skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Why would I yield something that doesn't exist? But, sure, okay, yes, I would be willing to yield rent control in the situation where it wasn't necessary to prevent displacement. I guess I miss your point?
If he charges x dollars for "up to the first hour", and y dollars for every hour thereafter, where x >= 50, then there's no problem.
Temptations Of Young VCs (Part 1)
You do live in a strange world very distant from the one that most of us readers of Hacker News lives in.

Name me one real monopoly that isn't enforced through "social engineering". A free market may have ocasional dominant market leaders like IBM and MS in their time and Google today. None of them are or were monopolies as better technologies and startups will always (lets repeat that word ALWAYS) come around as long as they are allowed.

True monopolies like the telecoms monopolies in many countries are not outcomes of free markets, but rather more or less corrupt deals between governments and a little group of businesses. Most often the monopoly is argued as a way to protect the consumer.

The free market works wonderfully in many different places in the world and in many different aspects of our daily life. Banking, telecoms and health care are not examples of this as they are heavily regulated. Most of us readers of hacker news are doing what we are doing because of the wonders of the free market.

If not we would be marching fists held up high to Washington demanding the creation of the National Department of Internet Services, to give us lifelong employment. Yet we aren't doing that. The free market works great even though our chosen field has been hit by many different bubbles and failures. The market has picked right up with no real government interference (except for financial and gaming fields) and will continue to improve.

Spare me the old marxist marching chants (I should know what they sound like as I used to be one).
Thank you for posting such helpful advice. I think the last part of your advice is the most helpful - that you need to really do wet lab benchwork, something I've tried to avoid during my undergrad, thinking that computers are the way of future and lab work is for suckers. But alas, in the realm of biology, the micropipetters and mice-killers win again.

But I appreciate you for also being very adamant about the "dark side" of academia; it would have deterred me if someone else didn't also warn me once about the "dark side" of going corporate (http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=66390). I appreciate again your advice and will think it over very carefully when I decide as to what exactly I am going to do next.
I don't think that's fair at all. I find Midwesterners my age or below to be just as excited about internet startups as anyone. The guy who plays poker for a living in Las Vegas is just another gambler, the guy who does it in Indiana is a rock star. Same thing with internet entrepreneurs. I know all of the above first hand.

The big difference is that in the Bay Area, people significantly older than myself still get it. In the Midwest they're still not sure what this newfangled Facebook is all about. </sweeping generalization>
actual paper is here: http://www.pnas.org/content/early/2008/12/23/0806314106.full...
I think the qualia problem asks why subjective experience exists and whether people experience the world in the same way subjectively. So this has little to do with recreational drugs and perception.
Being a hacker is more about self-determination than any institutional credentials.

You build stuff, you can code, and you want to talk about tech stuff. I'm not sure there's much else to a hacker's definition than that.
There's about three trillion worth of gold, not all of it for sale of course. But there are enough precious metals for a lot of dollar holders to get off said currency if they feel it is not in their interest to keep it. Alternatively, they can buy machines to dig for gold or invest in publicly traded gold companies, which also amounts to shorting the dollar. This might not be easy or even possible for China or Saudi Arabia, but it is certainly possible for Egypt and other small countries with US treasury bonds. If a few countries short the dollar, the price of gold in dollars would rise accordingly, making gold reserves enough to accommodate the next few stages of a run on the dollar.

Not enough gold? The price goes up.
So, with the same reasoning, no one with many shares of a company would dump them? China's been divesting dollars for a while and will dump to get that 25% if it has to.
True, this might not be an option for China, Japan or Saudi Arabia, but Egypt, Switzerland, and Hong Kong are small enough not to get ruined.
> The only country that is worse off in the entire region is Haiti. Probably more than 90% of the population is in extreme poverty.

This is completely false. Haiti is indeed much much worse off than the rest of the region, but Cubans have higher purchasing-power parity than Jamaicans, Guatemalans, Nicaraguans, Hondurans, Salvadorans, and perhaps a few others, and the country is generally much more equal most Latin American countries, so the bottom couple of quintiles in Cuba do better than their counterparts in Costa Rica, Panama, etc. (or I believe than poor Mexicans, for that matter)

It's still overall a poor country, and has many social, economic, and political problems—attributable to many factors, including ineffective leadership, widespread corruption, the US trade embargo, etc.—but the claim that all of Cuba's problems are the fault of the turn away from markets is so oversimplified as to just be wrong.

> Cubans was actually better off than most Europeans before Castro

This is bullshit. In the 50s, Cubans did a bit better than Southern and Eastern Europeans, but were significantly behind Western Europe.

Most Cubans were were not very well off in the first half of the century, and incomes (and equality particularly) rose substantially between 1960 and 1989. Then after the fall of the Soviet Union, there was a precipitous economic decline in Cuba between 1989 and about 1993 or 1994, which took 12 years to fully recover from. Present-day Cubans have higher real incomes than they ever did in the past, however.

Listen, I don't really want to have a protracted he-said-she-said about the state of the Cuban economy or the precise definition of "extreme" poverty. My point was merely that davidw's off-hand remarks about the topic were trivializing and unproductive.
you are welcome enough to be on the front page :) so welcome!
(though with mere 29 points (or karma, or whatever we call it) I don't think I have the 'authority' to welcome you just yet :)
I asked if you would yield price controls, which certainly do exist, and I was curious whether wild market fluctuations were pivotal to your position. I'm assuming this is why you haven't addressed the essence of my point.
His wife, Anna Kang, definitely is (started Fountainhead Entertainment). That practically guarantees that Carmack is, because it's highly unlikely an Objectivist would marry a non-Objectivist.

What baffles me is, how on earth do id and Fountainhead games exemplify Objectivist ideals?
Really, the only thing you need to wrap your head around to understand decorators is the concept of first-class functions (functions that can take functions as parameters and return functions).

If you understand those, and how they can be useful, the only remaining step to python's decorators is a syntactic transformation.

def decorate(func):
def wrapper(*args, **kwargs):
print "I'm decorated!"
return func(*args, **kwargs)
return wrapper

@decorate
def foo():
print "I'm foo!"

Above, @decorate is equivalent to having foo = decorate(foo) underneath the definition of foo. Decorate takes a function X as a parameter, creates a function Y that takes whatever arguments, prints a statement, and returns the value of calling Y with whatever arguments. It then returns the object representing X.

If you need a bunch of good examples of how first-class functions can be extremely useful, go through a bit of SICP ( http://mitpress.mit.edu/sicp/full-text/book/book.html ). It's a challenging tome, but well worth the effort.
Pathological has a secondary meaning of "highly abnormal." Also, brain scans have shown activation patterns of people in love to be very similar to those with OCD and other mental illnesses. See this TED talk: http://www.ted.com/index.php/talks/helen_fisher_tells_us_why...
Why do I keep forgetting that there are in fact people on this earth who buy shit just because they see it.
Plastics. I'm in plastics.
You honorably recognize your talents and achievements. But you still start a topic asking your candidacy?

Then what label can you give me? I'm not an aerospace engineer, I'm not a serial entrepreneur, and I'm sure as hell that I would never build an electronic passenger car.

Everyone is welcome here. We humans are extraordinarily curious beings, curiosity & willingness to explore is the main reason why we kept visiting this site.
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Geneva, the second most populous city in Switzerland is also famous for offering escort services. The service mainly aims at offering beautiful, educated and exotic companions for people who wish to spend some good time hanging out with escort girls. Geneva agency & models are well trained and equipped to make your stay in the city memorable. It is just not in Geneva escort services are available all over the world.
That's why I said 'I'd like to see an implementation that does not suck', it means all the ones I've seen (= familiar with) suck... :-)
What Is The State Of Solid State LED Lighting?
I haven't addressed the essence of your point because I don't know what it is.

Rent control only really exists in large cities that have experienced wild market fluctuations (in the form of surging rent prices) that displaced renters.

If there weren't surging rents displacing people, why would there be rent control? In that case, I would yield them... but in that case, they wouldn't have existed in the first place. So I still miss your point.
Some university libraries have a public terminal or two (mine does), which has access to all the electronic journals they are subscribed to (ACM, IEEE, JSTOR, Springerlink etc).

They don't advertise this; you have to ask.
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Glad to help. I was being a little tongue-in-cheek, obviously, but I meant what I said. The job market is very bad for biologists of all disciplines right now, and computational biology isn't the discipline with the greatest demand. If you decide to go on, being able to work at the bench is essential to your career.

But don't take my word as proof -- the Science Magazine Career forums are literally filled with sad stories of PhDs and post-docs in the biological sciences who can't get jobs. I wish it had existed when I started my program:

http://scforum.aaas.org/

(One more thing: I just read the link to the other comments, and I don't disagree with what they wrote. Most software jobs suck, too. But the key insight here is that most jobs suck -- there is no magic bullet to career happiness. The corollary to that insight is that you need to fail fast; you must quickly work through the things that suck, and find the things that don't.

Because a PhD ties you to one thing for so long, it is almost the antithesis of failing fast. For this reason, I would not recommend a PhD to anyone, unless they explicitly wanted to become a professor, and knew exactly what they were getting themselves into. It's not the kind of decision that rewards indecisiveness.)
Without thinking particularly deep about this issue, I suppose your idea runs alongside the efficient market hypothesis. You're making assumptions about the relationship between resource input and product output and perceived value. Like in the EMH, the ideal conditions are perfect information (let's also say perfect money->resource conversion), and rational customers.

EMH advocates would say the system is pretty efficient at pricing already; you could argue that the fancier packaging and expensive marketing takes all the markup into account, so when a customer buys, the products are fairly priced, at least in terms of summing up the steps in the value chain. I'm not so sure about that. Tulips, for example.

So at the cheap end of the scale I would tend to agree with you. For brand markup though, I still think the same rules don't apply as well. It is plausible that the higher the price, the less exact the correlation between environmental impact. In other words, intuition says that "environmental cost of a product is almost exactly equal to it's monetary cost" is less and less applicable as price rises noncompetitively, and brand markup and investor exuberance, are such cases.

Oh, I thought of another example. This is just silly: virtual goods. Anyhow your rule of thumb of buying cheap still holds here (the alternative to buying a virtual good is simply not buying, because you have nothing in both cases!). But this is a clear case where you are purchasing a psychological effect. And I would venture a guess that the more psychology you mix into the pricing the less you can infer its environmental cost.

Alright, I'm stating the obvious... nitpicking over semantics I guess.
Welcome! I grew up in Eugene, which was pretty boring too:-)
Wild fluctuations != rising prices.
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Cubans do not have higher purchasing power parity that Jamaicans, Guatamalans and all the others you mentioned. This might be true if there was anything to purchase but there isn't. If I start paying myself with wads of Monopoly money I will also have higher income than I have ever had before, it is still monopoly money that doesn't work outside board game.

No one is starving in Jamaica and most other countries in the region. (While I have not had the pleasure of living in Cuba, I have lived in Jamaica and Panama and travelled extensively in the region. Both have very high levels of education, health etc.)

Cuba was according to 1960 ILO (The International Labour Organization) number 8 world wide for industrial salaries and number 7 for agricultural salaries. While there was not full literacy it had very high rates for the region. Health was also amongst the best in Latin America. For more about this see http://www.fiu.edu/~fcf/cubaprecastro21698.html

Castro has done a great job of selling his miracle revolution. Most of what you hear in hollywood movies and popular press is fabrication and never questioned. Don't believe it.
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It's a shame that all 11 of the HN comments up to this point are debating the merits of Carmack's throwaway environmentalism line at the end of his post. Are we not entrepreneurs? Are we not engineers? Are we not innovators? If so, then we have truly lost the plot here and slid into trivial political Redditism.

Here's a guy who skips college, teaches himself to program, and pioneers the modern video game industry. Though his id partner John Romero rests on his laurels once they become rich and famous, Carmack pushes forward obsessively, almost single-handedly advancing the boundaries of 3D technology with each new game engine release while competing against much larger engineering teams from much larger companies. Then he decides to teach himself rocket science. From this post we learn that he gave up his discretionary spending and became frugal and money conscious again to chase space dreams that bled lots of money and probably wouldn't amount to anything. Now several years later he has a legitimate space company that's doing work for NASA and is poised for real scientific breakthroughs in 2009. Meanwhile, he's still working at id on the next breakthrough 3D game. All the while, never taking investment money, and always giving back his knowledge by sharing highly detailed technical posts like this one (and his old .plan updates) and by eventually open-sourcing all of his work.

This guy is the ultimate hacker. He epitomizes everything that this site is supposed to be about. And you guys are quibbling about the environment? FAIL!
It's a current tragedy in computer science research: authors release a matlab blob (no source code) or no implementation at all. When asked, I've encountered these answers:

1) An implementation is not important. We developed an algorithm!

2) Uh... the student who made the program already left and we can't find it.

3) [the student] I can no longer find my notes on which parameters I used to make the figures of the paper.

Very rarely, nearly never, does one encounter a proper software release.

Why? Many reasons--the key point is that only a handful of research institutions have technical staff on board to collect and curate software produced in house.
Quillpad is such a simple idea that had to originate from South Asia but that region has been busy trying to solve Western problems and ignored their own. That seems to be changing with the rising momentum of web usership there. The article seems to suggest an additional topic that could be added to this list:

http://ycombinator.com/ideas.html
Tesco looks like a solid competitor, though if I were them I wouldn't slow down now. I would speed up while loans are hard to get. The longer they wait, the longer Walmart has to use their dominance to finance completely duplicating what Tesco has.

But as good as they are, the real worst nightmare for Walmart is what it's always been: unions.
Take a look at a list of what is considered an uninsurable condition for personal health insurance. That alone would hit more than 1% of the population.
My point is that one can know something about the content of one's own subjective experience, and how it changes. Knowing about someone else's subject experience is a much taller order. So far people seem to learn about it by assuming that others are much like themselves, and then asking them details to get a better picture by successive approximation. It seems we're stuck with examining responses to qualia, at least for now.
The Value of a Degree
Some ideas from this talk are similar to ideas from the book "Predictably Irrational: The Hidden Forces That Shape Our Decisions" http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=413915

Bernoulli formula (on expected value) has an interesting flaw which leads to the St. Petersburg paradox http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/St._Petersburg_paradox
There is certainly something to be said for being a big fish in a little pond, but just make sure that pond isn't a puddle.
There's the seed of an idea going around that the Flow state (Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi) is a function of our Self Awarenss.

Here's a interesting article on the practical application of this that LifeHacker linked to some time ago -> http://www.life2point0.com/2006/06/the_little_book.html

Edit: Just found it on Scribd -> http://www.scribd.com/doc/86499/The-Little-Book-of-Flow
When the mystery of consciousness is "solved", will it be capable of being explained in English? Or can it only be solved at some level of math and physics?
One possible solution would be to create a free market system, with some government guarantees for those who are unable to pay themselves. That has some problems of its own, but it at least attempts to capture the good bits of a free market system, while not leaving the poor to die in the gutters. Of course, this is more complex than the comment I originally replied to about "just let some entrepreneur take care of it".
Iterate over and over until you find something interesting.
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> The market optimizes everything for the better if it is allowed.

Such as financial products? I think we have enough evidence right now that people are not mature enough for a totally free market.
If you were using The Browser, Opera, here's how you could open those pictures effortlessly in new tabs:

1) Right-click on top of a picture, keep the button down.

2) Flick your mouse slightly downwards.

3) Release the right mouse button.

And there you go. Now, after checking out a picture, you'd want to close the newly opened tab, and get back to where you were:

1) Right-click, and hold

2) Move the mouse slightly downwards, and slightly to the right.

3) Release the mouse button

And there you go again. It doesn't take long to get comfortable with Opera's Mouse Gestures, and you'll realize they're very handy.
I think it's fairly common... most people don't care that dinosaurs were extinct. Most people also don't care if some currently existing species were to become extinct, unless it's a species that affects human life (food, or necessary predator). Of course the environment is really complicated and nobody really can predict how one species could affect another, but clearly the extinction of dinosaurs had no ill affect on human life.
Basically a nice hold-my-hand introduction to functional programming for imperative programmers.
Concatenative language/Concatenation is composition
You are talking about one of the most highly regulated markets in the US. It's been at least 100 years since the financial markets where free in the US.
Wow, that's a great summarization of all the persistence technologies available.

I found the stats at the end to be deceptive though. You'd have to code support for 3 different native client storage APIs in JavaScript + use Flash in order to cover enough users to rival cookies. It's no wonder most web devs just use cookies.
Responding to the disqus comments by DaniFong...

That's a beautiful way to phrase it, Adam. But I am tentative; I'm not sure just how far the analogy extends. I think that modeling civilization as a 'human-like' intelligence or deity is probably a pretty loose approximation. For one thing, both humans and deities (as usually conceived) have that ability to hold their attention on something.

Indeed, in many meditation disciplines, practitioners are called upon to focus their attention on a single thought or object. This is supposed to heighten awareness of the world and one's self -- it is thought to be one of the most fundamental aspects of intelligence. And though it may seem like society can focus its attention on a single event, its interpretations are so diverse, and its focus so fleeting and diffuse, that it seems that the attention of a society and the attention of a person could be fundamentally, irreducibly, different.

I just read your post 'Elephants all the way up.' To cop an analogy from physics, there are many situations where the behavior of a collection of particles becomes sharply different as the scale or energy or number or density changes. We would call these 'phase transitions.' It seems to me that though large groups have many of the elements of a human-like sentient being, either in scale, type, or connectivity.

Or perhaps the lack of attention is an inescapable flaw as long as the rate of communication is so slow. Perhaps our collective attention will improve as our communication tools become more instantaneous and pervasive. Or perhaps focused attention is NOT a characteristic of the "greater-brain" - after all, it is fundamentally different, like the anthill is different to the ant.

I certainly think that tools like Friendfeed bring us in that direction (though I can't seem to be bothered to actually use it yet... twitter works fine for my purposes). Although, I do think that we'll have to wait until Friendfeed version 20 before we get to the "super-mind" stage (on the good side, with the current rate of innovation, that shouldn't take more than a few years!).