skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Thanks for replying. Perhaps you can help set me straight in this issue a little more.

I've always assumed that if you made payment according to a mortgage such as show here http://michaelbluejay.com/house/interest.html you get the effect as stated under the first graph: "Notice that in year 15 when you're halfway through the term, 75% of each payment is just going to make the bank richer, and only one-fourth is actually paying down your balance and building equity. Ouch! You have to get all the way to year 22 before more of your payment goes towards principal than towards interest."

So I assumed that if you made payments for the first 5 years and then sold the home, that the bank got to keep the amount it booked as interest (from the graph it looks like between 99 and 95% of your payments). The win for the home owner was the appreciation in the value of the home. The win for the bank was tons of interest.

It seems from your reply that if you sell after 5 years against a 30 year mortgage the bank somehow recalculates the interest and applies the exorbitant amount back to principal. Is that what you are saying? If so, is there some layman's doc that explains how this works?
The Case for Global Warming Skepticism
Myth #6: Rails only speaks English
Twitterpillar Emerges as Fail Whale Becomes 'Endangered'
Socialdecks: Enhancing education for the next generation.
Users can sign up (for free!) and study/review topics of their choice in unique ways, such as regular flashcards, or by a number of browsing methods (cloud, tagbase system, matrix, list, hierarchical, etc). There are thousands of topics to choose from, and you can learn in the best method suited for you with ease and speed.

The "social" in Socialdecks comes from the power of connections made on Socialdecks. Users meet other respected members as societies based on their recognition on the leaderboard or respective profile badges, as well as even just by using useful/insightful decks built by masterminds. Users have made hundreds of connections on the site, and they have helped people learn and grow in an entirely new way.

Evey new feature released is taken under consideration for user response, user friendliness, and user usage. This is exemplified by the simplicity of such features as signing up, which requires only 3 quick and easy fields, card creation, which requires only 2 fields, or even deck compilation, which requires only 1 field to be filled out, then you click your way through the simple, interactive application to form your deck.

We don't force you to sign up for many of the features. In fact, in current setup, you can browse, search, view, analyze, and interact with the application, all without even signing up or logging in. But once you log in, a feature-rich application is at your fingertips, only 3 fields and a click away!

Some of our latest features include Socialdecks Groups, a portion of the site dedicated to classes and groups of people collaborating together on a single topic, such as a spanish class or physics class working together to study for an upcoming exam and the Socialdecks Online Store, a simple way to supplement your flashcard-based studying with textbooks.

As a startup, Socialdecks strives to enhance the education process by providing a feature-rich application free of charge to a responsive and interactive audience.
How so? It includes things I rarely see in startup business plans: a revenue model, for one.
5 Tips (from VCs) for Startups and Entrepreneurs
Rubinius is a community project
Are there any guarantees on how fast files are invalidated on the edge servers? Running curl on those urls gives a lot of insight ( X-Cache: MISS ... ) into what's going on but it seems that invalidation of resources take 10-15 seconds. The X-Cache changes immediately but you only get a miss after a while. At least that's what I've been seeing in my pretty trivial tests.
Has anyone ever profited from pure client-side js code? I am not even sure it is possible.
What was it Joel Spolsky said about programmers counting "It must work for 1. Oh, there's more than 1? Then it must work for any number".

;)
It truly, truly sucks that Mathematica would cost me nearly a month of pay. I'd love to have it and use it, but that is just far too much.
Well, I'm obviously not arguing you should hire indiscriminately. I just think that asking "will the employee be essential to the existence of the company?" is the wrong test for deciding whether to hire someone.

Employees are toxic.

That is over-simplified to the point of being almost content-free. Beyond a certain point, adding more engineers to a team obviously decreases total productivity (per MMM); that's not to say that there's no value in, say, adding new sales engineers to support new customer engagements, or adding new employees to kick-start an entirely new project.
Joel on Software: Anecdotes
I thought it was just my computer trying to tell me something :-)
I recommend going down to the bare minimum and sometimes it helps to consistently compare your site with web standards compliance. I can understand some programmers' dilemmas which arise when IE doesn't support 90% of CSS, but at the bottom line 65% of users work with IE and it's the professional-grade standard for most businesses, nonprofits, and schools.

That's just my viewpoint on the issue, but I know some people have made their applications browser-specific, in which case they take advantage of available add-on features or applications to enhance the website and allow the use of more advanced templates/designs.
Adobe has developed Flash for iPhone, they are just waiting for Apple approval.
All I could keep thinking was "Hell, its got more of a chance of working than Paulson's plan..."

Monkeys are much more predictable, you see.
Can't wait to start using this for Stormpulse. Our traffic is extremely geo-specific (usually Texas and/or Florida), so this is going to help.

To be frank, I haven't been completely satisfied with S3, so maybe this will help insulate us from those outages as well, assuming the content is already cached at the edge.
No worries, you don't come off as condescending.

There is no doubt that this man has been successful and he seems to have changed the course of his life for the better. I am happy for him. However, consider the long term impact of cases like these. It's not about his success, it's about the type of behavior his success will inspire. People will look at him and they wont see someone who started his own company, they will see someone who made $250K in two months. Above all, people are attracted to short term profits (it's what got America into the current economic crisis). Someone who might have tried to start his own company will instead go for the quick profit creating Facebook and iPhone applications. He may be happy with his large payday, but the loss to society is large. At the end of the day, I'd rather have people starting new companies.

My concern is that cases like these will be sensationalized in the media and result in the incorrect perception that "social networking application things" are the best thing to go into. Hell, maybe this guy has real world impact. After all, people who don't normally play games are emailing him to tell him how much they enjoy it. But the way the media has presented his example will not inspire people to create value, rather, it will inspire them to go for the quick profit via the next big Facebook app.

I will admit I was a bit careless in my first post. Even entrepreneurs not skilled enough to come up with "the next big thing" should still strive to work towards solving real world problems. At TicketStumblr, you do have a real world impact. You are solving a situation that cause markets to fail: when people have incomplete information. Your service allows people to find cheap tickets because you give your users enough information to judge the market accurately. That is the type of real world impact I am talking about.
NASA Tests First Deep-Space Internet
Maybe you can try sage:

http://wiki.sagemath.org/sage_mathematica
In 10^10^(big number) years? :-)
I like Tesla. He was under-appreciated in his time, brilliant, and did things just for the joy of the science.

I just wish they'd stop with the naming of products, rock bands, and breakfast cereals, etc. after him. Its starting to wear thin.
At this point, it would be irresponsible for Tesla, as a company, NOT to ask for money from the government.

Hey, everyone else is (hypothetically) getting some, why not jump on the gravy train? At least they have the alternative energy thing going for them.

Whether the government should give them money or not is a different discussion entirely (and strangely affected by the simple choice of words between "research" and "bailout"), but I see absolutely nothing outrageous about Tesla asking.
I'm curious if anyone has any refutations. I shared this because I found it unexpectedly compelling. But I don't want to be the victim of believing the last thing I have read.
If you license it right, anything's possible. (i.e. major corporations can't use your code illegally or they'll get caught.)

Just because the source code is publicly viewable doesn't mean anyone can take it without permission; small people will, but the companies that would pay you for such a thing can't get away with that kind of piracy.
Hey how'd you find my other job posting?
yeah, the thought occurred to me. Something similar to http://online.typingmaster.com but allows users to create and pakage custom courses. I.e. a programming course that starts with most of the same stuff but then gears towards a specific language (java, ruby, python, etc.). Then allows you to share these courses with others.
IPhone now #1 handset in the world by AdMob’s count
I often evolve type in a single var into something more complex,

foo = makeSomethingDifferent( foo )

And I need to catch myself when foo is a default param
"[Copyright] is a tax [to give] a bounty to writers. [It] is an exceedingly bad one" (1841)
Hm, normal workers? I would imagine most CEO's use e-mail... Unless someone can transmit things directly into your brain as you sleep, I think it's pretty hard to argue with e-mail as a way of communication.
While I will probably never use mathematica, due to its breathtaking price, one can only wonder how many researchers the world over simply pirate it. I also doubt we will ever see Wolfram willing to set the price at a level that normal human beings can afford.

Perhaps a client-server version that does all its computing back at Wolfram's servers, would give them the confidence to dabble with a sane price point...
Suspect Has Witness that Doesn't Lie: His Metrocard
It's funny to think that the singularity, if it is coming, will produce this profound qualitative shift in human existence. And at the same time mean absolutely nothing in the face of a problem such as this.
If you disapprove of what the government is doing, go vote and tell the government to take a hike.
Some of this stuff is jaw droppingly awesome. But I have to say, the most useful things for me will be the discrete calculus, the new visualizations, and the enhanced typesetting and UI. Many of the new mathematical additions are very interesting but very specific.

I am very happy that Mathematica 7 ships with so much data. Data processing and procurement is a perpetual burden for those in chemistry, life science and environmental science. I'll be glad if this tax has somewhat lifted it.
At least they have a hell of an educational discount. Probably the biggest I have seen.
I learn things sometimes... do I qualify?

(seriously though, I'm not a student. 2 credits at Johns Hopkins, right down the street, are about the same price as Mathematica)
I love all the components that sage is built on, and am a huge python nerd, though I haven't tried sage itself.

Mathematica just does some super cool things and encourages a different pattern of thought, which I'd love to play with.
Search-based keyword tool
A lot of essays are extrapolated anecdotes. It's not an intrinsically evil form. You just have to do it right.
On Sunday Dave Winer defined "great blogging" as "people talking about things they know about, not just expressing opinions about things they are not experts in." Can we get some more of that, please? Thanks.

Irony, defined. :-) I kid.

I think Joel's problem here is that he missed the point where any of these guys claimed to be doing anything more than making a bunch of observations. Galdwell certainly isn't science, but I don't think he proclaims to be either.

I haven't read his newest book, but certainly his thesis is at odds with the idea (the one we truly want to love) that the only thing separating the haves from have nots is desire and work ethic. We're all over saying this is common sense, but then we find it outrageous that this could have an affect on any one particular outcome.

Gladwell's ultimate theory I suppose is that his observations should make us question how our society functions overall (again, haven't read the book yet). I guess that forces us to look at things in a way we often don't enjoy.
If you missed Wolfram's talk at Startup School you can get it at (along with the other talks):

http://feeds.feedburner.com/Ycombinator-StartupSchool
Boxee Media Center App Gets $4 Million in Funding
Cars used to be luxury items. If they were to receive money, I doubt the rationale would be to make more $100,000 sports cars.
Yeah? And? Apple doesn't look like they'll be approving that any time soon.
A bit of a harsh headline. They're only starting with luxury cars because they have to. In fact their m.o. is rather Robin Hoodlike: to use the money of rich sports car buyers to fund the development of technology that can then be used in cheaper cars. Which is what the internal combustion car industry did too.
The 4 Hour Work Week is when this whole genre jumped the shark. And I have not read that either. I've met Tim Ferris in bars. That was enough.
Exactly. How can the market possibly compete, when the illegal product simply works better than the legal product?

Pirated films are available anywhere on the planet, without wasting time waiting for international shipping, with a broad variety of subtitles, good enough image quality (often even HD) and play on commodity computer hardware, without buying any special devices. They also don't take up any shelf space.

I am amazed that films are not globally released simultaneously, both paid download and theatrical release, yet another competitive disadvantage for legal content. Almost all the english-speaking people I know would much rather download a film today than wait a year or two for it to hit the local cinemas.
researchers work in universities, almost all of which have site-wide licenses. Site-wide licenses for mathematica also start to approach reason. Its doubtful that that many researchers will have to pirate it.
Universities in a lot of countries do not have budgets that can deal with even $1000 a seat.
I noticed that too; I wonder how much they had to pay for that (near-ubiquitous) placement.
Chris Tompkins' Allvoices.com pays students to make story comments
Should web 2.0 news services pay people to comment on their stories?
Is that blog using Fertigo Pro for a font? That's incredible.

I don't know much about economics and the App Store, but I'd be inclined to trust this article. TapTapTap makes some excellent apps. Classics is a favorite.
He writes with a very entertaining style. Bravo.
> I think Joel's problem here is that he missed the point where any of these guys claimed to be doing anything more than making a bunch of observations. Galdwell certainly isn't science, but I don't think he proclaims to be either.

Well I'm going to compound it by adding my observations :)

I've got to say, in my own experience, I like anecdotes that are war-stories best. A critical self-analysis often is full of insights for others... The most gripping, amusing and insightful talks I've seen have often been "here's how a large project detonated on us".

Unfortunately, in my experience (I end up at a lot of SOA, Cloud, Web/2.0 type events) these are quite rare for a variety of reasons . You tend to get more of the hypothesis/external critique - which by and large I find a lot less valuable.

Anyway, that's my anecdote on anecdotes :)
The entire blogosphere seems to be populated with Polonius's, who was a figure of fun in Hamlet, first published around 1600 AD.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Polonius
This feels like a value judgment to me.

Did any of the following 'solve the next big problem'?: Jerry Seinfeld, Seth MacFarlane, Claude Monet, Francis Ford Coppola, Kubrick, the list goes on...

This guy made something that entertains people (although he's probably not yet in the league of those above ;). It seems to me that you're not valuing works of entertainment as highly as some other works. That's a judgment on your part, which makes your, "should still strive to work towards solving real world problems" sound quite judgmental. I like to think there is more to life than efficient markets (even though I love efficient markets)
Maybe it's not high if people are buying something; they may expect to give an email in that situation. But you can A/B test to see exactly how many you're losing by asking for emails.
But it seems that to "do it right," the writer must be able to pick the right anecdotes and draw the right conclusions from them. This is probably close to impossible if he's not an expert in the area. And if the writer's an expert, then he should be able to provide other (non-anecdotal) evidence to support his claims as well.

I think that's why many of these books are so frustrating to read -- they seem to rely almost completely on anecdotes, without any sort of underlying data to look at long-term/overarching trends/themes. Thus, instead of saying, "here are various data, including these representative anecdotes about some of them, and so we can see that my theory is true," these writers usually say "this is my theory, and look how well these carefully chosen anecdotes match it!"
Protein sequence alignment implemented (open source):

http://www.biomedcentral.com/1471-2105/9/S2/S10
Yea, after I wrote that I thought of ext-js (http://extjs.com/). Good point. I don't know what kind of money they are raking in because they are a js framework but a client of mine bought a commercial license. Their framework is ROBUST.
It kills me how the Gladwell book brought this out of Joel. Nobody wants to be told their success is a good part luck and timing. They all want to believe it is because they are smarter and worked harder.

So suddenly the software world's number one anecdotal blowhard decides to slam another blowhard. Okay. Whatever.
You named three open formats that don't require anything but coding to push back and forth. You named two programs that are open, but I've used Java: it's an ugly language. It results in really ugly programs. Universal programs, but ugly ones. I haven't used C# or Red Hat, but I've heard bad things about Red Hat.

Apple does support open standards. Look at WebKit. What they don't support is releasing everything they make openly. Usually, the rule of thumb is as follows: if the product's quality would suffer from being open, they don't make it open. If it works completely open, they release it as such. The problem is that in a lot of cases, opening things means inviting opposing beliefs. And that means that you get a bunch of sub-optimal choices, and that results in a lot of noise and a lot of low-quality options. Apple prides themselves on having a very reliable brand name. They couldn't do that if they were as open as Microsoft, and they couldn't turn out such good programs.

And as I said on this thread: Jobs is famous for having said that he'd rather make a high quality product than lower his standards and make more money. And he's making billions and churning out good things, so I'll trust that he knows what he's doing, and that part of what he's doing is closing things that ought to be closed.
Microsoft sacrifice quality for customisation? Hah. I dislike it because it's so high quality and uncustomisable. Means you can't do what you want with it, but the boss loves it.

Then that's very different from their OS set-up, which allows for a lot of options at the expense of unification and aesthetic pleasure. I haven't used what you talk about, but if they do that then good for them. I still think they do their OS customers a disservice.
"They'll never sell more than 5 of those pc computers"
If you have real data, and used the anecdote to illustrate it, you're doing it right.

If you give us the anecdote, but don't extrapolate to wild grand theories, you're doing it right... simultaneously telling an interesting story and giving people more data points to build up their own understanding of how the world works.

If you give us an anecdote, then tag on some theory so that the anecdote isn't mere storytelling, trying to make the anecdote more than it really is, it's deception (at best), or, at the very least, talking about something you know nothing about.

And all these anecdotes and know-nothing books, blog posts, and articles are crowding out real, genuine stories and useful knowledge.
Tunnelling Nanotubes: Life's Secret Network
The book review is impressively hypocritical. She ruthlessly disdains Malcolm Gladwell's use of selectively chosen biographical examples and anecdotal evidence, and then proceeds to selectively cherry-pick examples, to optimally infuriate politically correct sensibilities. She then lampoons him for incompleteness.

She mentions only one of the many larger studies that he cites, the Terman study. Was the Terman study wide ranging? Yes. Does it fit Gladwell's hypothesis that the opportunities one is offered matter? Yes. Does she show it to be incorrect? No. Does she attack any part of it? No. Does she mention any of the other studies that Gladwell mentions? That major hockey players are nearly all born in the first three months of the year? Ericsson's studies on expertise? Flynn's analysis on historic chinatowns? No!

If I present a theory, and back it up with a bunch of other data points, one should not be able to pick out a single data point, claim that I am basing my loose hypothesis on anecdotal evidence, and say I am irresponsible. This is what is being done.
It's a shame, because he was an incredible blogger. FSJ is the blog that I point people to as a sign of what Internet writing can be.
Xobni launches 4 partnerships that will change Outlook forever
Could a member of the libertarian party please comment on the moral obligation we have (or do not have) to ensure that all children are well-fed? I want to better understand your position on issues like these.
I actually call them evil entirely because they seem not to understand what makes products good and consistent and usable, and yet they spend billions trying to improve their products. Their solutions are thoroughly unintuitive, I've found.
Wow, it's almost like Rails is implemented with a turing-complete programming langauge that allows you to "write code" to "solve problems"! So innovative!
No singularity. You must have read to much sci-fi written by AI researchers afraid of dying and overly influenced by judeochristian conceptions of God.

If you want a qualitative shift in human existence you must create it. The singularity isn't going to save us any more then beneficent aliens will solve my problems by taking me on their ship to the planet of the sex goddesses to live in bliss in their zoo.
One of the comments on Cuban's blog said something that piqued my interest, yet I haven't seen an adequate response to:

"So the allegation in paragraph 14 of the SEC’s Complaint that “Cuban agreed that he would keep whatever information the CEO intended to share with him confidential” is untrue? If so, the SEC would be in violation of FRCP 11(b)(3). This is especially true since a duty of confidentiality is an essential element of either a 17(a) or 10(b) claim under the Exchange Act"
In the future, everyone will be in jail for piracy.