skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I don't think it's true that the predictive accuracy of a model is always as accurate in one parameter as it is in another. I think that only holds if the model is believed almost for certain. In reality you have a distribution of models that you might believe. Suppose you impose some smoothness assumptions on the system: that the response isn't too wild anywhere that you're looking. Then you can make the successive approximations: first you assume that, in this domain, asymptotically, these are linear, separable PDE's. Then if you spend all your time jiggling one parameter, it gives you a bunch of information and constraints on the response for the one parameter. If you jiggle it still further, you might be able to ascertain some glimpse of the nonlinearity, and nonseparability of the system. So for example you might know a fair amount, might have constrained the space of possible models for CO2 - NO2 coupling, or CO2 - water vapor coupling, or CO2 - SO2 coupling. You might see some of the homogeneous CO2 nonlinearities. But you'll know way less about SO2 - acid rain coupling. That's much higher order.

Regardless, my point is that if we stay within the phase space that we know, it's a lot safer.

You need different levels of confidence depending on the choice you're considering. If the prediction is ecological disaster, 90% confidence is good enough to convince me not to try it. If the prediction is a 90% chance of it being okay, that has to be weighed against the much more confident prediction we have that if we gradually turn down the manmade forcing on the environment, things will stay pretty close to alright.

So it's less like your glider example than the reverse. Someone shows you a videotape of a large body, of mostly known shape, traveling through a fluid of unknown density and viscosity. We know that most things fall. We know that most gliders are unstable. Yet we are climbing this mountain and approaching this cliff ledge. And I think it's prudent to say, look. Ground is good. We had better be a lot more sure than this if we want to fly this thing. We shouldn't fly the climate recklessly.

[ps, I am going to sleep now.]
Yes.

http://www.forbes.com/2006/06/01/paulson-tax-loophole-cx_jh_...

By accepting the Treasury post, Paulson is poised to take advantage of a tax loophole that allows government officials to defer capital gains taxes on assets they have to sell to avoid a conflict of interest, as long as the proceeds are reinvested in government securities or a broad array of mutual funds approved by the government within 60 days.
That's, uh... a little difficult to do in web development/design.
Since you do have money coming in and an expectation of what your growth will be, you can run a discounted cash flow model to get a price.
Do you want to sell it? If you're passionate about it, which I imagine you are, to get that successful, then perhaps not...

If you don't want to sell it, I would do one of two things:

a) Start with a very high estimate and work your way down from there. Who knows, maybe they'll bite, in which case you can take a long holiday in the middle of this recession.

b) Let them come up with a figure, then ask them for double that. After all, they approached you, so you can apply a bit of pressure.
We all seem to be in furious agreement then as that was what the parent post to yours also said.
With any situation, it depends, but great article here:

http://www.wrevenue.com/2007/10/24/selling-a-web-business/
Ask HN: vote breakdown by various categories available?
i've been trying to find voter breakdown by different demographic divides:
race, income, state, religion, anything and everything.

does anybody know where this information is available?
Irrelevant.

The site is worth whatever it is worth to the acquirer.

Once you figure out that number, you decide if you want to sell it at that price or not.

Until you get to that point, don't bother thinking about the emotional attachment.

Also, if you get a pile of money, you'll go on and do something fun with it (a whole new project?). You'll establish an emotional attachment to that project too.
Programming in R makes serious statistics serious fun
Exactly. It's worth only what someone is willing to pay.

It might be worth more to you, but if it is, you simply don't sell it.
You should probably try to get some competitive bids. If you have trustworthy contacts with any of your potential acquirer's competitors, call them and say "hey, I got this offer from FooCorp and I haven't really thought much about selling the site, but it's not a bad offer and I'm wondering if you guys might be interested" and see what they say. Don't expect a binding offer right away, but see if you can get some idea of what a few other potential acquirers might be able to pay, or if they make jokes like "I couldn't acquire a pair of shoes right now."

Consider seriously that this is not a great time for acquisitions. Companies want to reassure investors and lenders that they have a safe amount of operating cash on hand, and any significant expenditures will be scrutinized today in a way that they would not have been a year ago. One guy I know who sold a moderately sized website a year ago at a price that made him quite happy thinks he'd only be able to get one sixth of that price today, if he could find a buyer at all. If you are happy continuing to work on the site for a few years, and your revenue projections are reasonable, you might want to hold on to it and see if things improve.
iTunes is in no way sub-par so I think the language is a little strong, however, I think that just like many pieces of popular software it is not necessarily the best. Indeed, people with free time and some know how have come up with pretty cool product features that rival or surpass some of Apple's features. Aren't we allowed to demand more even though the product is already good?
Usually I save chunks of the problem I can solve without a computer. I go on a long walk to figure them out. when I come back I want to write up what I've thought, and get it implemented. This gets me started, which is the hardest part.
Microsoft gives their software away for free to startups
At first I found this positively fascinating, but then ...

Embryonic stem cells are harvested by destroying a viable embryo, a process that some people find unacceptable.
Eco Credit Crunch?
Obama’s technology czar: the betting begins
Your website is a business.

While most business brokers are focused in physical assets you should be able to find ones which can evaluate your business and give you a value for it.

If you want to, they can even handle the sale, to protect you and help the sale along. The negative is of course that they take a share of the transaction, and the other buyer may hire his own broker.
Ask HN: Sifting through & making sense of browsing history?
I would like HN's recommendations for a browser plugin or something similar?

Here's my problem: Like most people, I browse a lot. I post some of the really interesting technology related links to HN, business related links to NewMogul(NM), and then there are other things I read that are interesting that I don't post or don't come under either HN or NM.

My history has a lot of great info, at least some of that would be useful to me in the future. Is there a good way to manage history? browsed links?

I could sift through history in Safari or FF, that would be cumbersome. I could bookmark everything or add it to delicious, that again is cumbersome. I started using InfoAxe, so that I can search through my history -- while that is a step better, it is less than ideal.

What do folks here recommend? Thanks!
This will be ideal. In fact, there's already a wikipedia article about it.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oh_brother_where_art_thou
Let's assume that, at least this time, we can put the genie back into its bottle and actually manage, thank to your grand master plan, to cool down the planet (or, at least, to prevent it from warming more).

The thing is, we still can't entirely control the climate, and we're still at the mercy of its evolution. And since it's not changing overnight anyway, I think that instead of misallocating billions of dollars we're better off just adapting to it by fighting its effects locally (you know, here in Ireland we're still buying heaters and warm clothes...)

Because, as history teaches us, a handful of scientists and politicians who think of our societies and environment as big machines they can tune to their will, as brilliant and benevolent as they are, will never outsmart the rest of us. Even worse, they will often create large-scale disaters.
Are you interested in bringng home the new hero in the form of posters? If yes then Barack Obama is the right man. Buy Obama posters online. See this legend in his different moods in the different parts of his electoral campaign. If white house is the right place for Obama then Internet is the right place to find his posters.
So, there are a few things to consider.

First, how much work will the new owner need to put into it? $15,000 worth of work per year? Remember $10k only pays for about 5-6 hours of work per week.

Second, how likely is it that someone can de-seat your site? That makes it much less likely that the site is worth so much.

Third, would a competitor, given a decade, be able to build what you have built with relative ease? This is key to how long you would run a regression.

So, if you assume that the site is good for 12 years, a simple regression would give you about $200k as a valuation. BUT, that assumes they won't need more than 5 or 6 hours a week of work on the site. AND it assumes that it can't be easily built by a competitor. AND it assumes your site will stay that profitable (which is usually true in something like real estate, but not in technology which is constantly changing).

Even if you think the site will stay relative for the next 25 years, it's value wouldn't top $300k simply because future dollars aren't worth as much as present dollars in a net present value calculation since there is an opportunity cost to tieing up your money.

However, your site may be growing. In that case, it might be worth more.

So, if your site needs a full-time programmer, it's worthless. I mean, it's worth something to you because it can be your income. However, it's not worth anything to an owner since they'd be paying all of the income to a programmer (yes, even if that's themselves since they aren't getting the site for free).

So, it's really dependent on how much work goes into keeping it alive/competitive. This might be your job/income. That's good for you, but worthless to an owner purchasing it. If it requires about an hour of work a week to keep it competitive and it will be that way for a decade, it's probably worth north of $200k.
Yes.

Or at least they have the propensity to become more so than others.

My evidence is very very subjective... based on watching children (ages 2-5) you see some have a natural inclination towards order and logic. They love legos, lining up their action figures/matchbox cars, coloring in the lines and when they color they only use colors that make sense (i.e. they won't color a tree blue).

While other kids love drawing/painting, giving their parents plays/shows, and creating stories that don't make any sense. They enjoy the chaos of turning little red riding hood into a who-done-it with Optimus Prime and Mario helping find gold on mars.
I sold a blog with about 1 million pageviews per month and a monthly income of about $1100/month. I valued it at two years income + 1/2 of projected growth income over the same two year period.
There are toolsets out there (RPG Maker, Game Maker, Novashell) if you don't feel like investing the time to learn how to program everything yourself. Don't think of this as the "wussy" path: as repeated in the article, learning how to make even the simplest games on your own is a humongous time investment. If you are not seriously interested in making all sorts of games, getting into the industry, or learning every single technical detail, you will probably be much happier using a piece of software that targets a certain domain and run with that.

In short: treat game development like a sport. If you want to be a pro, you have to constantly train until making a game is second nature. If you want to be an amateur, you still have to sink your weekends into it. In any case, you have to be so fanatically into it that even minor accomplishments, like making a character move on the screen or making a GUI respond to mouse clicks, give you motivation to keep going.
Accessible View: An ARIA for web search
Hard to do if you're student....
I'm not too sure about this. The main issue is that people play to have fun. When they realise that their "efforts" to have fun are being used for something else, suddenly the game isn't a game anymore and they become reluctant to use it. So any implementation of this scheme might really flop if it's not done in a great way.

I'm actually very interested in this topic, since one of the ideas I'm developing is based on gaming, and the perception of the users is something that I consider will decide the success of this idea.
Yeah, but they're making progress on finding other ways to harvest usable stem cells. When the research converges, we'll be able to help a lot of people.
Data is good, code is a liability
C# 4.0 suppports optional parameters.
The internet is great at distracting, and for me I can't necessarily disconnect because I rely on the internet for certain aspects of what I do. I find that unplugging the laptop and going to a remote location (maybe a Starbucks or something?) is really helpful, leave the power cord behind. You still have the net, but you've got a 3 hour countdown until your laptop dies... suddenly minutes count and there is no time to get lost in rss feeds.

When/If the laptop dies... I can always head back and plug it in, but at least I'd given myself a dedicated block of time on the problem.
That's a different type of test. You're talking about testing the performance of your laptop with various configurations. This article is comparing the performance of several versions of Ubuntu and the reason you don't want to use a laptop for that is because laptops have significantly slower hard drives than desktop models (even at the same RPM). Also the laptop they're using has a 5400 RPM drive which doesn't help.
Not true.

I said when we first formed the idea and started working on it we didn't know who our competition was (if any). However, by the time we got to the interview, we did.
Not really an accurate title - The BBC didn't "fire" him, they just stopped making programs he suggested.

Regardless, I think he makes some pretty convincing arguments. It'd be nice if more people questioned what we're being told about man-made climate change etc.
Yahoo was a good company, but they missed their mark. Ironically, it wasn't Yang's fault. His predecessor who decided that Yahoo should be a media company (ala AOL) rather than a tech company (ala Google) screwed it up. So, the technology languished as they tried to throw poorly construed media at people. Only problem is that isn't profitable. Tech is.

So, now Yahoo either has to spend a ton to catch up with a company (Google) that shows no signs of slowing down or combine forces with another tech firm (Microsoft) who might be able to eek out something. Neither looks promising, but one definitely looks better.
A respected botanist failed to get funding for a show to attack global worming.

It was in 1996 that I criticised wind farms while appearing on Blue Peter and I also had an article published in which I described global warming as poppycock.

If you take someone who has a deep understanding of a related field like physics, or math, and they find a problem with a given model that's something to investegate. But, making a TV show attacking something he does not understand is not really something the BBC is going to support.
I always wanted to create an extension that would store history as a graph of traversal and not a list of visited URLs. The link is what makes the web powerful, I don't see why history doesn't share the same connected nature.
You're right. It's valid and necessary when you want to compare the performance of different machines. When you're comparing software to software, hardware should not be a limiting factor unless you're testing for specific cases.
I'm sure Zuckerberg is a hard working and smart guy. But if Yahoo didn't know when to sell, I seriously doubt someone with Zuckerberg's limited experience does.
If Bill Joy is indeed the most qualified, why does it matter who recommended him? It seems natural that Doerr would make Joy a partner since Doerr thinks so highly of him.
I agree with your point, but the essence is the same.

He was a fixture on TV screen at one point -- then they stopped inviting him for the reasons he stated.

They fired him from being a regular contributor.
It's been a while since I felt great excitement about a language!
Has Friendfeed Stalled?
I seem to recall The Register trying to help out w/ special t-shirts awhile back. Who doesn't want an enigma machine on their t-shirt?

http://www.cashandcarrion.co.uk/hot_off_the_press.html
I need an alternative LDAP directory with an integrated Kerberos Key Distribution Center and a modern usable user interface. Any ideas?
Stocks slide, Toyota warns of 'unprecedented' crisis in auto industry
It's always funny when people who know a lot about computers sound off on unrelated topics.
Reminds me of Milton @ Office space... "We fixed the glitch"... It'll work itself out :)

There is quite a difference though between actively firing someone, and just ignoring them.
"Also, don't use a laptop for benchmarking operating systems!"

That is exactly the kind of thinking that results in Linux's poor performance on laptops.
Malnutrition: The supper of champions.
For weight maintainence, healthy eating is definitely more important than exercise. It takes a hell of a lot more effort to burn 500 calories than to cut 500 calories from your diet.

I'm no exercise nut, but I do a lot of cycling (70-75km/week this summer). I don't find it relaxing; if anything, it's the most stressful part of my day. But, it wakes me up in the mornings and forces me back into the real world at the end of the day. More than the exercise, I really do it for the cognitive benefits.

But exercise has to be something you like doing. Cycling is the most enjoyable exercise I've found so far that I can easily integrate into my daily routine (that's how I commute to school and work).
Sounds like he has a reasonable grasp of the issues to me. He knows all the facts that the "Man made global warming" camp hide and don't tell people - such that London used to be full of vineyards because it was so hot etc.

I think the problem is that man made global warming has become a very very convenient vehicle to get people to do things, and big business. It's become a religion - a movement on its own, regardless of the evidence one way or the other.
Brothers and Sisters 3.07: Do You Believe in Magic?
Previous episode of “Brothers & Sisters” featured Kitty and her husband Robert McCallister waiting for a birth mother. Next week in “Do You Believe in Magic?”, Kitty’s neurosis will cause McCallister’s chance to adopt to be in danger.
An Arachnological Guide to the Spiders from Mars
I can't find a statement in the article that he didn't get funding for a show to attack global warming.

The sad fact is that since I said I didn’t believe human beings caused global warming I’ve not been allowed to make a TV programme.

That sounds different to me. If he didn't get funding for a show because BBC thought the topic wasn't part of his core competences, that's just fair enough.

If he didn't get funding for a show unrelated to the topic of global warming because of his opinion, then it's a witch hunt.
I think that Botanists tend to also be very good climatologists by necessity :) so he is probably fairly experienced in the right field.

Certainly he makes sensible points.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Learning_styles#Other_models

One of the most common and widely-used categorizations of the various
types of learning styles is Fleming's VARK model:

1. visual learners;
2. auditory learners;
3. reading/writing-preference learners;
4. kinesthetic learners or tactile learners

Visual learners learn through seeing (think in pictures; visual aids
such as overhead slides, diagrams, handouts, etc.). Auditory learners
learn through listening (lectures, discussions, tapes, etc.).
Tactile/kinesthetic learners learn through experience -- moving,
touching, and doing (active exploration of the world; science
projects; experiments, etc.).
It's worth pointing out that the Daily Express is a British tabloid with a not-exactly-stellar reputation for journalistic integrity. I'm sure there is some substance to the article, but I wouldn't be inclined to take it at face value.

( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Daily_Express )
Why is it bad to use a slower hard drive for a benchmark comparing software? You haven't explained this yet.
this is really cool - the canvas integration is superb. Does anyone know what direction this is meant to be heading?
It's even funnier that they still get votes on HN, if they have a rockstar status among hackers.
He was not allowed to do programs about plants, which is area of his core competence. He was not proposing new program topics, they banned him from making ANY program.

Before they banned him, he presented around 400 TV programmes and published 35 books.

Now you understand what happened to Soviet dissidents.
XKCD (500) thank god the election is over...
I've always found that benchmarks are not good at showing OS performance for desktop applications. Why? I don't really need raw speed. What I need is something that will allow me to switch tasks and use other applications while one is locking up/doing a ton.

BeOS was great at that. I'm guessing the new Comlpetely Fair Scheduler that is debuting in Intrepid is better in that way too. My use of Intrepid shows it to be noticably faster in my daily usage. However, I'm not compressing video. I'm running several apps at a time and need to switch between them a lot.
I'd agree, for the most part. Especially with Gen-Eds, I would just hope for powerpoints or go to the local notetaking service and grab a copy of the notes and just cram for the exams. I'd try to pick Gen-Ed's that were interesting, but the exams and everything else just made learning a chore.

Classes I actually found useful:

- Technical writing (english)

- This SOC class where all the teacher did was talk about real life and the lessons he learned. Amazing stories, so much advice still sticks with me to this day.

- My Enterprise Integration class which had so much cutting edge info I knew more than my co-workers on some things when I started a job. I still wish I had saved all the notes.

Aside that, the most important stuff I learned in college were all real-life lessons.
Central FL I can believe--I know a few others here in Tampa Bay--but the panhandle? That's like telling me you know a guy whose brother-in-law saw a Yeti-in the Sahara desert.
I enjoyed the first half of Timeline, and like I said, it was my first exposure to the quantum physics presented there. The second half (after everyone was trapped in the past) seemed kind of cliche.

I didn't find Prey too interesting though. I'd already known about nanobots and at that point was a professional software developer, so the programming aspect didn't have the same "magical" appeal as the others.

Perhaps if you're already familiar with the area he covered, it doesn't hold as much of an appeal?
Obama names tech execs to transition team
I answered that question in my reply to palish.
One solution for this is two use different browsers for entertainment and work (similar to an earlier comment about using different computers for the division). I use Safari for slacking off and FireFox for development.

When I need to buckle down, I close Safari.