skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
On your last point; now we have another study, from a somewhat biased organization that believes strongly in, relies on, and supports, the "long tail" version of the music industry to support the long tail theory.

You're absolutely right. I don't think the facts have quite come out yet. I do think it has a lot to do with the models of the businesses doing the research. I bet you'd find that Hulu has a pretty interesting long tail (and plenty of blockbusters, as well), because I go there a couple of times a week, and I'm sometimes surprised by what has bubbled to the top 50 results--quite a lot of back catalog stuff. Even stuff that has been out of regular syndication for years, like the original Battlestar Galactica, and other old, somewhat forgotten shows, and shows that didn't make it very long on TV, like Firefly and John Doe.

I don't know, as I haven't studied things very closely--I saw Anderson give his long tail talk a few years ago, and I've read the article when it was published, but I haven't paid it too much mind. I do know that my tastes are squarely in the long tail. I don't watch blockbuster movies, I don't buy blockbuster records, and I don't read blockbuster books, in general. But, I also know that I'm not "normal" or "average" in my tastes, so I am and outlier and not a reliable predictor of anything the average consumer is going to do. I will point out, though, that there are more independent records being made, more independent films being produced, and more independent literature being produced than at any time in history. That has to be explainable somehow, though I don't know if the long tail is the right way to explain it. Maybe it's just bigger populations plus the Internet equals "everybody gets to makes records/movies/literature" now.
Just from informally talking to a few people, it seems like sinus surgeries have basically a 100% rate of leaving you messed up for life. I'd be interested in seeing actual data though.
Unfortunately, no one can be told what Runnin-With-The-Songsmith is. You have to hear it for yourself.
The power landlords have over tenants is overwhelming, unless restricted by law.

Wouldn't competition - the invisible hand of the marketplace - also restrict abusable power? http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Invisible_Hand
This is a really great presentation. It seems to go along with the idea of releasing early and often. I've never really been comfortable or understood sales. In school my only few real experiences in sales was selling some product for some benefit or fundraiser.From that, I got the idea that successful selling required convincing some unknown person that the finished product solved their specific needs that I was basically unaware of. So it was pretty much a numbers game, more attempts mean more money.

I like the idea of a product development cycle where the customers and users are shaping the product. I also really like the idea that I can easily validate a product concept by seeing if the people advising me would actually buy in to demo. This presentation has helped me feel more comfortable with the process of successful product development and sales.
I'm still waiting for a post to get frontpaged titled "Why PHP didn't win"
"None of these alternative medicines are tested properly in an objective matter to prove that they do in fact work."

Many have been tested and proven to work. The only reason they are "alternative" is that doctors only prescribe medicines that the pharma companies promote. So they will prescribe people statins to lower their cholesterol, but they would never advise someone to take red rice even though it does the exact same thing with less risk of complications.
Patents only last 20 years, and besides that every resource is in theory substitutable anyway, so I wouldn't worry about it.
It's funny that 37s thought the apology letter was great because it violated some of the principles they laid out for good apologies.
Recommendations and research experience (published if possible) is absolutely the dealbreaker
Can you point to any mistakes he's made? He seems to me to have done a remarkably good job.
Chimpanzee raised in a human family has achieved literacy.
I don't have numbers to back up my assertion, but I would guess Concerta (12 hour extended release ritalin) is the most widely prescribed. And a ritalin formulation would almost always be prescribed before moving onto Adderall. There is also Strattera, which is a non-stimulant ADHD medication that doesn't really work but sometimes parents ask for it so doctors try it.
VCs Feeling the Pain of Newly Poor LPs
I don't know about the market shares, but, given that there seems to be many different types of methylphenidate for sale, I would assume that the market share for methylphenidate is non-trivial.
Why Don’t Google & Yahoo Offer Twitter Search? (warning: popup)
Strattera basically acts on the norepinephrine system (like Reboxetine) as an antidepressant, doesn't it? If that's the case, I would think it would be effective for a good share of the inattentive-ADD (i.e. non-hyperactive) cases.
Apple says one of Adobe Photoshop's custom shapes is an Apple trademark image
In other news: schools to start using Dvorak in 2045.
A really nice idea (though music composition is pretty niche, that might be a good thing). The score looks beautiful.

But too hard to start using. It took me 10-15mins to discover how to enter a note: you have to click where the cursor is. And not just where the cursor is, but slightly to the right... I had to read the help, and it wasn't even the first thing!

Entering a note is the very first thing a user wants to do. For user adoption (which is the what you need when starting), you have to make that first thing incredibly easy: click somewhere, get a note. All the additional sophistication should be additional to that. (IMO)

I think they are aiming at existing users of existing tools. But I think that's too hard - they can't beat desktop applications on their own turf. There's a lot of sophistication in the tool - so it's like they are aiming at what the professional applications do. These tools have competed and evolved to meet the needs of professional composers. However, I think a web tool is really in a different market, with a different proposition. They should first focus on where they strong. It's Writely vs. Word.

Music layout is hard, and their's gets messy when it's more complex (looking at Moonlight Sonata).

The fact that you can't publish to the web, or share (except with people who are already members) makes it harder to get started. Maybe not allow the whole score to be viewed without an account, but a tempter, to entice get people to sign up for the rest. As it is, there's little evidence that it's worth signing up. But maybe focusing on dedicated users (not casual) will work? As I said, it's pretty niche.
Richard Gabriel: The Rise of "Worse is Better"
Absolutely stunning. The statistics are almost as interesting as the visualizations.
Added after reading an interesting article from this thread on PHP ~ http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=436870 posted at http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=437001 by http://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=kuniklo
Is Computer Science a science? [pdf]
So, is the takeaway from this that if you are a suspect in any kind of serious crime you can expect your computer to be searched and/or seized?

I'm glad that justice appears to have been served in this instance, but it never occurred to me that checking your browser cache was routine procedure for searches.
I'm upmodding you because that was an incredibly clear and concise way to relay a conversation between two people in the third person.

Much better than: "And he was like 'blah blah' and then she was like 'bleh bleh' and then he replied 'blih blih.'"

I'm going to make an effort to use the 'assign letters to people' approach next time I try to say something like that.
One thing that's unclear about that article is whether the reported conclusions are the result of a rigorous study, or just the anecdotal conclusions of an individual professor.

Also, the idea that a biker with a helmet is more experienced than one without a helmet seems strange: in my experience, a lot of the most experienced bike riders don't wear helmets. I don't think there's a widespread stereotype about it, anyway.
They are derivatives of very well known names in Unix: ls and grep.

When ls utility was created standard RAM was 10KB and power computers looked like this http://images.appleinsider.com/leopard-preview-server-1.jpg

I guess if your IO interface is a real dead-tree paper then each character counts.
I haven't been able to find anything about a functional prototype. Is there one?

I'm dubious that light projected onto a rough-surfaced road from in front will be very visible from behind. Maybe when it's rainy?
I think someone should make a summary table of the form

Type of crime | min punishment | max punishment | avg punishment
I worry about the absoluteness of 2 & 4.

I've seen too many places where reasoning similar to that of 2 results in developers prematurely punting to quick and dirty hacks to get a trouble ticket closed faster. It may not be possible to get by with anything but a one-off conditional, especially in tax calculation , but I worry about the claim that it is inevitable. It provides a justification to not look for more maintainable alternatives first.

The same thing with 4. The only thing that bothers me is the sense of inevitablility. There are places where specific cases need to be dealt with in code, and it is an entirely different argument of how they should be dealt with once that much is assumed. But the inevitability bothers me, if only because I have run into several cases where things were claimed inevitable, and upon closer inspection caused large amounts of pain that could have been avoided if the existence of alternatives was considered.
I don't, but people may die if my software doesn't work.

Our managers do...
I don't think he's saying, in hindsight, after reading the whole article, that an animated GIF was obvious.

He's saying that he thought of the animated GIF option before coming to the end of the article, but that it was so obvious to him that he assumed the fact that the author had neglected it meant that it wasn't a possibility for technical reasons.
Inconsistent options are like irregular verbs in English (the most frequently used verbs are both ancient and irregular as a rule).
I agree that it's probably illegal, and definitely causes trouble for drivers, but if they're straddling the lane, that means they have a lot more to worry about--they're about to hit a biker.
More tips here: http://news.ycombinator.com/formatdoc
Superb work presenting such big numbers in a 'graspable' way. I wonder what techniques the artist used to generate some of the more complicated images.
I'm not sure if I agree with the author's conclusion, which seems to be that the newer generations of computer scientists are going to identify less with its separate sub-domains (science, math, engineering) than with the discipline as a sort of whole. Typically, I'd expect that undergraduates and graduates going through universities are going to have their perception of the field shaped heavily by which of the three sub-domains the university faculty most closely identifies with. A lot of the major computer science schools do have a greater emphasis in certain areas--for instance, I went to Cornell, and you could really feel how much emphasis the school placed on theory (i.e. mathematics), and that's shaped my impression of what CS really is.
Not quite. IBM provides strong incentives to patent inventions. It also makes it very easy for an engineer to do so.
I don't think that holding services legal liable for short-notice service cancellations is the correct way to go, as annoying as the cancellation might for the users involved.

It would become yet another diversion of time and money away from the goal of improving and keeping the service running. It might be an absorbable cost for a company as large as AOL, but it might be the difference between living and dying for a small company just trying to get going. Even if they could survive though, it doesn't mean they should be held liable. Forcing them to spend money being graceful at shutting down one service might result in collateral damage of other services to offset the cost.

It's ultimately a question between corporate and personal responsibility. In the end, they are another data storage mechanism. And as with all means of data storage, you need to keep backups somewhere else.

Metaphorically comparing this to tenant eviction just doesn't work. One's livelihood is not threatened by losing some photos or blogposts, and the cost of maintaining backups is insignificant compared to the cost of maintaining an alternative place to live.
| attorney hourly rates

And the other obvious one.
That's a lot less for the driver to worry about than swerving into other lanes or oncoming traffic.
"In a sample of 400 computer science papers published before 1995, Walter Tichy found that approximately 50% of those proposing models or hypotheses did not test them [12]. In other fields of science the fraction of papers with untested hypotheses was about 10%. Tichy concluded that our failure to test more allowed many unsound ideas to be tried in practice and lowered the credibility of our field as a science."

That's quite an important observation for further development of computer science.
I don't think anyone would claim that Israel can do whatever it wants. Surely they shouldn't be targeting civilian-only targets.

The problem is that missiles are inaccurate, and the rockets were being fired from rooftops in a very densely populated city. There's no retaliating without this sort of thing at all. The terrorists know it, and the Israeli's know it.

That's why they terrorists fire them from where they do. They feel they can get away with it because if Israel strikes back, this sort of story will be in the American papers. By putting it there, we're giving terrorists what they want.
The Beacon advertising fiasco comes to mind...
I'm going to avoid that just because this isn't the forum and its beside the point anyway. I'm simply saying that these stories are aiding terrorism. They specifically launch rockets from civilian areas so that if Israel strikes back, these stories will run.
Aha, that's why Unicode snowman domain doesn't work for me.

http://www.☃.net/
This is academic gobbledy gook. I felt like I was hearing a bad tech sales pitch flipping through this with all of its markitecture diagrams.

Beware - just because something comes from Stanford, doesn't make it meaningful or insightful. This is just restating common knowledge with flow charts.
Technically, inflation is indeed an exponential process.

But there's no real need for me to take refuge in the word "technically" when we're talking about 231 million percent inflation. There's nothing technically exponential about that. (Sadly.)
That's always seemed common sense- it was the hedgehog concept which was great for me.
Article excerpt:

This isn't the first time that police have used Google searches to nab suspects. Police Blotter has chronicled a 2006 case involving a wireless hacker ("how to broadcast interference over wifi 2.4 GHZ") and a 2008 case involving a woman convicted of murdering her husband ("decomposition of a body in water"). Searches in a 2005 murder case included "neck," "snap," and "break."
You could crowd source the targeting - make it arcade game for passengers. Winners get frequent flyer points.
Concur. Here's some evidence

http://mibi.deviantart.com/art/Death-and-Taxes-9410862

http://www.wallstats.com/
But does a naturopath actually give you some willow bark to chew on? From my experience, it is just a plant derived active ingredient. Kinda like the difference between "Natural Flavors" and "Artificial Flavors" in foods. The active chemical is identical, but one comes from a plant, and one was derived in a lab. In the end it doesn't matter too much because they both end up pretty much as identical chemicals in a test tube.

I mostly know of "naturopaths" who are into the homeopathic "mumbo jumbo" so I'm surprised to find out that naturopathic schools attempt to follow the journals.

I kinda think that there are good "doctors" (be it traditional or not) who are up on their science and listen past the 30 seconds they meet you. And then there are regular doctors who don't listen enough and misdiagnose on a regular basis and naturopaths who are into a lot of hand-wavy "medicine" that wouldn't hold much salt if properly tested, but because of the placebo effect find themselves still employed and even convinced of their skills.
Year In America
"Did PHP really win?"

Yes, for now. It is probably the most widely used language for web apps right now.

Anyone who calls PHP a toy language is not skilled enough to write anything better than a toy in PHP. It is not really a criticism, just an observation. Until you become skilled enough in any language you are pretty much doing fancy versions of Hello World. With many languages the skill of the programmer matters more. For example, I am still struggling to understand why I would ever use functional language for anything but that is a) because I haven't needed it yet and b) I haven't taken the time to acquire the knowledge and skill needed to write anything more functional than toys.
This is where the problem is. How does one properly filter the real from the fake? I find myself quite annoyed with the whole thing. (especially homeopathy)
Job = enslavement. The goal of the current economic-stimulation is to create millions of new enslavements. From the article:

Drama was a Keynes tool. During a 1934 dinner in the U.S., after one economist carefully removed a towel from a stack to dry his hands, Mr. Keynes swept the whole pile of towels on the floor and crumpled them up, explaining that his way of using towels did more to stimulate employment among restaurant workers.
"Many have been tested and proven to work."

Are they in the journals though? (i'm asking honestly, i'd be very interested to know)
The New Kindergarten
A toast to Cel-Ray, the one and only celery soda
Besides Beacon, he seems to interview pretty poorly, Facebook is still hemorrhaging money so he hasn't managed the whole "profitability" thing, and there's the whole ConnectU fiasco to name a few. Considering the fact that he's 24 and running a place like FB, I think he's done a good job all things considered, but the award was for "Best Startup CEO" not "Best Startup CEO who is still young so doesn't really know he is doing, but is doing pretty well in spite of his lack of experience."

Because that would be way too long for Om Malik to say remotely coherently.

(P.S. I think I would make an awful CEO of FB, but I also think there are far more competent Startup CEOs out there than Zuckerberg, it just so happens he gets a ton of press, which means it makes sense that he would win an award that is determined by a mass of mouth-breathing, TC-reading publics. Sort of like how it makes sense the Twitter founders won "Best Founders" since, apparently, any press is good press, even press that constantly points out how incompetent you are.)
"txt" speech is a norm for 13 year old kids on youtube and myspace. By 16-17 they're either all using proper grammar or too technologically challenged to be posting here.

I have NO idea how someone who writes in "txt" gets to be here, haha. Then again, the web is public. I sigh.
So bad it's good.
Following me?
I kept telling myself I'd do a "Ask YC: Review my site" after the next redesign, or the next...

thanks for posting it. :)
It is a bigger niche than many may realize though.
Heyzap creates widgets to put casual games on any web site (YC W09)
If you want easy, quick and accessible all rolled into one, try WebDNA. Nah, on the other hand I think you 'real' programmers would not be interested in using such a simple tool.
Anonymous comment: "Also, the financial chart icon points in the wrong direction."
This is actually pretty cool. The interface is a bit confusing but that is pretty much par for the course for music composition apps/progs unfortunately.
YouTube rolling out download links for videos
I was thinking along eru's lines. The specifics I came up with:
1) Compress sorted lists by encoding the differences between successive numbers using a code that's shorter for smaller numbers.
2) Use in-memory merge sort. That way you don't need random access to the lists, and it's overall O(n log n).
3) In order to merge large lists when memory is already almost full, divide the lists into blocks, allocate blocks for the merged list while you're deallocating blocks from the two source lists.
4) To do this in Python, use the "array" module.
I take it back - you can publish scores after all:

http://www.noteflight.com/scores/view/2177201ae448ab894682b1...

But I think you have to leave yourself logged in to do it.
"This is your malpractice insurance company. We just read an interesting article in the newspaper about how using checklists cuts fatalities by 50%. So we checked our data, and found this is accurate. Great news!

If you don't use checklists, your premium next year will triple."
Judge for yourself:

http://siteanalytics.compete.com/knol.google.com/?metric=uv

(Traffic is below initial surge, but steady with perhaps a very slight uptrend.)
I'd be interested in talking more with you. You can reach me at: glen at nixty.com.
How much money does it costs to maintain a laser based system over time? How much does it cost to maintain paint on the ground over time? Where are the lasers coming from? Are they safe? This articles raises more questions than it does solve problems.
You hate software patents because some companies abuse them? Do you also hate pain killers because some drug addicts abuse them?
I've been at my company for just shy of 4 years and I had no official training or schooling in database design or programming for that matter. When I started we were roughly 3 years out of a migration from MS Access to SQL Server - all done without rewrites or restructuring, but rather a simple recreation of the existing schema.

4 years later, the 4 "programmers" that were there are now long gone and we've cycled another 5 or 6 since I've been there and have managed to keep another 10 on staff. Not one a DBA.

So you start with a horrible database design in MS Access. Couple that with the migration to SQL. Add in 8 years of "maintenance" by nearly 2 dozen programmers who were forced to do web design, web development, application programming, hardware maintenance and everything else under sun because management doesn't know the difference. Finally, you mix that up with a sales driven CEO & COO and no real CIO, which means that deadlines and client satisfaction are king and properly designed architectures take a back seat to "just add a column so we can get it done".

What does leave you? A 12 Million dollar INC 500 company, backed by a dozen programmers with an average age in the mid 20's and average salaries just BELOW the average Level 1 programmers salary in our area. It also leaves you with a 9 hour day with your Management Studio open writing alters, updates, deletes and selects just to handle the relentless tickets that come in from the rest of the support staff. And it also leaves you with an 86 GB database consisting of 5000 tables, 5700 views, 3500 stored procedures with little to no data warehousing and enough transactional processes to choke an 8 Core, 24 GB Dell Server on a daily basis.....

Did I mention we don't have load balancing or proper offsite backups? We've been teetering on the brink of absolute chaos and collapse for so long that routine 30,000 row updates I won't even blink at. And there's no end in sight.

This article is great, but it doesn't even scratch the surface. ;)