer db to a mailing list.
Google vs. iPhone: Is Steve Jobs Reliving His Past Mistakes?
Out of curiosity, were does one obtain a classical education?
Science and Religion - the Physics Angle
I definitely agree about the Info documentation (I forgot to include that), but I think the tutorial is still worth doing: it covers the extreme basics using Emacs's terminology. It's hard to figure out how to do some things in Emacs via the info pages (or apropos, emacswiki, etc.) without knowing that, for example, each pane inside the Emacs window is called a "window" (Emacs calls the main window(s) "frames").

Also, it covers some conceptual things upfront, like how C-f is forward-char but M-f is forward-word, and that M-somekey is often a more abstract version of C-somekey. (Also, how to read the "C-x M-c butterfly" style keyboard shortcuts in the first place.) A lot of the things it covers ("C-x C-s is save") are pretty basic, but it tries to introduce some of Emacs's cultural/design quirks, which are probably what really trip up a lot of people.
If you're going to compare the US to another country you need to find a country of comparable economic size, complexity. I'll make it easy for you: there isn't one.

As for the bailout being a "scam", would seem to suggest that someone is flying off to Mexico with a bucket of cash. The reality seems to be that everyone is in for some pain. Companies have gone under, people have lost their jobs, and if the government doesnt act, its going to get worst.
Buffett to Invest $5 Billion in Goldman
Eh, I never feel excluded when a job ad says "Ivy League" (I went to a top liberal-arts college). If I like the company, I'll just apply anyway. Most job ads are more like guidelines, anyway.
I've been using for months. It took a while, and the O'Reilly book, Yegge's post, and EmacsWiki were all extremely helpful (in that chronological order). You might also consider just reading the manual too (although you might want to hold off until you have more experience).

Another resource that will be really helpful somewhere in there is to just type C-h C-h. You'll see a listing of various kinds of help. I use these a lot, especially to explore something new:

C-h k (type any keyboard shortcut) "what does this shortcut do?"

C-h b "list all keyboard shortcuts from all modes in the current buffer"

C-h f (type a function name) "what does this function/command do?"

C-h v (type a variable name) "what does this variable do, and what is its value?"

C-h a (type a regexp) "list all commands matching the regexp"

M-x apropos (type a regexp) "list commands, functions, variables, etc. matching the regexp"
So, the product is another to do list? Maybe I'm missing something, but I can't see how this would benefit us any more than another to do list.

Have you been designing this product to match the requirements of an existing software company which is selling product today, or are you trying to match the requirements you think you will have once your planned product sells?
And after than (as jrockway noted elsewhere), press Control-H i to get to the Info pages menu, which is the hypertext documentation inside Emacs. What you're looking for is almost certainly in the main Emacs section or the Emacs FAQ.

Info has its own manual, but most of what you need to know to start is that Enter visits a hyperlink (which are probably purple and/or bold), 'u' goes up one level, 'n' and 'p' go forward/backwards one node, and 's' searches. (To get a more detailed keyboard shortcut list, type "Control-h m" inside of the info buffer.)
this is the same idea as the 10,000 sheep art project, done by the same guy, aaron koblin

whee
And, by contrast, this is why computers are so slow at some decisions: no biases or heuristics, no input prioritization, etc.
My villa over on Port-au-Patois, don't you know.
His rationale is not incorrect but incomplete.

Essentially, he's arguing that since the Benford distribution of leading digits is the sole fixed point under the scaling operation, it's the most natural distribution to expect in large collection of measurements. Since units of measurement (e.g. dollars, meters, miles) represent arbitrary quantities, and the data set could be examined using literally any unit of measure (a unit of measure being a scaling operation, e.g. meters -> feet multiplies each datum by 3.26), a sufficiently large set of measured data (e.g. an almanac) can be expected to obey Benford's distribution.

Benford's Law is also not true of specific distributions that are very tight. Consider IQ. That the mean is 100 is completely arbitrary, but the standard deviation of ~15% is not. Observed ratio IQs in healthy children are log-normal with a multiplicative standard deviation of 1.15-1.16; in other-words, the 85th-percentile 6-year-old will have the cognitive maturity of an average 7-year-old, a fact that is independent of the unit of measure. (Adult "deviation IQs" are a different matter entirely, as they are "forced" to conform to a normal distribution, e.g. a person who scores in the 99.0th percentile will be "assigned" a z-score of 2.33, corresponding to an IQ of 135.) Obviously, with 50% of IQs having a leading digit of 1 and almost none having a leading digit of 2 or 3, this is not a Benford distribution. You could use a different arbitrary scaling factor, setting the median to 50 instead of 100, but then leading digits of 5 and 6 would be overrepresented, with virtually no 1s or 2s. The issue, of course, is that normal IQs are very tightly distributed in the log-space and don't span nearly an order of magnitude, so we will never get a Benford distribution no matter what scaling factor we choose.

The other problem with the OP's argument is that it doesn't apply to figures like fatality figures in natural disasters, or sizes of cities, neither of which involves an arbitrary unit, but both of which exhibit Benford-esque distributions, due to the multiplicative rather than additive compilation of the variables involved. An additive compilation (e.g. sum) of a large number of variables (e.g. height from genes) exhibits a normal distribution, for which Benford's Law does not apply. However, a multiplicative compilation (e.g. product) of a large number of random variables will have a log-normal distribution, and if the variation of X is over many orders of magnitude, its distribution will be locally flat enough (in the log-space) that Y - floor(Y), where Y = log X, will be approximately a uniform choice out of [0, 1), leading to the Benford distribution.
We're all to blame for not paying attention to what our government and fellow citizens have been up to these past years that has gotten us into this mess.
Isn't it illegal to sell life-sized colour prints of a $100 bill? Quality aside...
If you're using round robin dns, killing the web server will force clients with that particular server cached first to connect to a different one.

Not particularly elegant, but not a complete fail.
It would also be good to cap the number of upvotes at 50 or so. Now that submissions are getting 100-200 upvotes they are on the front page for days.
Nvidia's 240-core graphics card for computation
A classic and popular misconception that "no one in their right mind would do this", yet they do. The time for effort formula trips up a lot of people, your not the first one come up with this analysis.

The problem you have is the lens you're looking through. No one paid you to post here, no one paid you to participate in a social network, watch a youtube video, let alone make a blog, yet a whole heck of alot of the folks on the planet do it.

People need to stop looking at turk through the "job" lens because it will never ever make sense. But if you look at it through the multitasking, social media, bored outa my gord, what the hell, yearning to participate in something, be apart of something, advisory and authority lens it makes much more sense.

Meanwhile, read up on turks, get to know their behaviors and find out the why behind their actions.

http://www.floozyspeak.com/blog/archives/2008/08/valley_of_t...

Don't take my word for it, go ask them yourself, make HIT, put it up there and see for yourself. But take the traditional "this is a job" lens off cause that is a classic misguided view of mechanical turk.
Third Party Comment Systems Go Mainstream
How stupid our old hunter-gatherer ancestors must have been! They chose their actions based on incomplete information! It's a good thing that kind of thing has become antiquated among our intellectual upper class.

A question for you: what's the use of predicting reality if you have no emotional investment in it? The mere act of trying to predict reality to further some end means you have an emotional objective. The universe can get along just fine without you, you know.

Also, how do you determine when your rules have accurately predicted reality? Can you measure your own confirmation bias or congruence bias? Can you be sure that you've rid yourself of your bias blind spot when you make the connection between your mental model and what you perceive as reality?

There are not turtles all the way down. At some level you enter the exciting, terrifying, wonderful, and dangerous world of raw human emotion. Emotions aren't antiquated. They are the turbulent foundation upon which rationality stands. I'm not saying that rationality is baseless or impossible. I'm just saying that you cannot set it apart as a motivational engine that supersedes human passion. I see it more as a system that helps you make effective use of your emotional energy.

Additionally, you can't set up your definition of rationality (a set of self-consistent rules that allow you to accurately predict reality) as a system that encourages morality (rejecting things like torture or other needless suffering, as you said above).
Ironically, the original article's server appears to be down.

Maybe there is a god out there.
I like the idea....But can't say im a fan of the name. But i'll be interested to see what it's like when released.