skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
While I understand and respect the general unhappiness with the TAL and Daisey situation. I think this is an unreasonable extrapolation.

Both shows (TAL, and especially The Moth) are about storytelling. There are times (like the Daisey incident) where TAL tries to take on the role of journalist, but, at the end of the day both programs are about entertainment and thought-provocation. Whether or not Gladwell told a tall tale does not diminish either program's value as a storytelling medium.

I think it's unfair to blame Malcolm for the fact that journalistic publications failed to research and understand
what the Moth is actually about. Yes, he could have done a better job of finding what people are writing about him and correcting it, but I feel like the primary failure here was on these secondary sources.
Getting good returns from a 100 billion dollar investment is hard. Just as an idea of scale that's enough money to more than double world wide fusion research spending for the next 30 years. Suppose they started down that path and 20 years from now started building useful and highly profitable fusion reactors that beat coal power plants. Now what if that failed. Measuring the risk / benefit curve on such an investment is hard. But, Apple could afford to fund 5 other projects on that scale without touching their cash horde.

IMO, Apple starting down the dividend path is simply the only reasonable course when faced with that sort of cash flow.
Do you have in mind a list of potential clients ?

Basically you can go freelance two ways:

* Use a dedicated service like vWorker, oDesk etc ... You will compete with coders from all over the world, so expect some rough time until you build yourself a reputation. If you go this route I will strongly suggest to keep at least a part time job.

* You already have a list of potential clients and you intend to work for them directly. This is the preferred direction from my experience.
What's a Realistic estimate of India's Internet base by 2015
iminlikewithyou raised money four years ago to develop games for the web. You're just hearing about them years after after they changed their name to omgpop and released 42(!) games.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Games_on_Omgpop
I've used Trello, the pomodoro technique, and self-sprints to a great degree.

I think Trello and the pomodoro technique can be used almost universally, but the self-sprints are something I tailored to myself - I realized that I work best in short, intense bursts and not long, predefined durations. Sometimes I'm more productive in a single hour from 6:30am to 7:30am than I was for the three days before.

Get yourself Flowkeeper (a good pomodoro tool), a Trello account (or another piece of work queue management software), and start keeping a journal of your productivity - try and figure out when you're most and least productive, and work around that schedule.

Edit: Also, as a single person you'll never be able to be doing more things than can fit on a single whiteboard. A whiteboard is probably the single best investment that I've ever made for productivity.
Let me reiterate my constructive suggestion that the OP provide actual data. I can see how the author wrote a pop book, as he is quite verbose, but any engineer can tell you that he is also quite evasive on technical questions. "What's the baseline?" should not pose a tough question for anyone writing about performance improvements.
MPEG has made (I think) the right choice in splitting off a track for royalty-free web video (WebVC/IVC) while continuing their traditional generational codec development (HEVC). The former allows them to utilize expired patents from their long history as well as use their weight to negotiate royalty-free grants for current tech, in order to set an unrestricted baseline. Making this a separate effort rather than enforcing those conditions on the main standardization process allows them to continue evaluating the state of the art for all other use cases.

I think this is as close as we'll get to having our cake and eating it too while patents on algorithms are still recognized.
"It is easy to find a man in almost any line of employment who is twice as efficient as another employee, but it is very rare to find one who is ten times as efficient."

That's not really true for many of the newer industries that have arisen since then. Programming being the classic example.

Factories made workers orders of magnitude more productive. To get the benefit you needed access to a factory, which is why workers in the wealthy West ended up so much richer than the rest. Our education system still works on the assumption that getting you into a factory is a good idea.

But today factories are accessible to far more of the world, so their unique advantage has faded. They're still critical for our absolute level of wealth, but the relative wealth of a factory worker is falling and isn't going to stop.

Now it's skill with computing can make a worker orders of magnitude more productive. The effect is obvious if you spend any time replacing manual processes with software. A team of three programmers can easily work for a year and produce a system that replaces the work of thousands of people forever.

Which is why we need a completely different education system that helps people achieve this new level of productivity.

Do we really need that many people who understand computing? Won't it just cause a glut of programmers? Industrialists worried about the same thing 110 years ago. They turned out to be wrong. People don't just suddenly say "Well, I'm 100x richer than my grandparents. I guess I have enough stuff now." Instead the extra wealth lets entirely new industries be born, and creates entirely new "needs" and wants.

A world where basic education included reading, writing, and recursion would be a very productive, very wealthy world. I expect it will happen, because the economic incentives are huge. But it will take a long time to shift cultural inertia.
Wow, a downvote brigade for calling Apple a growth stock? There must be lots of MS fanboys here, or Apple fanboys who don't know that the opposite of "value stock" is "growth stock".

With a P/E of 16.87, AAPL a growth stock. Or overvalued. With a P/E of 11.71, MSFT is value not growth. With a P/E of 135.1, AMZN is ... pricy.
Pictionary includes a board game element with teams and some other folderol I think.. the core gameplay element, I.e. "I draw something, you guess what it is" has been around long before there was a Pictionary, or a Draw Something, or an Isketch, or InkLink, or ....

It would be like trying to sue someone for an implementation of tic tac toe. Though in today's environment, I'd be shocked to learn someone hasn't tried.
Ha ha, I'm actually talking about the Pentagon.
Linux 3.3 released: Android can now boot from the Linux kernel
Yes, I know it's a political problem not a logical one :( .

There's plenty of work available, on the second link above, Alberto Iglesias, the president of the Farmer's federation acknowledged that (losing the wage if you get employed) makes it very difficult to get labor to harvest fruit and vegetables. "Crews have been decimated at an alarming rate""

There's also a labor shortage for construction work, at wages above the country's mean, and higher than the "Plan de emergencia" wage, but of course, you don't have to work for that one, so that's the one people choose.

It also goes agains the link the parent posted, which was what I was partly refuting:

"a regular “paycheck” just for being alive, a paycheck sufficient to support basic human needs, with no means-test nor any rules on how it could be used"
Crushing Local SEO Competition: A Case Study
Exactly. I really struggle to see why companies are often hesitant to cannibalise their own products - because if they don't, somebody else will... The newspapers are lucky to be making that dollar given how slow many of them have been to innovate.

I think Apple's willingness to cannibalise is one reason they're so successful - for example, when the iPod Mini was a very successful product, they stopped selling it and replaced it with the Mini. More industries need to learn from them (especially the movie industry...)
If some rich people make their money "unfairly" then fix that problem independently, you don't need sky high taxes on all rich people to fix that problem. I make a very good living, but I don't cheat anyone out of anything, and I'm sick of having the specter of high re-distributive taxes hanging over my head.
nations with higher atheism are the ones with the least problems

It should be plain to see that development came first, then more atheism. This should be very obvious in Europe's history.

I think you're confusing a symptom of chaos and brutal existence with the root cause of it.
Whatever the excuse in the form of 'religious purposes', there is still a lot of industry in America devoted to one thing, and one thing only: the delivery of death.

Go have a closer look. A Death Cult rules the US.
> the market cap on that company would be > $X.

Market cap != Value assets

The 550B market cap is the value of all outstanding shares of the company which is not equal to value of the combined assets like buildings and $$.
Researchers have developed a unique way to create FULL-COLOUR holograms
Whoa.. backlash.

The intention wasn't to diss Flask. It is a very concise and useful framework. All the comments apply to my original comparison.

public static void main(..){
System.out.println("Hello World");
}

really isn't much more verbose than

print "Hello World"

yet every tutorial on a new language points out how frustrating it is for someone learning the language to type "public" "static" "void" "System" and other keywords/objects/modules without having any idea what they mean just to do something simple.

In Flask I need to instantiate the Flask app, define a function to run and decorate it with a route. That raises all sorts of questions about what a decorator is (which for a casual pythonist may or may not be something they understand - I know my understanding of decorators is sketchy at best). Then I need to explicitly call app.run() somewhere.

In Sinatra, the DSL makes it much simpler. If I receive a "get '/'" request, then "do" the following stuff. "end".

Flask is very concise. No doubt about it. It's stripped down to it's very minimum. Yet Sinatra manages to be even simpler, which is impressive to me.
While I agree that it is reasonable to expect trending towards an alarmist reaction, there are significant enough similarities between DuQu and Stuxnet to suggest that the authors of the former had access to the source code of the latter. If you read the W32.Stuxnet Dossier (http://www.symantec.com/content/en/us/enterprise/media/secur...) from Symantec it pretty objectively articulates the complexity and sophistication of the creation of Stuxnet. I personally don't think it's an alarmist opinion to believe Stuxnet had national interest behind it, and so am pretty wary of DuQu until more information is uncovered.
> Are you denying that wealth has a gravitational effect towards wealth

Money begets more money, certainly.

> when taken too far, has a negative effect on the society in which it occurs?

This isn't possible. A person can either spend money or store money.

When they spend money, they are telling others to perform work. That money then gets transferred to other people.

When they store money, that money gets placed in a bank or in an investment. In a bank, that money is immediately loaned out to someone else, creating a business or some venture, creating jobs and wealth for other people. In an investment, again, jobs are created and wealth for others is formed.

Now, can all of this run in a closed loop among the privileged? Only in a society with heavy government intervention where the market is warped. In a healthy free economy, talented people are quickly recognized and quickly brought into the loop. In an unhealthy controlled economy, you must know the right people to be allowed into the loop and the people allowed into the loop are rarely talented.

> A broader based of wealth occurs when a society is balanced not solely because of the supreme talents of an individual.

From each according to his ability, to each according to his need? History has already condemned your way of thinking.
Paid Open Source
Is there a site (similar to GitHub) that rewards open source coders in a monetary sense. For example, if I'm very smart (of course I'm not) I'll write something like node.js and store it somewhere like GitHub. My code is so cool and awesome that 10's of thousands of people follow and fork it.

The website can see the activity around my project, I've written some sweet code, people have followed and forked it. In recognition for the 10's of thousands of people I've brought to their site, they split up some of their advertising revenue or storage revenue with me.

I've written some good code, released it and got some money for doing so = happy developer. Github (or equivalent) have attracted many people to their site and probably more clients to their product = happy company. Does this exist?
I'm in the exact same situation, it's a real problem in Europe :(
The site can't display umlauts correctly which looks pathetic in 2012.
Geosynchronous orbit is not "trivial" - it's a long way from Earth.

A geostationary orbit is about 35,700 km above Earth.

That's about (correct me if I'm wrong) about 500 milli-seconds there and back.
You can't live without a salary, and you can't be productive unless you're alive. Putting money into a start up and expecting the founders to not take a salary would be like putting money into a bakery and expecting the owners not to buy flour.

As far as what is acceptable, it depends on your market, the idea, the investors, and the founders. I've seen as low as 40k (approx 50% market value for the founders if they were employees) and higher than 100k.
Great post.

I wasn't aware that the numbers that people throw around concerning inequality were _before_ gov't payments (they basically ignore current redistribution methods).

If you want to listen to a great podcast on income inequality: http://www.econtalk.org/archives/2011/11/kaplan_on_the_i.htm...

The other issue is that the European country that has had the greatest _decrease_ in income inequality in the last few years is Greece. Is that a model we should be emulating?
It's crazy how much you think to yourself "A year is a really long time."

And then you realize just how short a year turns out to be.
Losing $10 of revenue is different then losing $10

Unless you're the MPAA or the RIAA, apparently...
Bull. The moment you involve the economic pie, you say it is zero sum. We may call this the pie falicy.

Think of it not as one pie, but as trillions of pies. You get one by buying one or trading others for their pies. Under this model, what right do you have to your neighbors pie.
>"A small jar HHO generator which would then feed a micro-engine(like in a R/C car) powering an electrical generator which would feed power to the HHO generator."

Wait, so you split water and burn it in a generator to generate the power you're using to split the water? I would love to see someone work out the math on that one... Everything I know about chemistry suggests that the best you'll ever do is 100% efficiency, which you of course cannot hit if you're not burning all of your H2 (which you wouldn't be, since the point is to get H2 to lift the whole thing).

"This is already being done commercially."

Do you have an example?
We've agreed to have another one, and try to make it regular. https://plus.google.com/113891941847169025385/posts
They key part of this research is that newspapers failed to personalize advertising. That, more than anything is why their online ads aren't worth as much.
I took a quick look at the arXiv paper behind this article, and it looks suspicious. I didn't take the time to be 100% sure it's vacuous, but it has many red flags, such as being published in "Chaos, Solitons & Fractals," a poorly-regarded journal. Another red flag is the existence of theinfinitycomputer.com.

Now for some real math related to this:

The Cantor Dust and the Sierpinski Carpet really do have area (measure) 0 in the traditional sense. The normal area of the Sierpinski Carpet, during construction, starts at 1 (a full unit square), and is multiplied by 8/9 per iteration. The iterations never stop, so the area goes to zero.

Its 2D measure is 0. There are infinitely many length-1 lines within the final product (any line with equation y=p for any constant p in [0, 1] with no 2's in it's base-3 representation), so it has infinite 1D measure.

So we can look for a dimension between 1 and 2 that measures it, which is where the Hausdorff dimension comes in.

If you double a unit (length-1) line, its measure doubles. If you double a unit square, its measure is multiplied by 4. If you double a unit cube, its measure is multiplied by 8. Here's a pattern we can generalize to non-integer dimensions!

We work from the idea that any measurable set S, when multiplied (scaled) by scalar r, will have its measure (eg length, surface area, volume) multiplied by r^d, where d is the dimension of S. Using m(S) for the measure of S, we can write:

m(S * r) = m(S) * r^d

which means

log [m(S * r) / m(S)] = d * log r

and then

d = log [m(S * r) / m(S)] / log r

This isn't the formal definition of the Hausdorff dimension, but it is the idea behind it, and provides the correct dimension for iterative fractals like the Sierpinski Carpet.

What is d for the Sierpinski Carpet? When we scale it up by 3, we get 8 copies of the original. So m(S * r) / m(S) = 8, and r = 3. So

d = log 8 / log 3 = 1.892789...

for this shape. If you wanted, you could use a factorial-based expression for the size of an n-dimensional sphere, along with the fractional version of !, the gamma function, and use those to get a reasonable number for the exact measure of such a shape.

One more thing. There are numbers of infinite size that you can perform meaningful arithmetic on. My personal favorite are the surreals, championed by John Conway about 40 years ago. This number class basically starts with the ordinals (so including many sizes of infinity) and builds real-number-like operations on those. If omega is the first infinite number, then you can talk about sqrt(omega) in the surreals, and it's a meaningful quantity larger than any finite number and smaller than omega, for example. There are also hyperreal numbers which offer similar freedom of expression.
The only thing worse that having cofounders who big companies are trying to hire is having cofounders who big companies aren't trying to hire.
Makes sense, though it would be nice to have at least a place holder on the main site stating that pricing is yet to be determined. I very nearly ignored jelastic entirely as it looked like I had to signup to get pricing information.
There's quite a few p2p trolling legal cases started by porn companies.
I'm not saying that you're wrong, but my understanding is that higher education levels are positively correlated with income and overall wealth and negatively correlated with number of children. This is where I tend to have a disconnect with your statement that "richer households tend to be larger"; this does not match my personal experience or the folks I know.
And another one:

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1781156
Matt Haughey: Lessons from a 40 Year Old
Mozilla’s Mitchell Baker: we’ve been standards puritans for too long
Historically, Sun hired John Ousterhout and that didn't turn out terribly well for TCL backing by Sun.
On behalf of everyone who has worked in a startup under a wannabe Steve Jobs or a do-it-yourself manager, let me thank you for this post. Far too many people forget that managing people is a valuable skill that is much more difficult to learn than it looks. A good manager is worth their weight in gold.
Apple declares first dividend in 16 years
We do now know however that one compiler flag is all it takes to throw off professional, full-time reverse-engineers. That's got to be valuable to someone.
if the market cap of the company fell below the cash (net of debt obligations) of that company, the investors could liquidate the company, take the cash, and make a profit. thus, it's pretty atypically for market cap to dip below asset value, and even more atypical for market cap to dip below cash holdings.
I absolutely do not disagree. In fact, I could not agree more. I'm just objecting to the possessive "its own" if the death cult in question is Christianity.
6 Practical Exercises That Help Entrepreneurs Harness Their Fears
They were pressured by wall street to actually do something with the money.

I for one would have liked to see apple carry the cash balance. Sure they aren't making much from the cash, but I'm pretty sure there are better uses of the money. For example, why not buy a few suppliers?
Agreed. But sometimes you can know what your object are doing but not want to manage them.

It's tangential, but in my experience coding in Java or any other GC enabled language doesn't mean you can completely ignore the memory management. You still have to watch for leaks, unefficiencies or anything you would have cared for if you managed memory yourself.
Yeah. Those wacky Orientals, eh?
Enough to convict you in a court of law - cops do it all the time. (It's not a search requiring a warrant if you throw the cup away, it turns out.)
Their documentation looks a lot like Heroku Dev Center. Anyone know if this is an open source wiki?
Could Bitcoin Become the Currency of System D?
The answer to the question Baker posed lay in a set of mathematical rules called an algorithm.

I never cease to be amazed just how low the math level is in our culture. And how acceptable it is to be publicly that math ignorant.

It was difficult, for example, to change the algorithm, which worked best in a single-threaded environment, into one that could take advantage of multi-core processors.

Aha, so the parallelized it!

"We have been able to reduce X-ray doses to previously unthinkable levels," said Professor Johan de Mey, head of the radiology department of University Hospital in Brussels, Belgium. That is opening up the benefits of CT scans to a wider variety of patients.

Great!

The terrible way in which this article explains what was done, is doubly ironic considering how it is an article about math and programming literally saving lives.
I think the problem is the rabbit hole of self-delusion.

1. This is bad, and we all agree.
2. Something should be done about it.
3. Old white people (Republicrats and Democricuns) should do something about it.
4. That "something" can and may be violence, intimidation, economic sabotage, ...
5. Oversight is provided by the same people planning and execute such measures in 4.
6. Somehow, all "we" are doing is for the greater good, all "they" are doing is wrong and backwards.
7. If you disagree with 6, you hate apple pie and mom.
8. WTF ??
It would probably be 20% if we didn't sit at our desks all day looking at Hackernews.
Thanks for answering my question - I'd suggest you to put more information on jelastic.com, for example, for US customers, do you have your fully owned data center in US? or you are building on top of other providers (AWS, Rackspace, Linode etc etc)? if so, how is the quality of service and support of your provider? Where is your engineer located? You might also want to consider to provide a 800 phone number. As far as software stack is concerned, I suggest you to add messaging support for example ActiveMq or RabbitMq - it is essential for "big" systems, which are more likely be your source of revenue.
Fiasco? Even the Republicans fighting in the primaries are having to hem and haw and grudgingly admit that it seems to have worked out pretty well.