skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Go back to the basics - This year, there is only book that I want to read - SICP. I get through that, and I know I will be a better developer for the rest of my days...

Of course I am currently reading Real World Haskell (just took a break to read HN), so its not quite the start I wanted, but hopefully learning Haskell will bring me to a closer understanding of the math behind programming

Less multi-tasking - I started this a week ago, when I was working I switched off the twitter client, the email, and the phone. And I got so much more done with so less effort.

Finding myself - More time meditating, and writing (like a journal). Time over the last 2 years has flown by and I feel like I have nothing to show for it. Meditating had always helped me compose myself, not to mention it will help with finding the "zone" (Along the lines of less multi-tasking)

More hacking, actually putting what I learn to metal. I tend to be academic in nature, but deep inside I know I that its when I put it to use that it really resonates with me

Finally, just being happy. Fretting over every new technology that I feel I just have to know about gives me the satisfaction of knowing about it, without getting enough depth to "know" it.
> Don’t be surprised if you get in a fight and s/he flings a number out at you about how much you have cost them

That sounds like a stunningly bad thing to say to a woman.
Jeff didn't phrase the question carefully enough. In English if you say, "I have two children, one is a girl" that CANNOT mean both are girls. If both were girls you would never say that. Saying you have 1 girl implies that you have 1 boy. Or maybe 1 girl and one hermaphrodite.

100% was the right answer.

It's easy to get people to argue when you give them an almost-ambiguous word problem; they're not arguing about the math, they're arguing about the mapping from ambiguous words to math.
The Limits of Neuro-Talk
The raising of my daughter.
China announced on christmas day that it was gearing the yuan to be used as an international currency as more and more businesses are worried about trading in the dollar.

There is also evidence that China is moving away from its reliance on exports for economic growths towards a more consumer driven economic model by setting up distribution centres in rural areas and offering subsidies to rural households for the purchase of household appliances and other goods. They are though also strengthening trade relations in emerging markets.

A number of Gulf Arab states will maintain their 2010 deadline for a single currency, the secretary-general of the Gulf Cooperation Council also announced recently.

This all means that yes, the dollar is being put to sleep and 2009 will be a disaster year for it and the American economy, but it does not mean the Euro will replace it. The Yuan will become the currency for trade with China and the GCC will be seeking to promote their own single currency.
Obama’s Crowdsourced Resolutions For 2009
I love outsourcing disaster stories. Business strategy 101: never outsource the functions that give you competitive advantage. http://www.joelonsoftware.com/articles/fog0000000007.html
be serious about javascript, re-learn C, re-learn stats, master user interface design
They'll have to float it first.
Shouldn't be too tough. I've found that women are interested in men who enjoy what they do.
They missed #1: 10% inspiration, 90% perspiration.
I'm going to learn more philosophy and maybe some physics.
I'm going to learn about making money via subscription payments. I've launched a few apps, some that I'm very proud of, but nothing that attempts to make money in the most straightforward way: charging for use. Consequently I've never felt like I really understood this simple thing, or how easy it would be to deploy it on a new or existing app.

More broadly, my goal is to learn about bringing a business to life. Having quit my day job and switched to consulting in the last year, I'd really like to start exploring new opportunities that could make money while I sleep.
Where can i find more things like "the Do lectures"?
I recently came across http://www.dolectures.co.uk/ ,
perhaps on HN (I don't remember..) and found most of them really interesting. I thought they were a very contrasting and interesting group of people and some of them brilliant in there own simple ways.

I was wondering if there were there were some other things similar,talks or writings alike, that have influenced you somehow and affected the way you think about things?
Apple’s Internet share registered strong gains in December
I'm curious if we can generalize even more. For example, can we call Academia a giant Ponzi Scheme that will collapse when run out of naive new recruits laboring their years away hoping to reach top of the pyramid one day?
Hollywood's Digital Dawdling
http://www.takingchildrenseriously.com/
1. Statistics: Hate the way it was taught in college.

2. And maybe the Guitar. I'll start by learning to tune it first, which was the reason it's gathering dust in the first place.
Great read, but amongst all the drama they both lost!

Now off to play some FUN Mario Kart!
I don't think you do understand the problem. The thing you're taking issue with - GB vs BG - is the vitally important to the statistics, and is the thing that "normal" people get wrong when they see this kind of problem for the first time.

The only real objection to the problem as it's posed is that it's pretty unlikely that anyone would say that one of their children was a girl when both of their children are girls. For a normal conversation, the ambiguity wouldn't be present; "two children" combined with "one is a girl" means the chances of one boy and one girl are 100%.

It's a bit like the old joke about "which month of the year has 28 days?" - answer being, they all have 28 days, just some have more.

However, in other less contrived situations, this is important. People risk discounting permutations, and only considering combinations, when the permutations are necessary to get a correct view of the odds.
This one is sadly true
Go back to the basics - This year, there is only book that I want to read - SICP.

I actually started going over it (along with the videos of the lectures) a couple of weeks ago.
Saying "A person has two children, at least one of which is a girl. What is the probability that both of the children are girls?" would more clearly explain the problem.
I always thought that physics is the mother of all philosophy (at least the of "natural" kind)... then again, I am a physicist. :D
Euro isn't like the "most European currencies" and the past isn't a clear indication of the future. Wars are much different times than the mess that we are dealing with now.

I also agree on the ECB goals that controlling inflation and stability is much more important than controlling booms and recessions. It is not even that much possible to do that with euro since countries economies are not similar or fully synched. Extensive monetary control could lead to big asynchronous problems.

I agree that we have to see how well euro will do in the future.
For starters, I have a hard time seeing MS buying a ruby shop.
Second - I have a hard time seeing 37 signals selling to MS
Yoshimoto Cube Blows My Mind then Fries My Brain [video]
"There is also evidence that China is moving away from its reliance on exports for economic growths towards a more consumer driven economic model by setting up distribution centres in rural areas and offering subsidies to rural households for the purchase of household appliances and other goods."

That will be problematic for China.

http://www.nytimes.com/2009/01/01/business/01exports.html

"But shifting toward a greater reliance on domestic demand is not easy. Chinese households have one of the world’s highest savings rates because the country’s social safety net is in tatters, with families receiving scant government help with education costs, medical care and retirement; the average hospital stay costs the equivalent of two years’ wages for the average Chinese worker."
Guitar string frequencies are 82 Hz, 110 Hz, 147 Hz, 196 Hz, 247 Hz, and 330 Hz. Generate each frequency and twist the knobs until you can no longer hear a beat frequency.
Or buy a tuner.

If the strings are hard to keep in tune you will want to replace them. In that case google "change guitar strings".

Then you search "smoke on the water tab", and you should be good from there.
Exactly. That last line was the most glaring with the whole article because it was the Nintendo GUI that gave them their current standing. Their "vision" emerged from their greatest weakness - the inability to compete with the biggest boys in playing the same game. So instead they changed the rules by innovating. They must have known they were aiming for a different slice of the market but without appreciating how big it could be.
It sounds like a stunningly bad thing to say to anyone in any situation.
I don't agree; Jeff was not giving a quote. Instead it is just the relevant information abstracted from whatever the person said. By choosing the quote you did, you have added more information to the problem (at least when reading it with conversational English).

I think this would be a better quote of what the person might have said:"Both of my kids are driving me crazy! Just yesterday I had to pick one of them up from the police station--I grounded her for a month!" Pulling out the information corresponding to gender and family size would give only the information given in Jeff's post.

When applying math to the real world, you have to pull out the important information and deal with just that information. But here you are doing the opposite--trying to find a real world situation that applies to the math problem. In my opinion, your example does not quite apply.

(I don't know how the probabilities change when you account for hermaphrodites, but if it changes significantly enough so that approximately 66% is a bad answer, I would find that very interesting!)
In Okasaki's _Purely Functional Data Structures_, he adds an accumulator variable to the binary (and RB, etc.) tree membership test as an optimization, because it turns the test from up to 2*depth time to constant depth+1 time. (It's exercise 2.2.)

I suspect what the post meant was that while accumulators certainly have their benefits, reflexively using them everywhere is probably a sign that you don't really understand them.
The Netherlands is actually one of the biggest net payers of the EU together with Sweden, Germany and Austria. The UK isn't a big net payer because of the British rebate.
Art is a good example of pure wealth creation, but in his examples the numbers are misleading. At the high end, art prices are driven mainly by brand and scarcity. There is only room in people's minds for a limited number of famous artists; rich boneheads want to buy the work of whoever's famous; more rich boneheads than famous artists; pipe through law of supply and demand; result: prices are outliers.
But you can outsource in a strategic way, right? Like McDonalds, and KFC, with their seasonings - no one vendor knows all the ingredients or their quantities. Didn't Apple take a similar path with the iPod and then the iPhone? They rolled one critical aspect of the product themselves - the software - but the competitive advantage of the hardware was strategically outsourced.
I want to learn more about social psychology. I've just read Cialdini's book "influence" and have become fascinated with the subject.

As far as technical stuff goes I'd like to go through SICP - I had a small exposure to lisp years ago and would like to try it out again.

I'm also going to be doing some courses with the UK's open university (distance learning) - a math refresher and a course on processors/hardware.
At least analyze boundary conditions and special cases like leap years.

Apparently, we don't learn the Y2K lesson. I keep hearing about date rollover bugs in the industry press. At a company I worked for, there was a 45 day internal clock rollover bug in one version of our virtual machine. AFAIK, no one ever ran into this, except for one system that controlled automated people-mover trains.
In the short-term, yes. In the long-term, no.

When dealing with investments, over the long-run their price will match their value. However, in the short-run, the price will be whatever other people are willing to pay for it. So, in boom times that's often higher than value and in recession that's often lower than value. And in the short-run, new buyers of a stock pay back the older buyers just like a Ponzi scheme, but in the long run the company's value is what determines the price.

So, maybe you want to play the system and buy and sell based on these trends, but that's hard. Heck, Harvard's endowment fund couldn't do it, you think you'll be able to? It's a lot easier to focus on the long-run and invest in things that are good values.

The real problem that we're seeing here isn't that there are market fluctuations. It's that people wanted to put things in stocks that they thought they'd be using as cash in 6-18 months - specifically, retirement savings. If you're not one of the rich whose wealth will outlast their life, you need to move money from stocks into less risky investments as your retirement date approaches. If you don't, then you have to be flexible with when you retire and how much you'll have. But everyone wanted that extra hundred-grand or something to retire on - why move into safe investments when stocks have done so well? I don't want to loose out on some additional cash for retirement!

Heck, most investment firms have auto-adjusting funds that become more risk averse as you reach retirement age, but they aren't as popular as they should be because people don't want safe as much as they want more. In some ways it's like an unintentional scam. Investment professionals will caution you against being too risky just like a con-person tries to dissuade their mark, but the mark sees what they want and thinks the con is trying to keep them from money. . .and then it collapses. The difference is that the investment professional is (usually) being sincere about avoiding risk.

Be careful, don't over-extend yourself with visions of gold, and don't count those golden eggs before they hatch.
It's 1:99, not 10:90.
Most Inspirons don't have a warranty that includes international service. I had to tell people in similar situations that they need to bring or mail their machine back to the US before it could be fixed. So, I'm leaning toward lucky.
Ask HN: Predictions for 2009
It seems to be a common theme for people to make predictions for the coming year.

With the caveat that 90+% of these predictions are just blowing smoke, what do you see interesting happening in 2009? Stock market continuing to tank? Larger war in the middle east? SETI (or SETI on the Allen Telescope Array) finally getting a hit? New types of web apps taking off?
Learn to manage my time better and stop procastinating with HN :-)

More seriously, I want to read SICP seriously and play again with Ocaml (I used it quite a bit in university and really liked this language)

On things outside of programming, I'm going to get my chinese back into shape...
Why do they have access to the source code? Since when is Zune open source?
To be fair, that's why the prediction is for a $300 buy even though 37signals' revenue is 'only' ~ $8million.

Well, that's why this prediction won't come true. 37signals won't sell to Microsoft barring some astronomical price, and Microsoft won't pay said astronomical price for 37signals.
I really think microsoft will get yahoo; these 17% layoffs would mean less overlap and more Capitol even though they already have enough...also I think this is to ask.com's advantage as they would have a stronger 3 spot
this would've made a great Christmas gift; now I got to get one- so awesome - anyone know how long this has been around
If you prefer EUR over of USD, you can just buy EUR with the USD you have.
I would expect they're preserving bacteria at -80 and not growing them at -80. You need very cold temperatures, -80 and storage in liquid nitrogen, to maintain the viability of a bacterial culture during storage.
I know media loves to cover all contests as a horserace, whether it be presidential politics or business rivalry, but this is less a story of What Sony Did Wrong than What The Competitor Did Stunningly, Amazingly, Breathtakingly Right. Same with Sony's entry into the portable MP3 player market -- don't know the name off the top of my head but they've had one for a decade, right? -- which is now The iPod Market because Apple has designed and marketed one of the most iconic products of my generation.

Its not that the Sony entrant -- whatever it was -- was flawed. Its just that Apple just totally ran away with the game.

[And when my mother, who is 56 and had a stroke three years ago such that until recently she could barely move without assistance, mentions that the Wii is her favorite Christmas gift ever, you KNOW Nintendo did something right.]
Statistics and Eskrima.
Good advice. When buying a tuner look for a "chromatic" meaning it can tune ALL frequencies (within a certain range) no more than $40. This will give you more flexibility down the road. String names from high (the skinny one) to low are E B G D A E. And your first string change will probably be awful. Leave extra room and try to keep the winds even. Good Luck!
I'll happily blow some smoke. No guarantees - if you use this for anything serious you're insane.

1) SAAS will continue to grow and 2009 is the year where it will enter the mainstream with at least one IPO or major sell to a large established company.

2) Jquery will beat the other javascript frameworks and become the de facto standard for doing javascript.

3) Startups will stop focusing on B2C markets and move into the B2B market, primarily SAAS. Greentech will also surge ahead fueled be the Obama administration's policies and money.

4) Venture capitalism will be redefined. The mix of the plunging cost of doing a software startup and companies like Ycombinator and others will force VC's to move into greentech and away from software. VC's will face financial problems due to a slump in the market and at least one major VC will tank.
I don't thing that anything on tv is going to cure a lazy person of their laziness.
Yeah, the euro is being managed quite well.

In terms of recession vs. inflation control, most central banks don't see recessions as their domain at all. The ECB wades into it more than probably any except the Fed and it's probably a good thing. Most people hate the idea of manipulating money to deal with recessions and booms - heck, it pisses me off. It's not a good situation - it's often like picking political candidates; you choose the lesser evil.

What people worry about with recession targeting is that it will cause inflation. It can and many countries have shown very bad results with it. The problem occurs because, as you expand the supply of money, each individual unit is worth less of the pie. That's ok for a short while. The problem that most countries get into is that they don't stop it when things get better or that there's a perception that they won't stop it when things get better.

While the Fed plays a little looser than I would like, they've shown that they can effectively target recessions without causing inflationary problems by having long-term discipline. And people accept that it won't happen because of the Fed's history of it not happening. The ECB, while young, enjoys a good reputation and that's why they felt that they could continue to push rates down to target the recession (although not as strongly as the Fed has). They know that people accept that they have a good long-term monetary policy that won't just continually expand the money supply as many countries have.

In terms of economies not fully synched, I don't fully see it. I mean, the economy of Massachusetts isn't going to move lockstep with the economy of Michigan. They're incredibly different - probably more different than, say, the economies of Germany and France. What makes the economies of different countries different? Differences in workforce, differences in natural resources, differences in industries. . . All of those vary regionally in the US. Iowa and Nebraska's farming economy aren't anything like Massachusetts' biotech economy. And, what we're seeing right now is that Europe is affected as a unit by this recession (or as much as ever happens). You can always make the case that you can subdivide something to be more accurate, but for practical purposes coming together works well. Do you think Europe is more diverse than the US in this way? That's serious because I could be overlooking something big that's just not on my mind after being up until 4am last night.

The euro has been one of the greatest things to happen to Europe. It's not mismanaged and has a bright future, but it's premature to say that it's the new dollar. That would be like saying Linux is going to replace Windows on people's desktops. It might happen. Linux is good. It's gaining favor every day. It might be better. However, it will still be a good while before Windows is displaced if it ever is and it's premature to assume it will be.
VirtualBox 2.1.0 | TechJaws
If you drop by Copenhagen I'll probably be able to fix you up with a place to live for a week while you're here. I live on a boat in a Copenhagen Marina, and I'm sure I'll be able to loan a boat or something for a week.

Copenhagen is great in the summer - the beer is cold and the chicks are beautiful.

My mail is in my profile :-)
A preview of Windows 7 - or, Vista fixed
His point is that a person telling you they have one girl would be accepted as referring to a particular child. Thus, BG and GB merge and the odds are 50% of a boy and a girl.
The mean time between Blu Ray BD+ cracks will increase as Macrovision starts deploying more sophisticated code. Slysoft won't give up by Dec'09, but people will be wondering why they haven't.
Progmatic: the best programmer's news in one place
Ok, and then what are you going to learn on January 3rd?
Since we are not even aiming for plausibility, I say Google will buy Apple and convert the iPhone to Android.
I'll go ahead and predict the obvious: the tech sector will finally crash hard in 2009 like all the other industries in America. Technology is typically a lagging indicator, as its still dependent on other large industries for most of its revenue.

Look to see 25-30% cutbacks in spending for the industry leaders (Google, Microsoft, IBM) and tech startups (the funded ones) to tighten belts for real this time.

It may seem bad now, but the tech sector all and all has been nearly immune to the economic downturn compared to other industries (retail, auto, financial, and real estate).

The tech companies that will contract least will be ones who cater to the entertainment market (games primarily).

Hopefully I don't sound too pessimistic. Personally, I've been happily employed throughout the downturn, making as much or more than I'd been getting in the boom times. However I have pretty good second hand view (from friends and family) on other parts of the economy so I'm bracing for the same impact on tech.
The math behind signal processing; curing and drying ham and salami.
Money and wealth turned out not to be the same thing after all. You can create money by scribbling marks on little pieces of paper. Creating wealth turned out to be much, much harder.

Seems like every time they forget this, we eventually have a "correction".
"Both of my kids are driving me crazy! Just yesterday I had to pick one of them up from the police station--I grounded her for a month!" - given just the information in your quote, the odds are 50% of a boy and a girl.
Homeschooling?
Top items in the N. Korean marketplace 2008
...because hardly anyone has the big picture. this works with ant colonies because they had time to evolve their local decision making. it doesn't work with human economy.
Since that's the case, the Opera feature to mention is something about successfully opening JavaScript links in new windows, not mouse gestures; talking about the mouse gestures just confused me.