skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
He might have somewhat of a point, but he utterly kills it by playing up the pictures. Something funny becomes signs of deep, passionate regret. (Was the walrus saga really clever at all, or tragic at all, past the first one?) Lolsecrets has "world-weary" cats. Lolsecrets is not very funny. It's a very poor example of lolcattery. And I know it's snobbish, but I don't like how it completely avoids talking about Caturday, which would have explained why people like lolcats much more succinctly (it depicts animals, which we see as having subhuman intelligence, saying things in a broken manner; the humor comes from being able to imagine certain cats saying certain things) and without the drama.
Overcoming Bias: Cambridge meetup
Is it just me, or does the author use a lot of unintentionally funny analogies?

Anyway, I'm going to chip in on the issue of CEO pay. Many, including the author, are outraged that they're paid 500 times the wage of the average worker. But the CEO job is generally given to somebody who

a) has proven himself (5mm <= net worth < 15mm)

b) is willing to work 80 hours per week

c) is willing to pick work over family/friends, no matter the circumstances

The CEO must:

a) focus on quarterlies at the expense of long term vision (maximize shareholder returns per quarter)

b) focus on quarterlies at the expense of employees and the company itself

Aside from perhaps the prestige and power that comes with the job, it's not going to be a lot of fun. So why would somebody who's already rich be willing to do this? Money. And lots of it. Does that make them sellouts? I guess. But if working for 2 more years means the CEO can retire and sustain his current lifestyle for the rest of his life it's probably pretty tempting.

You shouldn't ask yourself - does the guy deserve 500 times the average worker's salary? Ask instead - why did it take 500 times the average worker's salary to convince him to take the job?

I think that the CEO should focus on generating true value, both in the short and long term. And I don't think that's possible when you're only held accountable for short term results. Only CEOs like Steve Jobs can work on their vision, short term results be damned. His annual salary is $1. Why? Probably just to prove his independence.

Everything boils down to incentives. Whether it's CEO pay, greed on wall street or credit cards (ab)use. People do what's in their best interest. Fix the incentives, and the rest should fix itself.
Their flagship site, Icanhascheezburger.com, is one of Web 2.0's big success stories -- on track to top a billion page views this year -- and its content is entirely user-generated.

Damn it, Icanhascheezburger.com is not Web 2.0.
My working memory improved with a simple idea: get other things to remember for me. :-) Paper and machines do a great job. Tabs in particular are a way to expand one's working memory; the browser can keep track of what you meant to check out or do, leaving you to think about other things. This takes discipline, though. Also, I find I can store some things in muscle memory; if I've copied some text for example, I feel like I'm holding something.

With deliberate practice and the right techniques, people can learn to expand certain areas of short term memory by associating it with other, more solid knowledge. This used to be called 'chunking', but the process seems entirely different. There was a paper (referenced by Ericsson et. al. on expertise) on a group that increased their digit span memory from 7 to 80 in just a few sessions.

Some people (e.g. Ericsson) think that with deliberate practice and effort, experts route around the standard short term memory entirely: in a blink they can remember information just presented to them, in a field that they know about, in the long term. For fields outside their expertise this ability doesn't kick in, however.
A few responses, not certain it's worth it to rant too much about a guy like this:

1) PDFs act like balls on certain computers, and they can't be embedded. Plaintext lacks the layout abilities without heavy customization.

2) Copying and pasting isn't what text is all about. Very often the point of text is letting you read. And Scribd handles reading pretty well.

3) You can let people download the PDF from Scribd. That's what I do with a lot of the textbooks I find: download, convert to Kindle format.

4) Scribd isn't perfect, but saying there's no point to it is silly. It's a repository for documents. Therefore, there's a purpose for it. You might not need that purpose, but it exists.

5) If Scribd is amassing a following of an enormous size, and it is, then insulting it for not being meaningful is a stupid thing to do, unless you've done something that's so much better. I use Scribd to find textbooks, literature, gaming manuals, and much more, and I used it to display my novel, with a PDF download option. It's useful for me.
you have strong point - i hadn't thought about it this way before. Just the other day someone called me out on a derivation and i spent a couple of hours writing out a very tedious proof. there were lots of special cases and i really resented the bastard when i was done. the experience was very much like filling out IRS forms. it would have been very nice to have a proof assistant to back up the points where i would have much preferred to handwave. I really like the comparison to manual memory management that's exactly what this proof felt like - freeing the mallocs.

but think about the following two situations: (1) you have serious doubt as to whether a statement is true. presenting a proof removes all doubt. Computer proofs, no matter how ugly, are a win for this situation (2) you have overwhelming experimental evidence that something is true and you want a mathematical proof to help you understand why it is true. Computerized proofs are less helpful here - this is where you want an elegant and simple proof. it should be very intuitive how the result depends on the assumptions. it should be something you'll be able to remember when you're 70 years old.
Your point about starting a business is a good one. I initially learned programming while self-employed as a web designer back in the wee days of the web. On my own, I always wore more hats than just "code monkey," and that made a difference. Not to mention that when you're self-employed, you can go take a walk outdoors, etc., anytime you like. I guess a predilection for self-employment is why most of us are here reading Hacker News.

At risk of going off-topic: I, too, suffer from RSI. As a programmer and musician, it is a double whammy for me. I have found many short-term solutions, but have recently experienced some astonishing relief from reading The Mindbody Prescription by Dr. Sarno (I believe someone here on HN mentioned it). If you think you would be open to the idea of RSI as a disorder originating in the brain as a result of buried emotional tension, you should check it out.
As a manager, when we do both our employee reviews as well as rankings, we always take into account what an employee is making. Ideally, an employee is performing slightly above their pay grade at all times, so their is a consistent track record of pay increases, punctuated every so often by significant changes in job responsibilities.

On a technical track, the typical valley growth pattern is from a low level helper, to a developer/technician, to an engineer/sysadmin, to an architect/Sr.Sysadmin.

But, from time to time, something gets out of whack, and either an employee was poorly interviewed, lied about their previous salary, or was grossly overpaid, and they come into a job with far higher expectations than they are going to be capable of delivering on.

Let's say that a solid Jr. Sysadmin, who's comfortable working around DNS zone files, configuring startup scripts, placing IP addresses on interfaces, and writing rudimentary scripts to automate all of this, should be making around $80K/year in the valley right now.

Now, let's say they got hired into a Sr. Sysadmin role, at $120K/year and, in their first couple months, were expected to architect/engineer/deploy a global loadbalancing DNS architecture, complete with performance and redundancy capability, documentation, etc...

This isn't unreasonable to expect of a $120K/year performer, so, when the individual failed to accomplish this, they are placed on a performance improvement plan, seen as an underperformer, and are taking up a valuable head count where someone else could have been performing those functions. They are mostly likely the first people to be laid off, and will be very unlikely to see a repeat of that salary, and will need to adjust to that fact. In a worst case scenario, it takes them 9-12 months to adjust to the fact that their next job will include a $40k/year pay decrease.

On the flip side, if they had come in as an $80K/year Sysadmin, and performed well, they would have been seen as an asset to the team, and would have continued to have enjoyed both career as well as salary growth. Ideally they manage to dodge layoffs, and then, 3-4 years later, they are making $120K/year based on merit.
Don't be so pessimistic :) The comment is a) an interesting point and b) funny.
Heh. Have you ever read comments on YouTube?
Get a refurb used first-gen Macbook; we've got every generation of Macbook at the office (company standard) and I can't tell the difference between 'em.

Maybe the moment is sooner than you think!
It seems that this could be an easily solvable solution...there is a way to have BES archive mail via exchange + symantec vault or emc xtender or whatever and he could use white lists + pgp to make sure he is talking to who he thinks he is..but i don't know what the requirements are for this kind of system
When you or axod give me a relevant significant non-physical way that men and women are different, I'll address it. I chose to address the specific, relevant, wrong point he offered as an alternative.
> I don't get interrupted by having to download files and open them in another app, then close them, delete the file if I don't want it, then get back to browsing.

Really? I use acrobat reader, and when I click a link the PDF just opens instantly on another monitor. If you have to manually download and open PDF files you're probably doing something wrong.
I can't wait for larger USB hubs that don't need to be plugged into the wall.
Poor guy. I know what it's like to be addicted to push email. It's the primary thing tethering me to the traditional Microsoft stack.
Don't Blackberries typically connect to an Exchange server? It's trivial to document/archive them, I think its more the invasion of privacy.
Not a guru, but I've used it for a while. Both as desktop and server. My main gripe is that FreeBSD doesn't have a reliable filesystem. FreeBSD still dies pretty horribly after a few hard crashes (power loss, whatever).

fsck? In 2008? No thanks. Messages about possibly corrupted inodes? How should that be my problem? I can't stress this enough, one day you will wake up and FreeBSD will refuse to boot. And that day will, by Murphy's Law, be one of those days where you have to get an incredible amount of real work done.

I'm a big fan of FreeBSD, ports, and the whole "do it right" and "proper documentation" philosophy. But until they get journalling right you should probably stay away.

(also: upgrading from FreeBSD 6.x to 6.(x+1) is incredibly painful. I don't think upgrading a 7.x system is going to be much easier. Reinstalling FreeBSD gets old fast, so you'll probably just shrug and stick with whatever version you already have)
Must be those Big Email lobbying bucks at work.
I found it fairly interesting that he'd be the first president to have a laptop on his desk, and the first to use email.
Ability to embed docs is key to viral spread too. Users won't download a PDF that much, but they'll read it in a flash widget.

When I did my pretty popular Sequoia spoof, I just used docstoc due to the embed. I hadn't really used Scribd since the very early days and they didn't have an embed back then so I didn't really think of them. I found out later that their ppt to ipaper conversion is awful so it wouldn't have worked anyway, but that's beside the point.
> I'm just glad to live somewhere that the majority of people, "good" or "bad", don't carry - I'd hate to live somewhere the opposite was true.

How do you know that the majority of the bad folk don't carry where you are?

I've been places where everyone was carrying. Why should that have bothered me?
I think the real "web 2.0" story, percolating under the surface is 4chan.org.
Django models now run in web2py (and it does migrations)
Steve Jobs must bet on USB3 when he drops FireWare on MacBook ...
I think this is orthodox Neoconism. The baby boomers were hippies who did drugs, attacked the Vietnam war, questioned authority, promoted "free love", and so on. Most importantly, their independence of thought is what makes them "selfish."

Contrasting them with the "Greatest Generation," whose lives were basically dictated to them when WW2 started, and supported the House Committee on UnAmerican Activities. Can we call them the "Pleasantville Generation?" instead.
the author's selective memory and faulty logic continually undermines the point

His chart doesn't help either:

http://www.ritholtz.com/blog/wp-content/uploads/2008/11/debt...

Yes, if you cut the Y-axis in arbitrary places, you can make small changes seem important. Too bad they aren't.

Here is a chart comparing my apples to oranges:

1000.0001 - ******
- ******
- ******
- ******
1000.0000 - ****** ******
~ ****** ******
+---------------------
Apples Oranges

Wow, there are 3 times as many oranges!
ZFS has a freebsd port.
https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/search?q=restart...
I wonder which will happen first... USB 3.0 becomes standard or they finally stop putting PS/2, serial, and parallel ports on the motherboard backplate?

USB 3.0 will probably win, but I can dream can't I?
"Just because the British government is increasing surveillance doesn't mean it is also as monolithic as its parallel in 1984."

Please can we stop this silly misconception that the UK government is engaged in surveillance en masse. It's a ridiculous fantasy.

Individual businesses have closed circuit TV, to catch criminals and protect their premises. The video goes onto a video, which in a few days is used again and taped over. It can be requested by the police, if they feel it may help with a criminal case. End of story.

I believe the practice started to take off in the 70s/80s when video cameras became cheap enough for the average person to have one, and they were shown to catch shop lifters etc. Also possibly to catch people like the IRA planting bombs.
" ... like having embedded Flash videos instead of QuickTime downloads."

Exactly. Being able to download a document in a robust format, and view it in the tool of my choice,. at my convenience, is an epic win. Forcing me look at complex media in a browser is misguided at best.

Given me a downloadable .mov anytime over flv.
I like my PS/2 port thank you very much. I also understand that there are some useful uses of the serial ports still today, granted mostly in hardware hacking. Though I guess I could see the serial port become a pci card.
iPhone has done push email for a while now ;) It's a great feature though.
Also, half his examples weren't done by any "U.S. generation". The automobile was invented by a German, and Penicillin was discovered by a Scot.
I see what you mean. But I don't make my own head phones. :( This is the sort of thing that scared me away: http://openeeg.sourceforge.net/doc/WARNING.html
I dont think so. The BBC advertises just as much as any other channel; it just only advertises its own stuff rather than washing powder or whatever, so you don't notice as much. You can't tell me it makes a difference whether someone's watching Eastenders or Coronation Street to brain scans.
This may be true on windows machines, but on OS X, or the iPhone, the experience is reversed - clicking on a pdf is a very fast easy operation, allowing you to read the document easily and quickly with all the functionality you expect. The scribd link results in a hideous looking font shown in a slow loading flash app. (Or on the iphone, nothing) - try scrolling in their scribd flash app - Serious Lag.

Windows does not have a built in pdf viewer, and the pdf viewers you can get aren't good. But the solution seems totally wrong.

The real solution is to make a really nice pdf viewer plugin for windows.
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pg
Ask HN: Realizing Your Idea Isn't Original
I recently came up with an idea for a web app that I've been getting pretty excited about. I've been spending the last couple of weeks doing research and today discovered that another company is already executing the idea. Not only are they executing it, but they're doing a pretty good job of it.

How important do you consider the originality of an idea to be? I have decided to embrace my variations on the idea, the size of the market, and go ahead with developing it.
browse and dev with safari

i like safari's developer's tools better than firebug
"It's a repository for documents."

Um isn't the world wide web an open repository for documents? And quite a good one at that?

What's the value add? Why choose to put documents in a single companies walled garden?
Yep. You'd need somebody with absolutely no shame ... like Phil Greenspun!

http://philip.greenspun.com/careers/acm-women-in-computing
http://philip.greenspun.com/careers/women-in-science

"[A]nyone smart enough to make it as a computer scientist can make it with less work and risk as an MD, MBA, or JD."

"A lot of men are irrational, romantic, stubborn, and unwilling to admit that they've made a big mistake. With Occam's Razor, we should not need to bring in the FBI to solve the mystery of why there are more men than women who have chosen to stick with the choice that they made at age 18"
read the chart again. 0.7 projected vs. 1.0 actual. That is a very significant change. Then just think about the 1.0 number. The total amount of debt is what everybody in the US earned in year. A scary thought in of itself.
I would postulate that some details of the potential competitor's execution is different from what you envisioned for your app. This difference may be what makes one app more successful than the other.

Try to figure our what the core perspective of the other app is; perhaps it is subtly different from your vision - assess whether you believe your core concept is "better" than theirs.
USB 1.1/2.0 is required to deliver 100 mA per port, but may deliver up to 500 mA. Devices state their power requirements (in units of 1 or 2 mA, IIRC) during enumeration, which always runs at 100 mA, and the host computer says yea or nay.

And yes, the USB spec actually measures "power" in "milliamps".
The definition of "reading easily" is subjective. As I noted in my other comment here, Scribd is not very accessible with what is arguably the only screenreader for OS X, while the original documents (pdf, word, ppt, excel, txt, etc.) were. Not to mention iPaper is flash, which means there's an additional dependency before viewing the document (an issue that could be ignored if it wasn't for the limitations of some platforms like wii and iPhone, but lack of flash/flash lite for iPhone OS is a rant for another day).

And speaking of OS X, "firing up a viewer" and bloat makes no sense with PDFKit in Safari where for me downloading and displaying the PDF in my browser is just as fast if not faster than scribd for a lot of the documents I'm looking at. If you were using the embed/email/social aspects of scribd, then fantastic, but scribd gives me nothing useful otherwise and instead just pisses me off with the various problems one can and does encounter.

Youtube succeeded because Real, Apple and Microsoft had a fragmented market with all sorts of formats for video, and no central place to aggregate these videos (with the exception of, say, Apple's movie trailers page). Flash videos became popular because nobody had the patience to download entire videos before watching them, or to install RealPlayer/Quicktime/Windows Media Player and have a subpar experience as a result. Put youtube and flash video together and the answer is obvious. However, you don't have the same kind of issue with PDF except for certain bloated viewers on certain platforms and subpar integration (which, I admit, the embed feature of scribd can come in handy occasionally).

If your argument were about powerpoint presentations nobody bothered to export to web/pdf, I would then agree that this type of service is useful, but I would also like to point out slideshare. Slideshare does have an accessible website to a large extent and provides a service not well served on any platform. I'm aware Scribd does PPTs too, but I feel Slideshare displays and handles them better. Scribd could learn a thing or two from them.
"The BBC advertises just as much as any other channel; it just only advertises its own stuff rather than washing powder or whatever, so you don't notice as much."

Sorry, but that makes absolutely no sense. Putting occasional information on upcoming programs in the same bucket as washing powder ads every 10 minutes is a bit of a stretch.
If someone else has already executed it and made a pretty decent job of it be happy. Now you know there's a market, and that there's someone you can learn from.

It is very rarely the unique idea that wins. It's the implementation and execution.
Apple Delaying Google's iPhone Voice Search App?
Not so sure I agree about the lizard men, but I agree in principle.

It's a bit like tai chi. You can say that chi is bs, and it's all about how you move your body. And you'd be right.

But, for most people at lest, without believing on some level that you're tossing energy around, you won't move your body right.

The key is to be able to believe that in the way that is useful, and yet, still have the clarity to look at your beliefs and recognize that some of them are not, in fact, accurate models of the universe. Outside of an epistemology essay, we can in fact believe and not believe the same thing at the same time, and quite often do. The trick is to do it intentionally.
Writing one blog post per day on Overcoming Bias, having to do that every day and publish immediately and put it behind me, and then getting feedback, has sped up my writing by over an order of magnitude.
Admitting that you need "evolutionary changes in the structure of thought" IS humility.

He's not talking about Mother Theresa stuff here, but good old fashioned intellectual honesty and curiosity.
The general idea doesn't need to be original at all. There was search before Google, social networks before facebook, video before YouTube, etc.

Sometimes the specifics of the idea can be important though. For example, take Google: lets use hyperlink data to rank websites

What's your idea?
I pretty much just sat down and started writing. I skipped the planning and just let it flow. That meant a good amount of cutting and pasting things around later to get everything in the proper order, but the free form inspired me to write more, better, and faster. Your mileage may vary.

Do you have a contract and an agent yet? I learned the hard way the value of a good agent.
Personally I prefer a plain old PDF. But from what I hear PDF sucks on Windows, whereas it's great on OS X.

So Scribd may be nice on Windows, but really the correct solution would be for either Microsoft of Adobe or both to fix PDF on Windows!
The global slumpometer
In other words, to summarize: "kids these days!".