skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
For those who don't click through, here are the 5 steps:

1. Find meaning and inspiration in your work.

2. Work hard.

3. Discover the relationship between effort and reward.

4. Seek out complex work to avoid boredom and repetition.

5. Be autonomous and control your own destiny as much as possible.
Ahh... for you see, it is a competition. It's a competition for time and attention. As the mainstream public -- quite different beasts than you and I, geeks and hackers, where we are obsessive with information -- turn to the Internet to consume content their time and attention is quite limited. Most times they will stick to only site or source that they like.

It's like community channels versus CNN. With blogging it's like we've lowered the bar for John Q. Public to get on TV and talk about their editorialization of the news, but, most likely people tune in to CNN for 30 minutes at a time. Why? Because it's professionally curated, edited, produced and digestible morsels that has developed a reputation over time. Talent will want to apply for jobs at CNN because they know that's where the audience is. Success begets success. The bigger blogs will only get bigger. Have more revenue from ads. Hire more writers and snowball.

Now here's the real question that people should be asking: is this a good or bad thing?

I, personally, don't quite know.

PS. As for you mentioning the linkage of big sites to smaller sites, I have a whole other diatribe about that and how it doesn't work from my experience working within the Gawker empire. But I'll save that for another time when I feel like having my karma points burnt.
i have to get an iphone now

see what you done did?
I completely agree. The effort I exert on my projects is far and above what I exert on client work. The reward is much larger, as PG says, I'm creating my own wealth rather than wealth for others in exchange for money.
Deal is on for Panasonic to acquire Sanyo
MySpace CEO DeWolfe: Branded PMP is possible
No. We already have a testable case in the US, which is a large percentage of kids drop out in the 10th grade. We increasingly are losing kids to low-skilled service jobs.
Simply: no, microsoft is not considering adopting WebKit for IE.

This appleinsider article, and others like it, took an out-of-context statement by Ballmer and stretched it into a farce.

I happen to live in Seattle and have friends who work on the IE team. IE8 sports a completely new rendering engine built in-house. It ain't webkit. My friends claim that when it is finished the new engine will render things, y'know, in a standards-compliant manner. Personally, I'm not holding my breath :-)
I have to wonder whether there are still enough good applicants for all the new startup programs to choose from and invest profitably.
It's also only valid at a certain radius (probably the surface). So the sensor wouldn't be calibrated correctly after you went inside (it would be off by differing amounts depending how far from the center you were).

The same is true of the constants for the planets, but at least they are (mostly) solid and not designed to be lived inside of.
I meant PR for twitter -- which is the only reason people are talking about this. Al Gore doesn't need PR.
The Internet as a Force in Politics: “Obama Would Not Have Won Without the Internet”
The Long Tail of Search is Much Longer Than Expected
Yeah, he's a real monster for trying to do anything at all.
Let me guess without reading, based on what I know of Gladwell:

1. Learn to write pretty well.

2. Come up with a hypothesis.

3. Collect data.

4. Throw out all data that disagrees with your hypothesis, even if it is the overwhelming majority.

5. Write book/article about the data you kept.
I think the researcher is arguing not that mushrooms are responsible for the sound of existing Stradivarii, but that they can be used to create new violins with similar characteristics:

The mushroom nibbles lightly on the wood, reducing its density and intensifying the sound, he said. [...] Many researchers believe the unmatched sound of Stradivarius violins comes partly from the instruments' age.
You can upgrade while still being minimalistic.

I <3 minimalism as well.
The UAW must be worried. They're going to be like a parasite that kills the host if they're not careful.
There's always OMeta: http://www.cs.ucla.edu/~awarth/ometa/

This is a generalized tool that will let you specify any language you want and target Javascript. OMeta has been implemented in several different languages; the Javascript implementation is just a couple hundred lines of code.
The Food Miles Mistake: Saving the planet by eating New Zealand apples
Of course; the important thing in that graph is the traffic trend.
"Electric cars are not a new idea." - which supports the statement that electric cars are hard. In fact electric cars date back to the very beginning, before there was even an "automotive industry"; nobody's been able to build a practical electric car for over a hundred years now.

It's hard. Battery technology has not been cooperating. If electric cars are your last-ditch hope to survive, you're just dead.
Well... By 2003 the Alpha has been more or less abandoned in terms of R&D expenditures. It's impossible to estimate how much of its perceived lack of relative performance was due to progresses in x86 designs and how much was simply due to a lack of research in progressing the architecture.
Can we get a politics.news.ycombinator.com or something? Sheesh.
14 year high?

Wow.

Bush has finally let the unemployment rate get almost as bad as it was under Clinton...
Yes I think you do have a point, but I don't think it's about things like visual resolution and the amount of data it generates. It may be about the much greater variety of data we see and about our ability to experiment and interact with the world around us in order to test our beliefs.

So maybe you could say it's about the quality of information not just the amount of data of one particular kind.

In any event, this is a debate that is only at the very beginning. I don't claim to have come to a conclusion. I just think those brute force statistical techniques are not the end of the road but rather a practical workaround for the brittleness and the complexity of traditional rule based systems.
There was an article on here a while back with a great description of the CTO role:

"The CTO's primary job is to make sure the company's technology strategy serves its business strategy"
1.354e14 kg assuming the Death Star has a radius of 160 km. However there's conflicting information about the diameter of the Death Star (some say 120 km, others 160 km) and that's the diameter and not the radius.

So the Death Star would be considerably lighter than your friend's calculation.

My calculations give 3.385e13 kg assuming a radius of 80 km which yields a density of 1.578e-2 kg/m3 or 15.78 g/m3 which is way, way low. In fact it's much lower than the density of air.

Three possibilities: I made a mistake in my calculation, Google's gravity value for the Death Star is incorrect, we shouldn't expect consistency from a story George Lucas made up almost 40 years ago.
When Clinton _started_ his Presidency.

I'm guessing you're too young to remember the whole "It's The Economy, Stupid" theme behind Clinton's first-term campaign.
I think Facebook's internal valuation is probably on the order of a small number of billions, so $550M in stock would represent somewhere around 6-10%, which would seem to be way too large a chunk of equity.
Food miles is a great example of an oversimplification that actually hurts a cause. Just because something pollutes more in a single dimension, doesn't mean the total pollution from 30 different aspects of the production is less.

But a single number is so easy to understand, people latch on to it.

Add to this to repulsive, smug attitude of some people, and I get doubly annoyed.
http://twitter.com/tipjoy/status/994204469
That should just redirect to http://www.reddit.com/r/politics
I'm not saying that one person taking on an extreme high risk endeavor is strange. Happens all the time. What's strange is that such a huge cluster of people are doing it.

The anomaly is the multiplicity of the occurrence, not the occurrence itself.
He's not have a conversation. As a broadcast medium, twitter is awesome.

"The signal to noise ratio"

Add filters like search and follow the right people. There are clear ways to increase the signal. Sometimes the signal isn't insightful or utilitarian - but personal.
compulsory national service, eh?

my ma grew up in communist russia. and when she hears obama speak all she can think of is the 1917 revolution and the Khrushchev speaking at the 20th congress of the communist party.

is she right, i dont know. did i grow up in a communist country, no. i was born and grew up in nyc. but i do know that every russian i've talked to thinks obamas 'change' sounds like the hammer and they all waitin for the sickle.
You are right there would be advantages for anyone using a browser that is locked down. I guess it has been too long since I was in that position.
If they just had to pay 1 cent per email, the dynamics would be fundamentally changed.

How might one make that happen?
It should be applauded. Free market. Good things bubble up and stay alive. Their personal choice in allocating their labor. Good for everyone. Blah blah. All that jazz. <3
The space program isn't really a great example of long-term thinking though. Its crowning achievement was the Apollo Project, which only took about eight years -- less than the time it takes Boeing to design a new airliner, for instance. Once we'd got to the moon we figured out we didn't have a long-term plan for what to do when we got there, so the money dried up and wound up getting spent on one short-term boondoggle after another: Skylab, the Shuttle, the International Space Station et cetera. NASA's budget and primary focus change frequently, and every time there's a grand new plan to do something new (a new launch vehicle or a trip to Mars) the money will evaporate soon afterwards leaving behind either nothing (e.g. the last few Mars plans) or a crippled project which never really does what it was originally supposed to do (e.g. the shuttle or the ISS). Meanwhile, huge slices of the NASA budget are spent idiotically thanks to Congress (e.g. the spreading of NASA facilities over various states with powerful senators).

NASA has had some great successes (the occasional huge success is pretty much unavoidable if you gather thousands of very smart people and billions of dollars) but as a poster child for government's ability to take a long-term view it's pretty dim.
"Fooled by Randomness" talks about the same phenomenon: People are more likely to pursue an investment strategy that demonstrates common, small increases in value while exposing them to rare, large decreases over one with common, small decreases in value while exposing them to rare, large increases, because it's psychologically difficult to persist while seeing bad results every day even if the magnitude of those bad results is so small so as to be inconsequential.
Inaction doesn't require a conspiracy - it would take a lot of resources to fix IE, so if it's not in Microsoft's interests to fix it, they won't. (I don't agree with lacker that they break it intensionally)

Microsoft isn't in the business of revolutionizing the computing market anymore. It's in the business of sustaining a billion-$ enterprise based on on the status quo.
Some supporting evidence would be helpful. I'm not familiar with his writing or criticism of it.
Retailers post worst October sales figures since at least 1971
We don't just have drop-outs because of that.

In my sophomore year in high school, I wanted to drop out. Things are taught too slowly, and 12 years of learning is far too much with the present system. If there were more acclaimed systems for graduating early, I'd have jumped at it. That's what this article is about.
Food miles is a great example of an oversimplification that actually hurts a cause.

Exactly!
1. coin catchy phrase

2. write book

3. create a demand for books based on pseudo-intellectualism

4. make sure it appears in every airport gift shop

5. ...

6. profit!

i kid, i kid, i own and read all his books.
First steam engine built in the UK for 50 years takes to tracks
http://blog.ideeinc.com/
It's a $4000 tax credit. They aren't giving you $4000. If you don't have a paying job, you get nothing. If you don't pay at least $4000 in tax, you aren't getting the full benefit.

I don't know about you, but I don't think I ever paid $4000 in tax during college. I spent what little free time I had at part-time jobs, but didn't earn much money. Most of my taxes were returned to me by the government for being a poor student.

100 hours of mandated community service is a tremendous amount. If you don't work during school, the tax credit is useless and if you do work during school, it reduces the number of hours you can work.

That being said, I did other activities that might qualify as volunteer work under this plan: I helped out with a local high school's FIRST robotics team.
the market value is tied to the amount of money that a company can generate (profitability). the profits are in theory given back to investors.

this is why software companies which have very low capital expenditures have very high market value, since software companies are most of the time very profitable (Microsoft)
And the number 1 reason is ... server capacity :-)

Anyone got a mirror?
Food Miles:

A good example of something that makes such perfect sense that it must be true. It just isn't.
Do tell. windycitizen at gmail.com
Whats wrong with dropping out after the 10th grade and going to a community college?

You would learn the same things (or more) and actually get something for your time. You could cheaply knock two years off of college that way. You would also be in classes with people who actually want to learn.
I disagree that you can give this much credit to the Internet. You can't deny how important the bad economy and low incumbent approval ratings are. Historically, with these two variables alone, change is a shoo-in.
I think the age of big unions is past. Its an economic anchor that no one will be able to afford to drag.

Time to start producing the kind and amount of cars the market demands, not the kind and amount agreed to in the last union contract renegotiation.

I kind of hope the bailout doesn't happen and the "big 3" are split up and sold off into many smaller, more innovative car companies like the early days of car manufacture.
I agree, Twitter is awesome. But I think Twitter is more useful as a passive conversation tool. As in, okay here are the 100 people I like and following and there's no direct pressure to care what about everything that they say or engage with what they say. But if I do, wow, it's pretty addictive. Like an IRC chat with constant flow but without the need to pay quite as much attention.

If his goal is to use it just as a broadcast medium to promote his projects, a la @barackobama, then that's useful but in the grand scheme of things wouldn't he better off going on TV? By being on Twitter, the PR get is for Twitter. The novelty is the fact that someone like Al Gore is messing around with something that many people have been discounting as just a toy for the past year (even though I've heard the market values it to be quite a pricey toy).

As for the s/n ratio, it's manageable but for people (public figures, Kevin Rose, iJustine, etc.) that have thousands upon thousands of followers it becomes outright ridiculous. They don't even bother responding and I believe it just defeats the purpose.

If someone like Al Gore wants to help I really hope he starts engaging in more conversations with regular people, because that's really a good thing. Twitter is an avenue that he can pursue but again... the s/n is so out of whack without advanced management and plus the 140 char limitation it might just be counter-productive. But hey, right track and everything!
Fun (and Fraud Detection) with Benford's Law
JavaScript Lab - JS Libraries under GPLv3
Erlang R12B-5 released
I get where you're coming from. My question is: does it matter that the average person will read only one or two sites? Especially when social news sites provide a means of aggregating out to many sites rapidly?

On Hacker News, for instance, I get the occasional Seth Godin post. I don't like Seth's blog en masse, but one or two posts a week is decent for me. Other people, I'm certain, get Daring Fireball and Signal vs. Noise in similar doses, whereas I follow that more intently. And on Hacker News, at least, when I write something I want to share I've often had a pretty nice discussion following what I've written. And considering it's Hacker News, it means that the people reading it are all people I'm thrilled to have reading my stuff. That means that I, as an independent and an amateur, can reach people. Not millions of people, but I can reach the people I want.

Similarly, with politics there are independents like The Seminal that frontpaged reddit once every two weeks. I don't know how many hits that got it, but I'm guessing that meant a good deal of hits. Not the same as something like CNN, but not a completely meaningless amount, too. And that also means that people who like writing longer pieces, people that news stations wouldn't have time for, are given a space to write for the considerable audience that exists for more detailed work. And my generation is much more used to sifting information through several sources. It means that smaller venues will still find their audiences.

I'd love to hear your thoughts about the big site-small site connection. If you ever do write about that, keep me informed: that kind of thing fascinates me to no end.
Simply insist that everyone change to communicating via cell phone SMSs.
I follow a few people that have many thousands of followers. They often reply to my @replies. It isn't something you can constantly do, but it is an important sign of authenticity that they do so periodically.

Authenticity is going to become increasing important for people with personal brands, like Al Gore.
Measuring multi-core performance [pdf]
The american auto industry doesn't need saving. Honda, Toyota, Ford are all likely to survive.

The world will go on after GM and Chrysler fold.
The BitC Programming Language
How Much Time Should You Spend Working Each Day?
I left high school after three years and went to an Ivy League college.

I regret only two things:

1) that I wasted as much time as I did in high school.
2) that I started in a degree program at a college.

Never confuse education with mere "schooling".

Schooling is an industry, and it's designed to separate consumers from their money.

Education is the important thing, and it may (or may not) overlap with schooling.
It's not 12 years of learning.

It's 12 years of attending a jobs-creation project for education majors (i.e. teachers).
I read it as "Microsoft may look at Open Source" not "Microsoft may look at WebKit"
I totally agree, as I mentioned earlier tools like Digg/Reddit/HN are extremely important and beneficial for the "little guys" as it's an equalizer. Digg traffic are massive (about 350k pv worth depending on the interest), Reddit is pretty substantial (100k pv easily, again depending on interest).

So for your question: exactly, is the commodification of blogs to form major media businesses a bad thing for small guys?

Again, I'm not sure, yet. In the mainstream media world consolidation is a bad thing. In fact they fret about this commodification constantly as real journalists see it as an extremely bad thing. Dan Rather now heavily criticizes this about news agencies merging into just 3 or 4 major corporation worldwide http://uk.youtube.com/watch?v=o25T0BspJ7c. But then this opens yet whole other can of worms as mainstream media has a different type of burden: that of performing their duty as the fourth estate.

So to sum up: the trend started with people making tools for regular people to write and express and create content easier. Those "blogs" are now turning into professional media empires, hogging up attention and pageviews. For the rest of the blogosphere to exist it needs to heavily depend on tools like Digg/Reddit to filter.

Is blogging dead? Maybe. It's too early to tell.

I really should just stop being lazy and extend my comments on here into blog posts. Maybe I'll get a social media consultant job out of it.
The only thing keeping me with sprint is that I have a soft spot for the underdog.

The device situation on CDMA is bleak, and Sprint aggravates it by not allowing devices they didn't sell (ESN filtering) onto their network. Being able to buy a GSM phone and drop your SIM in is rad.
I don't see it happening. Webkit is LGPL, and Microsoft have always been anti-GPL. It'd be a major shift in their position to suddenly embrace it out of nowhere.

The Internet Explorer's Trident engine is slowly but surely catching up with its competitors, so it's less of an issue than it was a couple of years ago. Let's not forget IE8 passes Acid2. The real problem for developers it that users aren't upgrading from IE6 fast enough, and that's not going to change whether Microsoft embrace Webkit or not.
This isn't solely the union's fault -- GM has been operating at a loss for four years in the US market. They've lost over 70 billion dollars since 2004. That's insane.

General Motors, like all US car companies, has been content to survive off of government subsidy, and has been so intransigent that they successfully fought back all attempts to force them to create modern products, improve fuel efficiency, or otherwise invest in research and development. Now that the market has shifted from beneath them, the management is whining that they can't create new products fast enough to meet the "unanticipated" change in demand. They think they deserve new subsidies to rescue them from the consequences of their own bad decisions.

The UAW can be greedy, and has certainly played a role in this, but I'm not eager to blame the auto workers for wanting to be paid a living wage when the management team has been systematically destroying the company around them.
Cringely's take on the Papermaster hire (future processor oversight)
Can we put 30 year old flame wars to rest? We need to concentrate on modern ones instead. Please and thank you.
A friends new company - visually explaining complex issues simply
Why is that a bad thing? It is awesome if someone is intellectual and job focused, but it's similarly fine if someone is not. We can't all be paper pushers or professors - we should be grateful to those in the service industry.

If we didn't "lose" people to "low-skilled service jobs" then there'd be a lot more competition for high end jobs, which would drag up costs across the board.
Ericsson Expects Cellphones With HD Video Capability by 2012
IBM's vision of 'Smart Planet', expects sensors & software to launch Smart Infrastructure
So true. It's not just oversimplification but also that these causes become fads quicker than the data can be collected in order to verify.

"Locavore" was Oxford's word of the year in 2007.
I left school at age 16 and have been self employed since age 17. If I'd had to stay until 18 (as they are now doing here in the UK) I doubt I'd have been involved in the startup scene and had as much success as I have, because I would have gone on to become a lawyer or a member of some other "profession."

Locking up free spirits for another couple of years might not look like a bad thing, but at that age you're very impressionable, and if you're always being told that getting a degree and a "career" is the best thing, those two years could be the death of your creativity.
I've done exactly that, and never found a difference.