skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Markov chains exposing  what Palin really says
MarkovSentenceGen> main
" McCain is a service of many special interests, the abuses of the compassion that if you're trying to be the special love. To confront the wars America needs more energy problems - as the experts in Congress spends too much lesser tales of a proud to Washington elite, then some of Alaska's North American history. And maybe you're not just one expects us face in chief. I'm going into the governor's personal chef - the country he actually do nothing at all. Starting in sight ... when the way in a six-by-four cell door of our state and comfortable committee"
MarkovSentenceGen>

"McCain is a service of many special interests,"

"To confront the wars America needs more energy problems"

hidden markov truth?
Bargains abound. That's what I'm looking for next...bargains. I just wish I had more cash in my stock account. GOOG at 350? Sold. (I'm now long on 12 shares. Hooray! I always wanted to own some GOOG, but it was always too expensive. Though I'm sure a lot of friends at GOOG are pissed, as this is way below their strike price.)

And, of course the bailout failed to solve anything. If GW would have just called me, I could have told him that.
Pyjamas: A Web Toolkit for Python
As a practicing statistician, I have to whine about this.

The issue is selection bias; the four observed events are not independent random samples from the same Bernoulli distribution, but the events about which we have learned because they were interesting enough to write about. Unless we are willing to model the process by which people choose to write about their experiences, which is quite infeasible in this case, we can make no inferences.
20 Excellent AJAX Effects You Should Know | Infopirate.org
How early do you involve a bizdev person?
How early in the startup timeline do you involve a business development person? The BD person may have a diff perspective than your vision. So would you rather hold onto your vision and belief or dilute your original idea and get onto what the biz person tells you?
How about sending your message to a kind of delaying-mail-proxy server could help?
How can anyone really take Matt's opinion about anything Apple or Microsoft related seriously?

Here are his opinions:

Apple: Bad

Microsoft: Good

It's a classical case of noticing that certain things are bad because you already think they're bad. That doesn't make things statistically significant at all. It's just observation bias.
Quis testiet ipsos testes?
"Intelligent" Supercomputers Put to the Turing Test | Infopirate.org
How long is a piece of string?

Every business is different. Sometimes there simply aren't useful jobs within a company for business development folks. Sometimes it's the most important task. Only you can know that about your own company.

We just started involving someone in a business development role, and we've been in business for about three years. And we're just experimenting with it, with a friend who happens to have some free time right now.

Also, I'm not sure why you'd bring on someone that doesn't share your vision. If it's your company, you get to decide who you work with.
Exciting times. Browser competition is getting hot, and we're going to have a bunch of neat new capabilities soon. Even IE is innovating!
What's the difference between the ordinary and the extraordinary? It's that little bit extra.
The dirty secret about berkshire is that it's predominantly an insurance company.

Hardly a secret - it's the first line of business listed in the first sentence in every year's annual report (see http://www.berkshirehathaway.com/2007ar/2007ar.pdf for example):

"Berkshire Hathaway Inc. is a holding company owning subsidiaries that engage in a
number of diverse business activities including property and casualty insurance and reinsurance,
utilities and energy, finance, manufacturing, services and retailing. "
Apple's "Brick" manufacturing rumors - not so revolutionary?
Don't bailout. There are always lows and highs in this journey. This is a "low" phase. Try to get over of it. Even if you are thinking about a new idea, there will be a phase with that idea where you will feel "low". It's very frustrating to see afterwards that you left the journey half-way. Let your users/customers decide if this is failure or not. Then it'll be obvious if you should quit or continue. I did this mistake before. I'm going through this situation again, but this time I learned the lesson from past experience. So I'm not quitting when I'm at low phase. I'm pushing my best, and I hope a high phase is ahead. All the best!
what was your avg dist. on the longer hikes? am curious that 15-20 lbs. was heavy on the long hikes. and where'd you store the extra gear (i imagine a lot of it was weather-related)
Remember the story about the NASA-engineers who mixed up imperial and metric units?
Compensation for BizDev person
In terms of equity compensation, what is a good breakup for a Business Development person, who may join at a later stage? And mind this, at a latter stage, the BD person may have a diff perspective of the business than what the original founders do. So in case of a break up, what happens to the partnership scenario?
Ah, hindsight.
I doubt that many people actually predicted exactly what and when it would happen. Just saying "mortgage-based securities will fall" or "the market will go down in 2007/2008" doesn't count. Of course, I don't doubt that some people predicted it in the sense that they took trading positions against the market. But there are always people shorting the market.

Have you actually read any of his books? His style might be a little unusual, but I've never seen any "magical thinking" there.
Linux Kernel lists explained
Lesser of Two Evils at Fresh Start After Divorce Blog
Two things:

1. Just launch. You are about to quit anyways - so why not just launch, it obviously couldnt be worse.

2. Co-founder - I think two highly motivated founders is definitely ideal - but whatever little I have seen I think more often that not one founder is a lot more motivated than the other. This also seems (but again im not sure) to be the case with Apple(jobs vs woznaik) as well as microsoft (gates vs allen). Additionally, I think this arrangement might have some advantages (vis-a-vis leadership issues) also.
Yes, and apparently the national debt and the trade deficit are the same thing.

(Not that the article is bad, but I found the intro confusing.)
Had the same exact problem about 10 days ago, as well.
Tech vision and Biz vision do not always match. The technology-oriented founders are married to their vision, and sometimes miss out on long term sustainability and monetization opportunities. I would guess someone with a product development and time-to-market strategy will be of great help. Though you may have to hit a middle ground keeping some of your original belief and incorporating some of theirs.
Go on George, it is free
Getting the most from Social Bookmarking Websites - Video
The chili-peppers language-analysis is Eudora's "Mood Watch" feature. Never used it, but always thought it was a good idea.

Similarly, email clients should catch references to attachments that aren't there, and ask "do you really want to send this without an attachment?"

Even more generally, they could recognize (and allow to be configured) certain addresses as requiring additional confirmation before sending -- so a mistaken overbroad or misdirected CC becomes less common.

(I'm thinking: first time you send to an address, you get a confirmation popup, and a chance to classify this address: require dialog confirm; require captcha/retype-of-name confirm; require waiting period; require confirm if combined with other address; etc.)
He sure seems to know a lot of things that other people aren't sure about:

* It's a recession for sure, but depression? No one knows. Here's one guy who says no: http://online.wsj.com/article/SB122333679431409639.html

* "this adds up to difficult times for business in America for at least three years and possibly longer." Three - not two, not four, but three. Hrm.

* "with the US dollar in the gutter" - it's actually been climbing lately: http://finance.yahoo.com/q/bc?s=EURUSD=X&t=3m&l=on&#... No idea if that will last - I don't pretend to have a good understanding of why it would be rising right now, but it is, for the moment.

I guess his points about open source and other cost savers doing well in a recession are valid, but the reddit-bait title and other stuff put me off.
In the headline to attract clicks, it's a 'depression'. In the text, it's still a 'recession'.

Everyone's a sensational-headline click-whore now, it seems.
BTW, I thought about similar feature - setting a desired reply date/time on e-mails you send, so the recipients MUA can automatically schedule it in users calendar (and/or remind him of replying you).

As of many people replying they need a feature no one has - here's opportunity of creating a completely new web e-mail system :-).
It is only 1 kiloton. The 1908 Tunguska meteor was ~10-20 megatons, and caused no known deaths or injuries.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tunguska_event

.

According to that Wikipedia article, kiloton-range bolides (airburst meteors) typically occur on Earth more than once per year.

A stony meteoroid of about 10 metres (30 ft) in diameter can produce an explosion of around 20 kilotons, similar to that of the Fat Man bomb dropped on Nagasaki, and data released by the U.S. Air Force's Defense Support Program indicate that such explosions occur high in the upper atmosphere more than once a year.
An interesting side issue here is that the global stock indexes have just barely beat inflation over the last decade. With the current market slump, annual returns over the last ten years are probably negative.

How will this affect investment, returns and opinions of the stock market in the future? Things like this have happened before...at the time, there were announcements of "the death of equities", unlikely followed by a huge surge in stock market returns. It'll be interesting to see what the future brings. This could all be a symptom of bad management/shareholder policy, the role of capital growing less important or even that most mature companies not really profitable. The really great returns over the last 10 years have been from small companies growing large and creating novel technology.

Sometime I'd like to take an economics course to see whether anyone truly knows how wealth creation, company profits, stock prices and wages correlate. Or whether we even have the conceptual tools to discuss these things in a meaningful way. What the hell does 'wealth creation' really mean? Where do the green numbers on a company's balance sheet end up? If any of you know the answers to some of these questions, I'd love to know.
From Varian and Shapiro's "Information Rules" (http://www.squeezedbooks.com/book/show/7/information-rules-a...):

> Information commodities trend towards the marginal cost: zero, meaning that selling information commodities is not likely to be successful in the long run.

The important thing is the marginal cost, not the cost of creating the thing in the first place.

I'd highly recommend the book.
Let's be honest...the value of post-secondary education is measured in terms of life-experience, not professional. Am I better equipped to function as an economist armed with a degree in economics? Sure. Am I better equipped as a person to function rationally, efficiently and humanely with four years of campus life under my belt? Without question.
Yes, commoditization and "normal profits" of perfect competition. I think it's more your second point: it's not that someone should offer it for free if they can - but that someone will.

Open source is part of this too: e.g. the eeePC has linux and openOffice. MS responded by offering low-end XP and low-end office for $40 on the eeePC. It's heading to $0. Also, WINE runs most windows apps on linux. When money is tight, these non-ideal options become more attractive.

I think this is inevitable in all markets, with the old answer: offer something valuable and unique.
That's a nice one. Didn't think about that. It's a nice compromise between client and server solutions.

Store-and-forward has another big set of issues though. File sizes and bandwidth requirements are easily non-trivial. In addition, there could be legal issues with keeping the data around for awhile and then forwarding that wouldn't exist if you just piggy-backed on some other app. In a way, it kind of puts you in the league with GMail and the other guys, right?
Brilliant. Except for those individuals who prove more mathematically adept than socially to begin with...
Without figures, you're correct: His estimates are worthless. But if the US government stays the course and puts money up for all of the failing US companies, which seems to be the plan, the dollar will be in the gutter. Can't just print money, after all.
Something like this?
http://www.addins4outlook.com/sendguard/

I've never tried it, though.
Not that I use it, but I'm sure Outlook or any other POP mail suite offers scheduling.
Lower-end products (A "Word Lite", etc.) will be big business for budget-conscious consumers who will never see "OpenOffice - FREE" on a shopping comparison.

I'm an open source guy, but at $20 a pop the Gnumeric guys would be rich. I know I'd buy in.
Mygazines Settles Copyright Lawsuit, Agrees to Remove Infringing Content
> The whole point of traveling is that you see something new.

This is all probably great advice when you're talking about being a tourist.

As someone who does business traveling a lot, though, it's really hard to argue some of these points.

I, personally, would rather carry a little extra junk through an airport because I decided to include a backup shirt and slacks in case I spill some soup.

When we're talking about business travel, you're talking about things that affect your career or your own company. I take what I need to be 99% sure I'll be successful at the destination-- and I don't worry so much about the burden. Of course often you can go out and get what you need, but you don't want to have to do that (especially at the last minute) if you don't have to. That extra bit of confidence of feeling prepared can make all the difference to let your mind focus on getting business done to the best of your ability.

All this aside, I think the analogy about software is a great suggestion. You really don't know what you should be taking with you (i.e. features) until you get there (i.e. release it to users).

I liken that to a civil engineer building a bridge remotely and then delivering all the pieces without having ever visited the site himself. He or she would have a much worse idea of the dimensions, concerns, or obstacles-- and might have to re-engineer a lot of what they built.

Of course software is more flexible than that, but it's still a great idea to take a few, and not all, of your "best guess" features to the customer until you get their usage/feedback to build on.
I think your analysis is somewhat facile, and unsupported by the facts: the dollar hasn't dropped at all because of the 'bailout' - quite the contrary, it has done well over the past few days.

But once again, that's why this is hacker news, and not economic news: our area of expertise is not in economics, with a few exceptions (that certainly do not include me).
I have no idea what you're talking about. Perhaps you'd like to see a picture of a bunny with a pancake on his head? Here you go: http://heresabunnywithapancakeonitshead.com/
of course they don't always match. but who is working for who? are you working for the biz dev or is the biz dev working for you? you pay them to give good advice, but if it conflicts too much with the tech direction, you're not under any obligation to follow their advice.
Blogger says "Obama" is a spelling-mistake
> His first love was an Iraqi super computer, a poster of which he had pinned to his bedroom wall.

Cray?
Self (programming language) - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Mono Project Releases 2.0
Furthering Open Source Mobile Apps With Ad Revenue
I had never thought of this. I don't agree that it's overrated, but I agree it can be overrated and marketed too heavily.
Coverage may not be gospel, but it is a useful and interesting metric. I do see coverage data abused in practice often, though, so I agree with your sentiment.
Designing the perfect laptop
That's right, I tried to write that on the wrong keyboard.
Watch The West Wing Episodes
There are services that let you Download The West Wing Episodes Free or even watch them online. There are hundreds of people using these services to Download The West Wing Episodes Free so they can keep their favorite episodes.
Watch Hells Kitchen Episodes
If you still haven't watched Hells Kitchen you are in luck as there are sites on the net that let you Download Hells Kitchen Episodes Free and some of these services even let you Watch Hells Kitchen Episodes from the main site! A lot of problems! We have the SOLUTIONS.
A complete lockup of the global financial system has been seen often before? Come on.

As for whether or not the scenario should be well understood by anyone who has common sense: yes, that's the point. People were blinded by their faulty statistical models, and stopped acting in a sensible way.
It could be implemented as a variation on "saved drafts".

Since Gmail has a bunch of google lab apps in the gmail settings, it might well happen....

http://mail.google.com/mail/#settings/labs
Also the user loses their entire state if they switch web browsers or sit down at a different terminal. Granted they'd have to log back into your site to restore their state but at least there's something there to be restored.
Ning keeps growing. Over half million networks now.
...and fueled the Space Shuttle up with 900000 grams of liquid oxygen?
The CEO should be the bizdev person for as long as it's possible. At least that's how we do it. Once you moved up the Sales Learning Curve, you can start hiring bizdev and sales people to consolidate and grow like crazy.
Could this be summed up as Work smarter, not harder?
well done, hopefully it doesn't spread on conventional websites.
i couldn't agree with you more. competition will sort all this ugliness out in the medium to long term. today's web applications are so complex with so many moving pieces that bounding performance to any reasonable range is becoming more and more difficult.

i'm pretty sure amazons dynamo paper has been mentioned here on more than one occasion although it does not speak to javascript performance specifically. what it does do is attack the problem of bounded performance in their space, but may be abstracted in general. the paper talks at length about specific issues in their problem space but takes an overarching approach to isolating performance bottlenecks and ensuring performance at a finally granulated level.

i think the way that the dynamo paper attacks the larger problem by breaking it down into its constituent parts and then ensuring bounds on those subsections has value in this discussion and beyond. no doubt a great way to ensure overall performance is to strongly decouple constituent parts and ensure tight performance bounds on those parts which you have greatest control. in total, you will be able to predict with more confidence a performance range that you may feel comfortable with.
Over the summer Microsoft was the one providing the technology for nbcolympics.com (Silverlight). Prominately on the Silverlight website it features the words "cross-platform" and "cross-device". But go to the featured use of it - nbcolympics.com - and it would not play on Linux, or even Windows 2000 or Windows ME. Only Windows XP, Vista, and one version of OS X were supported.

Or nbcolympics could have gone with Adobe Flash and everyone could have watched it on any platform. Sure I could install Moonlight (the Mono project's version of Silverlight) but it didn't WORK for Linux. To me if Mono and Silverlight took over the web we'd go to a stage where everyone thought it was cross-platform because Microsoft says so and there are these projects, but people using Linux get a terrible experience. Users don't care why that is, they just know it would suck, and Microsoft would hobble Linux for another few years. The Mono project is enabling that, and that is why a lot of people who are FOSS contributors don't like them. Myself included.
fail.

i thought at one point the laptop would also make coffee, since they added in the design pretty much everything that came through their mind
Work smarter and harder.
don't need this linked to my actual name

Yeah, you wouldn't want anyone to know you enjoy sex.
I enjoyed the East vs. West discussion in the article. I grew up in the "East" (India), and even by those standards, the importance of "making a desperate all-out effort as if your own life were at stake" was drilled into my head from a pretty early age. It's one of the things I've chosen to keep, even as I've discarded most things the East gave me, like religion.

When I moved to America, I realized that this notion sounded or would sound pretty absurd to most people around me. Inevitably, I was drawn to entrepreneurship, because that's where I found like minded people.
There was a similar one. I think it involved time travel instead of answering math problems, though.
If a recession becomes severe enough, there is the risk of deflation--nobody wants to buy anything, so vendors keep slashing prices to try to unload their inventory and workers are willing to take lower wages to avoid unemployment. To counteract that cycle, dumping lots of money into the economy (as long as it's not too much) is just what Dr. Keynes ordered.

I've also heard the argument that since businesses spent the last few years acting as if the weird bonds in their portfolios were as good as cash, then if the Treasury replaces those bonds with actual cash, it won't have a net inflationary effect. (Although I fear that Wall Street is going to take its bailout money and use the proceeds to create a silly bubble in some other asset; localized inflation, so to speak.)
I agree with you that Sun will forever be held back by their past actions. Must the same way KDE is still not quite as accepted because of the Qt licensing scuffle - what 10 years ago? However when you look at the success of big complex projects - Eclipse coming to mind first - on Java, there is no equivalent on .NET that really works on every platform.

I too think there will be another language that succeeds C++ in FOSS, and I thought it would be Python, but not so sure now. C will always live on in a lot of the more important stuff like the kernel and basic utilities, but desktop apps will eventually move on. That is a discussion for something else, but I don't believe it will be Java or Mono. I'm just saying that Java is a better system if your primary goal is cross platform. If your primary goal is to build great Linux apps - then it is not.
This is easy enough to do on a UNIX machine. Compose your message, then delay the sending with at:

$ at 8:00am sh -c 'mail person@normal-sleep-schedule.com < my_message.txt'
CSI: For Warrick (S9 E1) - Season Premiere
“For Warrick” - The CSI team comes together after Warrick is shot in a Las Vegas alleyway, on the ninth season premiere of CSI: CRIME SCENE INVESTIGATION.
ER: Another Thursday at County - Oct 9 2008 Preview
The ER is on guard as Gates marshals the new interns to treat a terrorist, but it’s the new doctor (Angela Bassett) and her tough disposition that has everyone on the defensive. Meanwhile