skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Not surprising. People want to save money nowadays, so they flock to the internet to find deals. Amazon is more or less for the lazy, those who don't want to look at 100 web stores, but still want a decent deal.
My email address is in plain text all over the place. I rarely see spam though. Almost all of my mail is redirected to Gmail and their spam filters are great. Do community based spam filters exist? Sort of like how AdBlock has feeds for ad rules.

Although, I understand that spamming is annoying to people that manage infrastructure.
President-Elect Obama’s Choices for Key Science Posts Hailed
90's Flowchart
Fable II
could we balance the scales by burying the corn instead of storing it around our middles?

No. As our new DOE chair has pointed out, growing corn is not carbon-neutral:

http://www.futurepundit.com/archives/002722.html

The US already subsidizes farmers to grow corn to turn into ethanol, but $7bn in the past decade has been wasted because the process isn’t carbon-neutral. “From the point of view of the environment,” explains Chu, “it would be better if we just burnt oil.”

So you can't "rebalance" the carbon scale by turning the corn into oil and then reburying the corn: That's a lossy process that leaks carbon into the air. You should instead simply bribe the agribusiness corporations to leave the oil in the ground and play checkers all summer instead of planting excess corn. ;)
Those are not the same?
It is not rarity ordering. Just ordering.

Simplified view: people solve a test with a number of questions. They are getting ordered by how many questions they get right.

Tests are constructed to produce Gaussian distribution of numbers of correct answers. Some questions are easy, almost everybody can solve them. Some questions are difficult, almost nobody can solve them. There should be progressively less and less people getting more questions right.

But in reality, it's not a perfect Gaussian distribution. There are some numbers of questions that have more people getting them right than would be predicted by normal distribution.

Now, about quantitativeness. We could get somehow quantitative metric, if questions would simple and uniform in structure, for example test composed just of "how fast you can multiply x-digit numbers" task, or test solely composed of "how fast you can arrange pieces into a particular shape" task.

But it's not like this. There are different tests, some of which have several thematically different sections. Even inside one section, questions do differ a lot (for example, some shapes are harder to compose of primitive elements, how would you quantify this difficulty?).

To further complicate matters, usually completely different tests are used for different intelligence ranges.

And we are not even speaking about normalizations. Your rank is computed just for your age group. For the same raw score, you get extra points if you are younger or older than the optimal age.

If I remember well, there is a fast ramp up of raw scores till 18 years, followed by a slow decline afterwards (rate of decline is slower for more intelligent people).

And then there are national/race differences. And Flynn effect. It's much more messy than it looks.
http://us2.php.net/htmlentities
Why networked software should expire
It depends on what he means by cloning. Speaking from an Indian perspective, there is a horde of vanilla Indian social networking sites which are just floundering. On the other hand, there is bazee.com, an ebay equivalent which was bought by ebay and is now known as ebay.in. There are other startups similar to US ones in travel, mobile payments and so on, which are doing pretty well.

I guess it's not just about localization in terms of language but also about making related offline services available, which is sometimes not feasible for the original site(s) to do all over the world, at least fast enough.
Or, y'know, "ten".
This boat circumnavigated the world on renewable fuels which included human fat:

http://www.earthrace.net
"A chorus of voices exhorts kids to study science. No one stops to ask whether it is inhumane to force adolescents to spend the bulk of their time studying subjects most of them hate."
-- Unabomber Manifesto, Ted Kaczynski

(Personally, I think that the notion of a core curriculum is mistaken,, but so is much of public education, and I don't know which small concrete steps would be best to move it forward.)
or people who have better things to do with their time than look at 100 web stores. Not to mention Amazon Prime members get free two day shipping and heavily discounted next day shipping so you could wait until Dec. 23 to do all of your shopping and have all your items by the 24th. I don't know any other web store that can give you that deal even if they are a couple bucks cheaper on some things.
Yes, cheap enough for home use, but not necessarily suitable for home use.

The idea is that instead of using lenses to get a magnified image of something at a distance, you arrange for your sample to go really close to a digital-camera-style sensor without any lenses. You get multiple images by sending the sample past several bits of your sensor. Then you do some computation (the article doesn't say what for, but I guess the idea is to increase the effective resolution by having those multiple images, and maybe also to remove diffraction artefacts).

All very neat, but only suitable for capturing images of things you can actually do this to. The idea of the system described in the article is that you can do it to cells suspended in fluid (water? something else? I don't know) if you're clever about controlling how they move over your sensor.

But if what you want is a greatly magnified image of a fly's wing or a bit of paper or an integrated circuit, or (I'm guessing here) even something that is (as per the design) suspended in fluid but that might have things larger than cells that could block the channels through which the fluid moves, then you're out of luck.

I'm sure it can be generalized somewhat, but there are some limitations that seem really hard to overcome. You absolutely have to get the sample very close to the sensor. You absolutely have to illuminate it transmissively rather than reflectively. (At least, that's how it seems to me.)
Nintendo to Launch Video Streaming on Wii in 2009
Plus they have nearly neutralized the traditional stores only real advantage ie: "I need it now" with Amazon Prime which offers free 2 day shipping and next day shipping for a couple bucks.
Free PDF that does a good job of describing the situation:

"Into the Eye of the Storm -- Assessing the Evidence on Science and Engineering Education, Quality, and Workforce Demand"

http://www.urban.org/publications/411562.html

Abstract:

"Recent policy reports claim the United States is falling behind other nations in science and math education and graduating insufficient numbers of scientists and engineers. Review of the evidence and analysis of actual graduation rates and workforce needs does not find support for these claims. U.S. student performance rankings are comparable to other leading nations and colleges graduate far more scientists and engineers than are hired each year. Instead, the evidence suggests targeted education improvements are needed for the lowest performers and demand-side factors may be insufficient to attract qualified college graduates."
Bruce Schneier on IT Insecurity - Expert Voices
Retail Sales Plummet
Fault-tolerance (uptime) is Erlang's core strength. Concurrency is just a pleasant and currently trendy side benefit.
I'm pretty excited about this.
"Debugging is twice as hard as writing the code in the first place. Therefore, if you write the code as cleverly as possible, you are, by definition, not smart enough to debug it."

But if you implement a DSL and associated debugging tools and other niceties you can write your code as cleverly as possible AND be smart enough to debug it because it's so easy. But beware of that phase where you have a nice language but very leaky without supporting tools because it hurts!
This analysis is fair from a VC's point of view but incomplete.. not to reuse political slogans but there are really 2 Americas.. there are very fundamental problems faced by millions of people like lack of health care, education, and jobs (jobs people can do with their skills and culture) and then there are problems in terms of "top-line" growth.. In terms business opportunities and the "top-line" growth stories, they are going to come back in very short time and those stories do not necessarily need this "creative destruction" but just innovation and speculative greed in fields such as utilities/energy, commerce, and computing. The main problem here is - this destruction is going to push behind great many people more and more and these people are not not going to be part of next growth cycle and many of them were already not part of it for last many years (but people ignored assuming America is great.and all Americans are in great shape.. the problem is going to be even more severe now).. This destruction can be called "creative" only if it creates new business opportunities as well as social uplifting.. it is not going to be the case as there are going to be huge social issues through this destruction so we need to consider the whole picture
Programming is something that not everyone understands, and teaching those that just don't understand programming is a monumental task.

I've taught basic programming to a lot of people, and I find that the problem is on the other side:

Teaching programming is something that not everyone understands, and learning from those who just don't understand teaching programming is a monumental task.

Students come in with different views of the world - some of them have the metaphorical analogies in place to understand scope and curly brackets as "boundaries" or "bags", others don't. Explain it to them.
StudiVZ had an exit - just not to Facebook. There are many exits as long as you have users.
Control Freak - The Evolution of Video Game Controllers
How do you quantify customer satisfaction? It's murky at best. Not only that, it's an unfair comparison since you're comparing one OEM against a range of OEMs. There's no doubt that there are a lot of garbage Windows PCs built. That doesn't say anything about the OS other than that they license it out liberally.

You'd also be comparing one OEM that makes much more expensive PCs than most of its competitors. It's like comparing Accura vs. Ford.

And if you did quantify it, which is impossible to do meaningfully, wouldn't that take into account the fact that cult members would feel much more satisfied even if all other things were equal? That's what being in a cult is about. I would bet the average Scientologist feels much more satisfaction about their religion than the average Catholic. That doesn't mean it's better.
Isn't that what coffee shops are for?
Who was General Tso? and other mysteries of American Chinese food [TED Talk]
Pity this one didn't get more attention.
Calling Michael Arrington a "media mogul" is generous.
The question is: would Amazon's turnover had been even higher without the downturn?
At the very least, the rebirth of the discriminate, 'rational' buyer is great news for well-run etailers, who can fully leverage the industy's low overhead base.
Man, I'd be right with you a few years ago, all tied down now. After you come back, post a review on here, would love to read it.

PS: Watch out for the girls, very distracting.
No, he'd be the same cool, but it wouldn't be occluded by the gargantuan thing that Microsoft has become. Like the Woz, we'd be able to hear more about Bill the engineer than Bill the billionaire.
Haha. I like how you added Starbucks to your list.

Drop me a line and we'll get some coffee when I arrive. My email is joseph dot walla at gmail.
I often find myself wishing for variations of popular sites and services since often I can find one that does what I want, but fits me better.

For example, when I was recently looking for some good bug-tracking software I used FogBugz as a trial and really liked it, but they're pricing was really ridiculous for my use case. They would charge $20 per user per month for whoever uses the site. That will work great for other folks who have a static team, but I work with a revolving pool of outsourcers. So for me, it would cost an extra $20 for a outsourcer of mine to perform a $10 task that month and use the bug tracking system. Great software, but their pricing model was a bad fit for me.

So, I started looking at other bug tracking software sites and found some that I'd never heard of, but that looked promising. I eventually settled on Unfuddle since it allowed me to have a revolving pool of users and not be penalized for it in the pricing. I tried Lighthouse and a few others, but there were slight variations in their functionality that didn't make them an ideal fit. Of course, those aren't exactly 'clones', but they duplicate significant portions of functionality and vary in small ways that can be significant for a user like me (i.e. pricing structure).

So, I'm all for clones - bring 'em on. It keeps the established guys on their toes and innovating and gives users slight variations to choose from.

It's basically slight genetic variation and natural selection in business.

P.S. The only time it really seems wrong to clone is when the site's text is copied too closely - or if the visual design is too similar.

P.S.S Also, if the site being cloned is super unique and pushing the realm of some new functionality, it seems bad form if clones don't at least acknowledge and give credit to the original site for their inspiration.
I have mixed feelings here. On the one hand, from a market perspective I think, "Sure, why not. Just exploit the race condition that exists between The Next Big Thing in the US and those startups recognizing the European market."

On the other hand, as someone that cares about the health of the European startup scene, it doesn't set a good precedent that successful European startups tend to far too often just be knock-offs of American companies, and in fact the cycle feeds itself -- it's such now that European investors often want to see a "proven model", meaning a knock-off, which makes it harder for European startups to find funding when doing something riskier.
Weren't people saying AWS components would go down during the holidays because it was actually Amazon's extra holiday capacity?
Not yet, but that would be one hell of a domain name. :)
Last spring I was working on my laptop on travels through Thailand. Loved it.

I also stayed on Koh Chang, at a couple different resorts that had wifi. One was on Lonely Beach (Can't remember the name), one was at Bang Bao (Cliff's Cottages). I never paid more than $10/day for lodging.

I am thinking of doing something similar next year again soon -- I find traveling to be one of the most intellectually and emotionally stimulating things I can do, period. But I'm thinking of Argentina this time, I've wanted to go there for years and brush up on Spanish.
Thanks, the article was scant on details as to what, exactly, they hope to prove by this. Given the blog post that you linked to, it sounds like they are still not going to gain credibility among the science community that their system is exhibiting quantum effects, and the times article makes it sound like a publicity stunt.
Deciding between a laptop and desktop: some ideas
Visual proof of Euler's identity (vid)
You've looked at the profile of the last editor of the question but the original author is Xesaniel http://stackoverflow.com/users/48214/xesaniel
I think pg's answer is actually a pretty decent answer for everyone except the non-specialist. I suspect most people suspect the basics are a sort of super-lispy machine where the atoms are neurons and each atom can be contained in as many lists as there are synaptic combinations of neurons which include that neuron.

But there are plenty of neuroscientists who think lisp is some sort of speech impediment. I've heard lots of theories, but smart people were probably right a long time ago and we just haven't caught up.

That said, even if the lispy sort of theory works out in the end, who cares? I mean, it's like arguing about Godel's incompleteness. No matter how profound the answer, the answer just isn't going to influence your day-to-day life that much. "nothing more than electrical signals" is about all that the vast majority of people really need to understand in order to solve their particular problems.
On paper, yes.
Coffee shops are less focused.

Plus, you don't have to worry about being asked to buy something or leave.
One assumes that a math PhD went to the trouble of writing a dissertation so they could do something with it. I know little about the other fields you mentioned, but a PhD isn't needed for actuarial work. A bachelor's (heavy on the statistics) with some finance courses covers you, and after that it's self-study for the seven (7!) exams you need to be a fellow.

A math PhD in an actuarial setting is out of place, like a CD grad working at Geek Squad (a hypothetical Geek Squad with pay comparable to programming).
OC3D: A game engine for iPhone
Teachers' Guide to Practical C++ Programming
You answered your own question - everone who's anyone was deriving short-term(~5-10 years) benefts from this.

I disagree with you on "China ... took care of their own country". They did not come out of this any better than Americans and their actions were just as shortsighted. While Americans will lose ability to pay for SUVs, plasma TVs, and middle-east wars, Chinese will lose their jobs. It's a lot better to still have a job and only be able to buy half as much as you used to, then not to have a job at all.
Steganography: Hiding Digital Data in Music on Audio Cassettes
As gnaritas pointed out, what you're running up against in that unfamiliar loop is a Smalltalk idiom that Ruby imported. My first reaction to this was, well, it's only unfamiliar, and what you call the "standard for loop" is merely a sample bias. On second thought, though, I think your original point stands. You can't just import idioms from wherever, put them all together, and shake. Or rather, you can, but what you end up with is "far more ad hoc than elegant".

What Smalltalk has that Ruby doesn't have is a simple, regular structure at its core that everything else is defined in terms of. Although it may not seem like it, that's far more than an academic point. It has enormous consequences for the programs you can write - for the programs you can think of. Most of the computing world has yet to catch up with this insight.

In the meantime, we get kitchen-sink languages that are good enough for the classes of programs that we already know how to write and are looking to make incrementally easier. I'm tempted to compare Ruby to PL/I. But that's unfair since Ruby at least was invented by a programmer who wanted to make a language he would enjoy.
Stackless is missing some important parts. I've spent a great deal of time working with it over the past few months, and there's no good SSL socket support. The built-in socket module will block the entire process (all tasklets), and while drop-in replacements exist, they either don't work with SSL, are buggy, or both.

Stackless also lacks Erlang's transparent support for multi-process and multi-machine execution, though I talked to a guy who's working on adding that for his Master's degree.
Two reasons why it may not turn out a problem you think it will:

1. Demand for US treasuries is highest it's ever been. So long as the rest of the world is on the brink of collapse (together with USA) people will believe that American paper is the most reliable one, compared to all others.

2. There is no such thing as "can't pay up" when you own the printing press. Bernanke will print the money (paper or electronic) and give it to the Chinese - the problem will start when those money will trickle back to US and create consumer price inflation. it may also affect exchange rates and makes imports more expensive (inflation again).
I work on iPhone software and our sales were a lot worse than November (40% less). Couple others reported the same. I guess people are buying more gifts than for themselves, and app store has no notion of a gift yet. There was nothing there last year, so can't compare.
He must have done it for the laughs.
That may have been Amazon's way of running an experiment in the off season to see if it was a viable service and beefing it up once they saw it catching on.
Could, yeah, lots of things could happen. My guess is the "first mover localization play" is, more often than not, a lower risk, lower payoff sort of thing. You're never going to be the next Google, but then again, you can see that the original service is working pretty well - you're not creating something that's never been done before, so you have an example to follow, and if you execute well and play your cards right, you have a decent (or at least better) shot at making money than the 'blue sky' sorts of projects.
Ask YC: Bubble survivors?
Why does it seem like that in every bubble there are certain companies that seem to survive the bubble? Also which companies do you think will survive this bubble?
When you write long-form blog posts that are about little more than the list of Ruby people that have offended you --- often writing about them for the Nth time --- I stop caring what your contributions are, and start being annoyed. Whatever Zed's "contributions" are, there are 100 Ruby developers who have contributed more, but don't demand that I attend to their neuroses.
The irony: CNN reports 2008 is one of the worst holiday seasons ever for retailers across America: http://money.cnn.com/2008/12/26/news/economy/holidaysales_fi...
I follow HN in NetNewsWire and can't always tell that a link goes to Zed; if I could tell, I'd ignore them.
Congrats - but - don't techies tend towards metric units?
I think Zappos also had free overnight shipping this Christmas - they hit $1B in sales and are almost always more expensive than Amazon. Good customer service pays off.
I actually hacked up a clone of HN because I thought it would be nice with a hn-like site for "normal" news in Danish and there aren't any. I don't feel bad about it in any way because it doesn't infringe or subtract from HN since it's a totally different crowd.

If you want you can check it out here: http://www.deloghersk.dk (still has a few bugs...)
Can you add an argument to your statistic? MIT also runs one of the best-regarded business schools in the country.
A free-market economy without banks will have an awfully hard time starting new enterprises; pooling savings and investing in businesses is the purpose of a bank. Managers and owners can't allocate time and money without capital.
You say we're "screwing selling ourselves out", but the only evidence that's been marshalled for that argument here is the bullet train with wi-fi --- wi-fi that was invented, perfected, designed, and engineered here, for what it's worth. Would you like to present some actual evidence to support your position?

Some would say that if China is becoming a world superpower, it's because they're behaving less like an oppressive dictatorship. In world-historic timescales, China's transformation is ludicrously fast; it seems strange to demand even more radical political change as evidence of their bona fides.
This is all really interesting stuff, trevelyan, but I don't see how it buttresses Friedman's argument that the Hong Kong bullet train is a metaphor for the decline of the west, or challenges my argument that the bullet train is a just an anecdote with very little explanatory power.
Newsflash bro: meatspace is messy and relationships take work.
How the Apple App Store, Android and an SLR camera are one two and three while things like flex displays and memrisistors that the bottom of the list is a mystery to me.
My co-founder and I just did a similar thing, except we rented a cabin in the mountains for a year. We're working on www.trailbehind.com
> Whatever Zed's "contributions" are, there are 100 Ruby developers who have contributed more

No, really, there aren't. Go read about Zed.