skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I've seen this within two big US companies as well (one known then as a big online bookstore, the other one a search company gone horribly wrong - you can imagine.). But to be fair, I dealt most of the time with their european subsidiaries.

I also think that failing business start to fail in the top management level and one level below. It's kind of the "bozo explosion" that Guy Kawasaki describes. If you put one Bozo-Manager into the CTO-position everything will break down:

People just want to present something that looks important, not deliver something that delivers real value to the company. They don't want to spend time to specify a product and take risk, they just delegate it to some poor (external) guys that waste some money.

If they succeed, it was the great manager with his superior skills. If not, the developers sucked, hire some other next time.

Ah...btw.... "Evangelist"/Advisor to the CEO-guys....

One very recent example of a large private media company in Germany: They have a couple of technolgy evangelists reporting to the Owner of the company. They have a very strong personal relationship over tens of years but are just incompetent in all IT matters. They just repeat the current buzzwords ("it must be key/value and loosely coupled!" because Google and Amazon does it.). The problem is: That's true but it's not what the company needs to achieve the project goals. If you have no users, why do you want to scale from the beginning? It's an iterative process, also: premature optimization is the root of all evil.

As most of the media companies/publisheres are private companies (or at least the mayority is still owned by the founding families) they have no external pressure to fix their broken strategies/HR/management.

They can keep losing money in their current business for another 10-15 years until they have to shut down large parts. So they still try to get away with crappy IT products.

Another story:

Internet Explorer 6 is still quite common in the enterprise area in Germany. Why? Because SAP sold crappy technology. They build a big part of the user interface on top of the proprietary MS IE6 platform. Also the customers have very long purchase cycles. Upgrading ERP-software is done every 10 years or so as it's so expensive...

I often say, If we would operate nuclear power plants this way, we would have a Cernobyl/Fukushima-Event per week...
printf() is fine if you just want to see if something is being run (assuming, of course, you recognize the flushing caveat we're discussing).

If you're dumping printf()s all over the place to see exactly what flow your program is taking at runtime, you're better off just setting a breakpoint or two and using a debugger to quickly step through it.
>plenty in the U.S.

You should first validate that assumption - 'talk' to a few U.S. agencies and find out what they are using, how much they are paying, what their problems with those systems are.
my RISC-architectured world has been shattered. Neat example.
It's sad that both Windows and OS/X laid the groundwork for that sort of thing years ago and yet neither have really made good on it yet.
It was pretty good back in 2002. Not sure about now. (I worked with them for remailer stuff back in the day)
While I'm sure that this may be a component, I don't know if it has as deep as an impact as it's implied. With rising worldwide demand due to an exponentially increasing global population, as well as things like Ethanol in the US driving up the price of corn, protectionist policies on things like rice in Thailand, and things like possible inflation from QE2 this may be just a component of a veritable plethora of issues that are effecting the global prices of food. Still though it's fairly interesting to hear about this side of it.
capnrefsmmat covered the bursting of the bubble, but the positions were rolled over simply by converting the futures to their equivalent holdings in actual wheat, selling the rights to that wheat for the actual spot price, and using the proceeds to buy more futures for the next term.

This doesn't actually protect the buyer. Rather, the buyer was protected (for a while) by the continuing influx of new capital into commodity indices which led to a continuing rise in prices -- in other words, it was effectively a distributed Ponzi scheme.
> When I see success, it always seems like there is something additional to intelligence - like work ethic, or conviction.

I usually see luck. Luck is a huge variable.
Taking clones
Getting things done in SEO
I recall another online payment processor that got into conflicts with the government over opaque laws: http://www.wired.com/threatlevel/2007/04/egold_owner_cal/
Personal Coaching Programs
Frustratingly, the post you are probably thinking of was here: http://www.cpeterson.org/2011/03/10/why-gas-is-so-expensive-...

(Aside: this is one reason why I have so little trust in the web as a long-term historical medium.)

Although that article focused primarily on oil futures, it also discussed commodities futures, and specifically addressed the rollovers. Unfortunately, I neither understood it well enough at the time, nor remember it well enough now, to regurgitate it. Maybe someone else will come along with a cached copy.
We then move to work in areas that aren't efficient. That can't be duplicated. Work that can't be done by a computer, at least yet.

Technology replacing jobs has been happening for a long time, it's just that it happened much more slowly in the past. Now, as it's happening at a rapid pace, some people are finding themselves fit to work in a world that no longer exists.
"We need to protect our jobs."

That's all I've been hearing in the past few years, and it's exactly the kind of thing that, although counter-intuitive, leads to the loss of jobs in the long-term, and a slower economy.

Let companies compete fair and square among themselves, and it will lead to better products, lower prices, and more jobs. Otherwise, most of those companies will just move to some other country, and then you'll have fewer companies to provide jobs, and their products will gradually lose competitiveness. It's what happened to GM.
I Am a Female Nerd. Apparently.
The fundamental problem is that people don't like change. I've encountered this a few times. I invent a system process to make a work flow simpler, people resist because they don't want learn.

One key example was an intranet out of office board. The secretaries maintained a list of who was in or out (context: 13 years ago with very little good groupware). Engineers would sign out the scratch themselves off. Was it consistent? No. The system was very simple and engineers loved it. Did the secretaries? Nope. Did it get traction? Nope.
Perpetual Inattentional Blindness
That showed up as a blank square on my iPhone. Here on HN, I've seen /~ used to denote sarcasm. Alternatively, the winking emoticon ; ) or tongue sticking out emoticon : P work as well.
I don't even know how to respond. It is not a fabricated concern because it happened to my kids' babysitter in my house.

Having experience with what happens when a kid goes down a pornography rabbit hole, the worst that can happen is a screwed up life. Will seeing porn guarantee a screwed up kid? Of course not. Does porn have the ability to screw a kid up? Yes.

I'll take a few steps to keep my kids and those who come to my house safe so I have the opportunity to provide a foundation so when they come across it, they aren't screwed up by it.
I'm not sure it would be that easy. During turns and such, it may send the balloon fluttering in odd or unreadable directions. During such an emergency, its highly unlikely that the forces acting will be so consistant.
It is a bit disconcerting to me that commenters here are fascinated by the technical analysis of this system and appear quite oblivious to the problem of starving human beings.

Perhaps I am not intellectual enough to appreciate the empathy hiding behind this analytical ruminating about the problem - but I wish that I got the impression that there was more reaction happening than "Wow, what an interesting phenomenon in the commodities market- how do all of these moving pieces fit together?"

To quote the sometimes poignant Jack Johnson:
"Why don't the newscasters cry when they read about people who die?
At least they could be decent enough to put just a tear in their eyes"
> You add a tender type button in one state and it shows up in 50 states. That's a problem when pressing the button in 46 states is a federal crime.

The "total with sales tax" button already does something different in every state.
He did mention it somewhat. Since the funds were only required to store 5% of their clients' money in the actual commodity, they could stash the rest of the money somewhere else safe, and then on top of that make money on transactional costs.

From another article I'd read before (which I linked to down below, and which is gone now), the funds made quite a bit of money in the rollovers by charging a fee to every investor who wanted to roll it over. Since none of their investors actually wanted a dump truck of grain showing up in their driveway, and since the price kept going up and up and up, they paid the fee to roll it over each time.

Somebody probably did lose their shirts, but it sure wasn't the funds, and the funds won't have any trouble doing this again, because there will always be more customers eager to park money somewhere to make more money.
Thanks for the post. I confess, FaceSay will not win a design award :-), but it does seem to generate some key aha's for the kids. I sometimes wonder if a bit of quirkiness in the design helps make it engaging.

Here's a quick synopsis of the research. Since the first study, the emotion recognition and face recognition results have been replicated in one additional randomized controlled study, though not yet peer reviewed (dissertations and masters theses). The latest emotion recognition results were in a randomized controlled study in a California school district - i.e. a more challenging environment. Here's a link to the IMFAR poster I presented in May.
http://imfar.confex.com/imfar/2011/webprogram/Paper9669.html

This 2010 study also found, to my surprise, significant improvement in theory of mind measures.

I am hoping a group in Canada and one in Poland will launch a FaceSay study this year, and we are aiming for an NIH grant for additional studies and new development.

I hope your daughter likes FaceSay. Sorry for the long delay on the Home Edition. Classic bootstrapping limitations. If she likes it, I'd be happy to discount the current classroom edition to the Home Edition price.

Casey

Casey Wimsatt
Founder
www.FaceSay.com
Regarding point number 3. There was a food crisis story reported back in 2008 about Haitians eating dirt to suppress hunger. Before the earthquake. Truly the worst luck in the past decade to affect a single group of people.

http://m.npr.org/story/18767313?storyId=18767313&from=mo...
on the exchange side - market data/trade/ack latencies can be microsec in the 50th percentile, single digit msec in the 90th, and double digit msec in the 99.99th, the variance can be significant and also change based on hr of the day and how well the exchange handles the load.

So even if you use customized, co-located hardware/FPGAs or even ASICs with the fastest interconnects and unlimited bandwidth and your engine responds in nanosec, still the message you get from/send to an exchange can sit there in a queue for something like eternity.
It seems that people forget what "model" (in MVC) really means. A model (in general) is a simplification of the world. The world is so complex that you can't possibly reason about it at once, so you split it up into smaller models that are easier to understand. It's exactly the same in MVC: the model is the definition of your application's world; a simplification that your computer can work with.

Yes, Rails ship with ActiveRecord, which makes it dead simple to define data models that you need to store, but the app/models/ is far from limited to only data storage. app/models is about the business logic of your application. It seems to me that all of the files the article wanted to place under lib/ actually belongs under app/models.

Yes, I agree that it's nice to be able to test your application outside of Rails, but whether you place the files under app/models or lib/ doesn't change that. Yes, it might be useful to abstract it out to a gem, and then you can move it into a lib/-directory (since there is no MVC of a Ruby library), but as long as you're inside the realm of a Rails application you should put everything that's related to the business logic in app/models.

So, in summary:

If it's related to the BUSINESS LOGIC of your app: Put it in app/models.

If it's just GENERAL stuff: Put it in lib/ (or better: create a gem out of it).
I wrote an article about the same subject, albeit much shorter and from a slightly different perspective: http://www.michielovertoom.com/python/ugly-python/
Questions Developers May Have Forgot to Ask a Startup Founder
Agreed. The solution presented is by far the absolute worst to the wealth-gap issue. It reminds me of the Kurt Vonnegut story "Harrison Bergeron". The only way to achieve pure equality is to handicap those individuals and businesses who are the most effective.
Or, he could just move on and do something that doesn't require fighting the government.

Sorry, but I can't read anything by Aaron without thinking how much of an unlikable character he is. Get the chip off your shoulder! Stop complaining. Stop boasting you "Invented" facebook. No one invents websites.

Reminds me of Mugatu "Do you not know who I am? I invented the piano key necktie!"
For what little it's worth, a lot of my commentary on HN for quite a while has been centered around the effects of things on real people -- whether it's UI, buggy software, or poverty.

And those conversations have generally not gone very well.

So I've recently started giving up. HN is just not the place for that sort of thing. It's a place where the audience-participants want analysis, they want technical details, they prize expertise, and they can't discuss value unless there's a hard real-world number involved.

That's not altogether bad, but I do hope that somewhere there is a group of smart people who actually think about the real-life problems that other people have, and try to do something about it. If there is, I don't know of it yet.
I admit the author is a little bit out there, but it does seem like a quite real possibility that there will not be enough work for humans if A) the population keeps growing and B) technology gets smarter and can automate more.

I'm not saying it will happen (we're too early on the AI curve), but it might, and then there will have to be some kind of major social upheaval because humans, as all animals are meant to work for their own survival. Socially we don't tolerate welfare very well (neither the envious worker nor the unemployed recipient, frankly).

How will we do that? Will we shift people to purely intellectual pursuits? What happens when are brains are feeble by comparison to the AI that surrounds us? These are all interesting questions to ponder. So while it may be a turnoff to hear some crackpot proclamations about the fate of humanity, I wouldn't say it's necessarily a worse guess than "everything will work out just like it always has."
A lot of innovation replaces labor input with energy input. So far, we've been replacing jobs that disappear by consuming more raw materials and energy to make more crap so everyone can have a higher standard of living. If energy/raw materials is the bottleneck instead of labor, all of a sudden the economy is a zero-sum game.
>... what sets it apart from the rest is the use of beam-splitters and a graphic processing algorithm ...

Seriously? I've been seeing this exact same setup (minus the Kinect) for 3D interactions for a long time. There must be something more revolutionary here, this is barely news-worthy. The only thing I haven't seen previously is the fairly-bad object occlusion, but I've seen that in other demos years ago - all they lacked was the beam-splitter.
The 80-char limit recommendation is a thing I regularly sin against; most of the time caused by a comment behind a statement.
I am always against bittorrent being associated with everything illegal. If anyone ever gets to the legal phase, wont ISP's disclose the IP number details rather than relying on skype ?
What author suggests at the end (abolishing private corporation) is pretty absurd. But he makes a pretty good argument that the economy might be a zero-sum game if technologies can take us zero cost of production, distribution or providing of service. We're closer than ever, but still very far from that point.

If cost of replication and distribution of every product globally can be driven (close) to zero, only a few best products in each category can have economic existence. Therefore as distribution gets more efficient it's winner-takes-all market. In winner-takes-all markets wealth distribution is extremely skewed by definition.

So if technology takes us so much further that a lot of people won't be able to add more value to the economy than they will be 'taking away', the governments will have to find a way to keep balance before social unrest takes the main stage.

Some more thought should be put in this direction. Here's a milder possibility of controlling for winners-take-all phenomenon - limiting the maximum market cap of companies and then splitting them up after they reach it. This wouldn't shock the economy as much and would provide sort of balancing and competition at the top. Also stock owners wouldn't be too much worse off.
And yet if you try to trace back why those "rules" have any authority and you're likely to end-up back at a claim that it was what everyone did in their real life.
Network Marketing Success: Overcoming Objections
I applied for early admission to UNM. I applied fairly late (I don't remember if there was an explicit deadline, but if so I was before it) and hadn't heard back by the first day of my senior year of high school. I called the admissions office at lunch from the high school, and they said, "Sorry to have not gotten back to you in time. You've got good letters of recommendation and you already have six credit hours at UNM with a 4.0 GPA. We're going to admit you."

I told people at the high school goodbye, left before the end of the day, and never went back to that fucking place.

That's how I did it. Your mileage may vary.
cool, but I was more amazed by this one

http://research.microsoft.com/en-us/projects/surfacerecon/
"while efficiency eliminates certain jobs, it just shifts employments to other sectors as long as people continue to innovate."

Oh yeah? Prove it. (Hint: when you do, you should wait patiently for your Nobel, because you'll have earned it. You're re-stating a very popular theory, but that popularity doesn't make the theory a fact.)

The problem that I have with the "innovation" canard is that it inherently assumes equality of potential for every worker in the labor force: we don't have much room for unintelligent people in our society if you now have to "innovate" just to get a job. Most people can't innovate, and never will.

Your argument about candle-makers is also a straw man: thus far through our history, we've been able to replace each declining low-skill industry with the ascendancy of another equally low-skill industry (argiculture to factory labor, factory labor to "service" work, etc.) But that era appears to be coming to an end. In a world where there are no jobs for people in the bottom X% of intelligence, we don't automatically get more innovation -- we just get structurally unemployed people.
The Volkswagen Group is using IE6 as standard for displaying web pages
“The idea that an app on an iPad can better teach my kids to read or do arithmetic, that’s ridiculous.”

Ugh. Also read as: "Something I haven't seen doing something I don't expect it to? Ridiculous!"

The correlation between students at Waldorf schools and prestigious schools later is extremely easily explained by a single character: $

That said, something different than our current, standard public-school fare probably stands a decent chance of doing better. Anything with more attention to the methodology stands such a chance. But I'd be willing to bet that many of the successes also simply reflect parents that are more aware of their children's education.
"each molecule of air still contains about 21% oxygen"

Errmm, no. ("air" doesn't have homogenious "molecules", there are N2 molecules in air which are 100% nitrogen and 0% oxygen, and O2 molecules which are 100% oxygen...)
Not exactly notes, but workflowy.com is pretty awesome for lists. I've used it for my class notes as well. It has tagging support via #hashtags and @mentions.
Thanks for your insight and for your past championing of a more "ground level" approach to improving some crucial systems.

The sort of community of which you speak does certainly sound like an exciting and powerful one. I hope that it exists, and I hope that it finds you - and maybe me.
Gaddafi put on display in shopping center freezer
Stop caring about what other people think
The actual arxiv pdf was submitted about a month ago. http://arxiv.org/abs/1109.4039 The main thing here is that the attack is one of several ways to distinguish that a machine running Skype is the same machine running the bittorrent client; they're not separate machines hidden behind the same IP.
Because with such a tiny market you cannot actually move a lot of wealth without influencing the value of the currency itself.
no. people like gates or zuckerberg will not save the country.

a long time ago (actually not that long) people who had wealth pursued education. they gravitated to universities they travelled the world to learn about culture. they were not becoming educated in order to increase their monetary wealth.

this was true even as recent as andrew carnegie, once the world's wealthiest man. according to one biography, the mentor carnegie chose to help him become more educated preferred the company of carnegie's brother, by comparison a man of modest accomplishments but who apparently had a more interesting intellect than andrew.

at the same time we read that gates fancies the khan academy and takes his children on tours of factories. i'm not even going to mention zuckerberg's activities.

things have changed i guess.

university has value aside from being a path to higher income. i feel sorry for the uneducated man, no matter how much wealth he acquires. circumstances can change and men can lose their fortunes. but education is not something a man can lose. it is his for life.
As he remarks, he doesn't take in account the corner cases. Suprisingly, or maybe not, his concatenation statement is similar to what I regularly use:

def commalist(f, endword="and"):
"Concatenate a list of strings in the form of 'Red, Yellow, Green and Blue'."
if len(f) == 0:
return ""
elif len(f) == 1:
return f[0]
else:
return ", ".join(f[:-1]) + " " + endword + " " + f[-1]
This reminds of wonderful book - "Economics in One Lesson". Written half a century ago it describes most economy fallacies, that are dominating even among intelligent people. If you didn't know, you would think it was written today.

There is a chapter on "The curse of machinery" (read online - http://www.fee.org/library/books/economics-in-one-lesson/#0....), that explains why this whole post is thousand years long delusion, that keeps coming back every decade or so.

Highly recommended to anyone who wants to understand true fundamentals of the sound economies.