skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
If you ignore the absurdly stupid title, this is actually worth a quick read. It's excerpts from interviews with Myron Scholes and Ian Stewart woven into an oversimplified but not completely awful overview of Black-Scholes and its impact.

If the question interests you, I recommend An Engine, Not a Camera by Donald MacKenzie. It goes into great detail about the history of Black-Scholes, its application in options trading, and how it (or, rather, financial modeling in general) tied into the 1987 crash and the failure of LTCM. I have a small writeup about it at http://jasonfager.com/1080-an-engine-not-a-camera/
The iPad is a lot more than a regular PC with an ARM processor.

Had you suggested that, and some foolish HP exec would have believed you, then it would have failed catastrophically. The ARM processor is not the magic juice that made the iPad a success.
> They have just a few percent of the market

Like blind users are just a few percent? Or people with motor-control disabilities are just a few percent?
That is a very sweeping claim. I'm certainly not qualified to talk about every one of those religions. I doubt that you are either.

Also the existence of a creation myth does not mean that it is particularly important to that religion. For instance the Catholic faith has a detailed creation myth in the Bible. However the official statements from leaders of that faith (see, for instance, Pope John Paul's October 22, 1996 address where he says that "evolution is more than a hypothesis") accepts the truth of the scientific consensus on how the world came to be, even though it is in direct and obvious conflict with their creation myth.

Yes, I know all of the logical arguments you can make for the creation myths being central to the faith. They have been made before, including by a variety of Catholics. However the current belief of many millions of Catholics, and the official statements of the church, demonstrate that their creation myth is NOT, in fact, central to the religion.
Thanks for pointing it out, i will fix it.
> do statistics on TBs worth of data, derive useful conclusions

That's gonna be the hard part. Most CS people I've met flee from math and, more generically, theory.
I'm convinced that businesses could save trillions of
dollars by applying existing weak AI to their problems.

Why are you convinced of this? Do you have any case studies with obvious broad applications?

I have had a website and a LinkedIn profile for over a year that make
this fairly clear. How many consulting inquiries have I had ? Exactly
zero.

Neither LinkedIn nor your ISP are responsible for marketing you. Have you been presenting your software at restaurant conferences? Do you have any case studies where it saved someone x% of their food costs?
Sony Ericsson Live with Walkman – WT19i Review and price in India
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I just listened to a lecture on this at BU. Emerging Internet Technologies at IBM or something of that nature. He was basically trying to sell us his product that crawled the internet (mainly a firehose at Twitter) and gathered statistics for advertisers and presented it in pretty graphics.

The main issue they had was developing language recognition. Deciding if a user 'liked', 'loved', 'hated' or was 'neutral' about a product. Another issue that stood out to me had to do with their reliance on the internet. Just because 200 users tweeted that 'this movie is going to suck' does not really represent the overall opinion.

To reiterate, the whole buzz of the lecture was the biggest turn off. He wasn't explaining about how to expand on his product or where to go from here. Just that they had developed a product and we could use it instead of attempting to develop one ourselves.
I don't think your off-topic at all. I think your point speaks to the core of the issue at hand, which is, companies only want to hire folks who have mastered a particular skillset that they only deem important to them at that specific point-in-time.

I don't for one minute think there aren't enough people who can't do "data driven analysis" or whatever it is that companies find important "today". Companies just don't want to invest their time and money in creating that someone who will be able to do the specific thing that they need.

They always seem to think that someone will be "out there" to solve their specific need, and all it takes is a job posting on some job board.

Take a note from the old record label industry, that would have A&R departments, who would take on an individual artist who had merit, and then nurture them to become the world-class musician that makes them a ton of money.
They use tools and seem to have a amazing knowledge of the exact range of a shotgun. The local farmers tend not to be amused by some of their antics and feeding habits.
You need to cut features from the target.

Drop me an email at the address in my profile if you'd like me to help you cut a lot off to start with.
FreeCause : Clients
> Except we would hit peak uranium pretty soon

We will never hit peak uranium. The "exploitable uranium resources" numbers floating about are for deposits that would be commercially exploitable roughly at present prices. The thing is, the cost of the raw uranium is a very small proportion (less than 0.05%) of the cost of running a fission plant. In other words, you could multiply the market price of uranium by 1000 times, and it would only increase the cost of running the plant by 50%.

But, well before that, it becomes cost-effective to separate uranium from seawater. Where we have enough for tens of milennia. If that runs out, it then becomes cost-effective to mine and refine nuclear fuel in space and return it to earth. At present-day launch costs. Peak Uranium will never happen.

And if it somehow did, thorium is roughly a thousand times more plentiful than U-235.
No you wouldn't, because it would suck. Touch interfaces would suck to use with a mouse, since they are touch interfaces. And mouse driven interfaces would suck to drive with your touch, since they are designed to be used with a mouse.

You won't see a hybrid from Apple, because hybrids, by their very nature, are compromises. They are more awkward and less useful than the two things they combine. Apple understood this, which is why iOS exists.
Impress.js is so awesome! ;)
One of the things that this does improve vastly is rendering in Chrome for Android/ICS (and I assume, other mobile browsers). The old markup didn't scale very well and made for a lot of horizontal scrolling.
My understanding is that this work was widely reviled by those in the medicine faculty. They saw themselves as modern healers; he represented them with prescientific imagery that they considered grotesque. (The images he chose for the faculty of law were a more extreme example.)
>Often times the people complaining about groupthink are also the ones acting immature.

Not everytime though. Especially in topics like Microsoft/Apple/Google, the moderation is brutal if you don't fit in the groupthink.

A big example: http://winsupersite.com is hellbanned on HN from being submitted as a story(if you do it will show up for you, but actually it's killed so won't show up for others at all). What crime could the site have possibly committed to deserve such an extreme banning(there are no instances of other tech sites that I know of getting banned, can you give me any?).

Post complaining about the banning:
http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3408883

The answer is simple, the site is of Microsoft watcher, insider and enthusiast Paul Thurrott who posts breaking news, analysis and reviews with a sometimes positive slant. That is enough for some "enthusiasts" of other platforms here to flag it to death and ultimately to hellbanning. I am guessing someone who innocently submits stories from there regularly will get their account hellbanned to, for not conforming to the groupthink on here.

This is just the visible tip of the iceberg of the groupthink which downvotes comments and flags any legitimate news that doesn't conform.

You think the point in this post is just a figment of the author's imagination? http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3663447

Another example of legitimate news getting flagged to death:

http://i.imgur.com/fSJqq.png

How long before Winbeta is hellbanned from ever appearing on HN for being a Windows-centric news site?

Just because you haven't experienced this does not mean that others have not constantly been downvoted for their (non disrespectful) opinions. I believe that's behind their defensive "I know I am going to get downvoted..." lines.
This is good advice. I often get stuck on some problem and try to power through it. This rarely works and I often have to give up frustrated. Several days go by and I forget about the problem completely. Then one day, I remember the problem and a good solution just appears. It works so often for me, but I never do it intentionally.

Just take a break when you get stuck and do something else.
If karma average were based on only those comments between 6 and 50 points, everyone's average would be between 6 and 50 points. That's not the case.

Can you elaborate?
And Git is not Python either. What's your point?
Stupid Security Questions
Apple now wants 3 stupid security questions and a super secret 'recovery' email address - which can't be my real email address because that's my Apple ID.

Who are the jerks who make up these questions that 'everybody knows'? I don't remember who my first teacher was, where my folks met, or care at all about the car I liked the least.

How about - what was the most mediocre, least memorable event in your life and what was the date it happened?
Perhaps it is too soon after waking up to have a sense of humor, but the flaw with your plan is that I am divorced and would be highly unlikely to intentionally have a child out of wedlock. And if I remarried, I would be highly likely to take a new name. (Though, given my post divorce relationship track record, the new name would probably be foreign and something I couldn't spell or pronounce, much less other Americans.)
Good point. My training said no full names, but that was because we were directly associated with a specific product/analysis, so any full names would associate the patient with a particular health... thing.

A name by itself, you are quite right, is not PHI. Thanks for the reminder!
It would make sense a little bit if GitHub was open source.
Males sense to me. I'm going to add to the chorus in hopes that it reinforces your belief that you should listen to us: Step away from it. Stop working on it for as long as it takes for you to get your mind straight. After a few days I guarantee the answer will appear from thin air. That's always how it goes.
Right now I have three servers in hetzner. I have been using them for 5 years, but only last year my startup "boomed", so I had to cancel my old server and move it in the same rack as the other servers. If your startup has already "boomed" just make it sure to rent all your servers in the same rack or pay the reservation fee ($10 per server).

Hetzner prices are great for any software engineer. Having that powerful server waiting for my projects is one of the reasons that I had the chance of succeeding. I used to say that this is our profession and having a dedicated server is a mandatory thing.

Even with one server from hetzner I was able to virtualize it into 8 machines and create a real production environment that made it easier to scale. After you learn XEN it's faster than going through amazon interface.

From my past experience I always worked with people who wanted to use amazon or google appengine. I was always against it and said that the prices were ridiculously expensive. My colleges said that they didn't wanted to manage servers and the cost of appengine was only $2 per day, etc. This is a real story and when the time of high traffic came the $2 became $50 and now we pay $1500 in something that could be handled with ONE $100 hetzner server. After using hetzner I would NEVER advise appengine and I would only advise amazon if you must have the servers in the US.

For those who say that the site would have too much latency if it's in hetzner: just use a cdn for static content, http://www.maxcdn.com is very cheap and probably much better than just hosting in the US.
Who Is Stalking You On Facebook?  Who Is Your Biggest Fan?
http://coffeescript.org/ has demonstrated how to fix that problem.

If the underlying engine is fast, a more convenient syntax can be introduced.
Thoughtful story. Its posts like these that keep me going and give me the motivation to pursue my outlandish ideas.
Gamification is already here
Protecting the industry with trade barriers definitely sounds like the way to make it competitive.

If we do this our IT industry might one day lead the world, like our sugar industry, automotive manufacturing and softwood lumber do.
http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3148927
Why can't Opens Source Orgs roll an independent repo hosting server with something like GitLab (gitlabhq.com)?
Hi
whats new today
An excellent recruitment program to find talent for their own projects.
Are you still talking about Opera? They are aggressively trying to be compatible? They are even implementing WebGL.

http://html5test.com/results/desktop.html

Yes, I agree being held back by one browser is a problem. However, that browser is IE8.
I'm glad to hear this worked-out in the end for you. I got my current job through SO Careers as well. Of the firms I applied to on there, most asked me for an interview, and most of those were pretty good companies. The one I chose in the end was love at first sight. And they too told me during the on-site they were going to make an offer. I've been happy ever since.
The Real "Mobile First" Companies
The web is an open platform that should remain device agnostic. Coding for a subset of available browsers is the kind of idiotic behavior that caused so many issues when IE was popular.
HTML5 but the same old UI? What benefits it brings?
If that's their target audience, wouldn't it stand to reason that their gender drop-down would support an expanded set of options?
"They have just a few percent of the market and they expect us to write special CSS codes just for them."

250 million users, across both desktop and mobile.
I couldn't reply to Estragon's comment below, so I'm replying here.

I'm convinced of it primarily because I'm convinced that the majority of activities that human workers perform do not require general intelligence (ie. strong AI). This includes most manual tasks : cleaning, cooking, customer service in restaurants, etc, but also many tasks performed by office or even "knowledge" workers.

A product my previous company developed replaced over 20K workers over a period of years. Few people even know it exists.

Once you are aware of this and follow the news you see it happening in virtually all domains: e-discovery systems replacing attorney hours, automated news story generation, etc. One area that has been lagging is robotics but this will start to develop very quickly, especially with the new DARPA Robotics Challenge.

Now to be clear many of the "Big Data" applications people are talking about may not fall into this human labor replacement category, but the underlying technologies are essentially the same.
You can actually make good money by going into the law or medicine. You have to work and and be skilled of course, but lets be honest that is also required for a start-up.

I can't help but think that ability is because you can't run a law firm without being a lawyer so the boss has some idea of what it means to be a good lawyer and how to treat them.
I"m sure they can come across as egotistical and arrogant. I'm sure they're super competitive. Hell, they placed 6 in the olympics in 2008[1], and will probably row in 2012. These are kids that, yeah, they have been given a lot, but they also know how to compete. And rich to begin with. Thus probably arrogant as hell.

[1] http://sportsillustrated.cnn.com/2010/writers/jon_wertheim/1...
Yes it does. As does the original proposal and I mentioned some issues in my post.
How Stripe thinks about recruiting
That explains why I like both Knife Party and Pendulum's sound. Set Me On Fire is an awesome Pendulum track.
All the Pythonistas I know are very pragmatic WRT programming languages and frameworks. I see no real difference between Rails and Django - they both solve very similar problems in very similar ways. And they are both, certainly, good enough. I can have long discussions about the merits of buildout (I call it Python's Maven), but it's much more for practicing the almost-lost art of debate than for anything else.

It all boils down to taste. I don't use HN because it's written in ARC - I come for the discussions.
Something I'd like to see is a "HN Enhancement Suite", kind of like Reddit. I don't at this time have the JS chops to pull something like this off, but what I'd add:

* User tagging
* Un-hellbanning per user (Find someone who has legitimate contributions yet is hellbanned? Restores their posts to a normal color and moves their post closer to the top in a thread)
* Ignore text lightening for downvoted posts
* Hide post on flag or downvote
* Popups on username mouseover with profile page info
* Custom CSS (why not?)
* An "ignore karma" switch. Hides comment thread vote arrows, ignores hellbans and text coloring, hides all mention of points anywhere on the site.
* Ignore option, hides all posts by a given user
When I worked at Microsoft in 2006, I saw not one, but two presenters pass out mid-presentation, both in front of a large audience, about six months apart. This was when we were proposing the Ribbon UI. I remember always being in a perpetual state of "things will get easier, it's just around the corner!"
What you are saying is true. However that's not really my point.

Firstly, I've never liked trance, so I'm not trying to defend my pet genre from infiltrators. On the contrary, I thought I'd seen the back of it ten years ago, outside certain areas of continental europe. then, suddenly, it's the thing in the US.

Now, the united states has always had its own rich history of electronic dance music, indeed they invented it. Pretty much all electronic music from the last 30 years worldwide is derived from Detroit techno and Chicago house. That lineage has continued unbroken in those places to this day, yet that type of dance music has never really attained popular success in its own country.

So, why is this form of very continentally-european music suddenly achieving populaity in what is actually its distant ancestral home? And why now? These things usually lag about three to five years as you say; trance has been a creative cul-de-sac for at least four of those cycles.

The stateside rise of dubstep and electro house makes more sense to me: it's a substitute for nu-metal and radio rock. Trance, as I say, is an absolute non sequitur.
I am working on moving out but it's not easy considering i do not have enough money to live alone in a foreign country.By the way i am from Zimbabwe not Mozambique.
https://www.djangoproject.com/weblog/2012/mar/13/py3k/
Are you not a hacker?
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Who blames their equation for the financial crash? Afaik, it's a tool to valuate options, not an algorithm to trade or valuate mortgages. The link is that it "caused investment banks to hire people who had quantitative or mathematical skills". Which is like blaming Marie Curie for the Fukishima disaster.
Can anyone explain what talent refers to in this context? Is it someone who has learned this stuff, someone who is capable of learning it, or someone who was born with an innate understanding?
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Alright, my area is not physics, but one thing annoys me: does it still make sense to have particles as an abstraction? I mean, in the same sense that in math, at some point, you give up caring about discrete values and work with continuities instead.
Ask HN: Is there a way to see if a URL has already been posted to HN?
I may be searching the wrong terms, but I can't find any answer to this on Google.
Laconic.js DOM Library now supports IE7
Making a CS person versatile with hadoop is not that hard. Making a CS person versatile with statistics is much harder.

See Zed Shaw's seminal article "Programmers Need To Learn Statistics Or I Will Kill Them All".

http://www.zedshaw.com/essays/programmer_stats.html

Making a math/science person versatile in CS is somewhat easier, but even that can be tricky. Many of them are bored by file formats, architecture, etc, and simply don't have the mindset of of engineering.
Thanks this is a really interesting take. I had already tried the "walk away" approach, for more than a month, but coming back to it seems completely overwhelming. I like this idea because I think I get what it's doing: it's reminding you of all the parts bit by bit, and allowing your mind to re learn re think, and rebuild the project in your head, and it's also a utilitarian task meaning that you're not thinking (stressing) about solving something that is already solved.

I'm going to give this a go. Thanks.
I see, thanks. I misunderstood your comment to mean that karma was calculated on comments between 6 and 50 points, instead of what you meant, which is the last 50 comments minus the five most recent.

Unfortunately, it doesn't weight for in-depth discussions or comments on less-popular articles.
Relevant quotes:

* "The new HTML should be much easier to parse, and when benchmarking the official 4chan Chrome extension, we found that it parses approximately 600% faster."

* "CORS [Cross-origin resource sharing] is now supported"

* "responsive design for mobile browsers"
Build a demo project showing you can do data analysis and they will find you.
> I think most of the verbal stuff in IQ tests wouldn't relate that much

Most software engineering jobs involve communicating with people. Customers, other engineers, other teams, leaders, etc. I would hazard to say that most effective senior engineers will spend at least as much time communicating with people as they will spend on individual technical tasks, if not more.

Communication skills are vital. If you cannot effectively persuade a team of people that your approach or point of view is correct, then your views, no matter their objective merit, will not impact the organization. Being an effective engineer requires having good ideas and also influencing other people to understand and adopt them.

A person can be an effective journeyman individual contributor engineer without strong communication skills, but to become a master with wide impact requires it.
I think another issue is that no one is interested in doing 'on the job' training. Few people learn statistics, programming, and data-presentation in college (not all three anyway). Companies might consider finding someone smart with one or two of the skills and expecting them to learn the other skills on the job. And what is talent? To me, talent is the ability to learn to do something quite well. To say there is a lack of 'talent,' when you have only searched for people who /already/ have those specific skills is disingenuous. You have barely looked.

Who is complaining about the lack of talent? Companies! Who produces talent? Companies! Who can fix this? Companies!

Part of running a company efficiently is is hiring, grooming and retaining juniors (who will become seniors). For God knows what reason, few companies actually understand this. If the skills you are looking for are lacking, hire someone smart and teach them.
I know that feeling. Just watch one or two tutorial movies, and then it'll easily come together. The new UI is not that different, but in general much more logical than in the 2.4.x tree.