skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Even if each individual agent isn't rational it is possible that, on average, we are.

Think of a room full of gas that you slowly heat. All sorts of quantum effects and chaos affect individual particles. But, on average, we can predict the net outcome with fairly good results using very naive models (laws of thermodynamics, ideal gas law, etc).

And you're absolutely right about profit. Standard economic theory predicts that, in a free market that is at a stable equilibrium, each firm won't earn any profits exceeding the marginal cost of production (economists say that a firm is earning "Normal profits"). But, obviously, no markets (that I can think of) are perfectly free or in perfect equilibrium (and economists know this, and have far more complex models for real world situations).

Although, if memory serves, this hypothesis has been empirically verified by many almost-free markets (i.e., commoditized goods sold to intelligent/large consumers). You have a bunch of sellers doing business, barely making ends meet, until something happens that disrupts equilibrium (new technology, another company's bankruptcy, sudden changes in demand, etc), where they can hope to earn supernormal profits in the short term, before the market returns to equilibrium.
I think Hulu did great in this situation. It's not like they have said they would keep episodes of shows up forever, shows get removed a lot. FX wanted the show off, so they basically had to take the show off.The only bad point was originally they would have lost credibilty as a reliable place to watch shows, but the notice and addition of the show for another two weeks show they are taking this seriously. Hulu has earned some of my respect, I'm impressed.
Targeting schools and school boards is definitely much tougher than disrupting from the edge (i.e, individuals)

You may want to check out what http://www.inigral.com is doing in this area.

also, my email is james@plopquiz.com
"It's the C of scripting"

No. C is a very elegant, if somewhat minimalistic, language. PHP is a kludge made of all sort of functions cluttering the only namespace there is. While K&R clearly understood the value of separating language from library, PHP deliberately ignores this lesson. I heard the most recent version (or the next, maybe) will support namespaces. It started as a quick-and-dirty solution for writing dynamic pages and, sadly, it shows.

I somewhat fail to see the power of a language as something derived from lack of fancy constructs or high-level abstractions. And, BTW, C has a lot of fancy constructs and high-level abstractions: you just have to point the right libraries to the compiler/linker.

I am sorry to tell you, but the main reasons PHP is so popular are the low cost of labor and the lack of interest by a large group of self-appointed programmers in learning anything, as you say, fancy.
No joke. I love Hulu, and when I found out it was just a joint venture I was kind of surprised. It really is a great substitute for traditional TV.
Matt, it does serve one powerful purpose: propaganda.

Some people say Israel can do whatever it wants because it's defending itself against rocket attacks. Other people claim that the Israeli state is a murderous organization that should be eliminated.

The truth is, we do not know if anyone was firing rockets from the building where this guy's son was. I suppose someone was, which is unfortunate. We don't have footage from the airstrike. We do not know why the building was hit. To cut a long story short, we know very little. The fog of war prevents us from seeing things clearly, so we should be careful before jumping to radical conclusions.

Everyone who was killed in Gaza (and unfortunately far too many have been killed already) was someone's son or daughter. This kind of article seems to me as cheap exploitation of the deceased for someone's political gain. It's a bit nauseating, IMHO.
Wait, was this a joke? I honestly can't tell.
Is it 37 who's spamming HN, or is it their fanbois?
"Harbert was convicted and sentenced to three years in prison"

Person drives drunk, hits and kills pedestrian, drives off, lies to court.

Gets 3 years in prison.

What the hell?
Keep looking (not full time, of course). They're out there! Obviously, this is one of the best places to do so...
"I wish more browsers would
take the lead from Firefox 3
and adopt full page zoom"

I wish Text Zoom stays the default. I like text. I dont want pictures, videos and navigation to become bigger when I hit CTRL+. I want all the space for BIG TEXT. I dont care if the design of the page breaks.
I agree with you that Hulu is not perfect. They should really keep the episodes on forever, especially since they are available 24/7 for download via Amazon,iTunes, or p2p. The networks haven't realized that they are losing control of content distribution. But I think this shows that Hulu has a decent idea of whats going on and is doing what it can in this situation to compete.
Have you tried drugs? Go to a shrink and convince him you have ADD (and who knows--maybe you do). All drugs for ADD are amphetamines, so it may take a fair bit of convincing before you get a prescription.

Not much finesse in that (possible) solution to your problem, but it sounds like you don't have many options.
what in the hell does this have to do with hacker news? why are you asking programmers for advice on making friends? I think you're missing some key information about programmers here.

anyway, if your friends annoy you, spend less time with them, and go to places you haven't been before, pursuing whatever interests you have, and see if you meet people.

personally I deal with alienation by telling everyone I know to go to hell and seeing who sticks around anyway. I'm not actually qualified to give anybody advice on this topic, but I'm just reiterating my initial point now.

might as well reiterate my second point. I have the opposite problem: making too many new friends and not having the time to follow through on the friendship. this comes about because I have a lot of interests that I pursue really intensely. if you pursue a lot of interests, you'll meet people. so do that, but without being too intense about it to make any space for new friendships to develop, and you're good.
Sorry, ZumoDrive is currently not available for: Ireland

Any plans to internationalize?
"PHP is a kludge made of all sort of functions cluttering the only namespace there is"

Yeah, how many namespaces does C have again? If you were to write a web application in C with all the same open source C libraries as are available for PHP, your only namespace in C would look almost identical.

"While K&R clearly understood the value of separating language from library, PHP deliberately ignores this lesson"

Ironically, this is exactly what made PHP successful. Everything is included in the box. It wouldn't have been half as successful without including every useful library they could find.

"C has a lot of fancy constructs and high-level abstractions: you just have to point the right libraries to the compiler/linker."

You're not going to get closures, classes, meta programming, etc, etc, from libraries in C. And guess what, PHP has libraries too!
srsly.

my Spanish teacher a few years ago told me that the word in Spanish is the same in either case: aburrido. the downside is that most English speakers will assume you mean "a burrito." the upside is that it makes a lot of sense to combine these two words into one thing.
When each individual agent is not rational the group is not rational. Take car buying, a major car company that cut it's advertising budget in half they could try to sell a higher quality product for less money. At which point all other company's would have to limit their budget to compete etc. However, this does not happen because consumers are not rational as a group.

You can even measure the level of rational behavior by comparing stable markets. EX: Gasoline vs Bottled water, there is vary little to distinguish the products, but brand name water carries a huge price premium.
Yeah. I agree with you: I think it ought to be distributed widely and efficiently. But I understand it from the point of view from the content providers/DVD salesmen.

I like that Hulu's playing it fair. I'd like to hope that they'll become more and more open as time goes on, or that somebody else does.
That's an interesting article. However, I suspect the additional protection provided by wearing a helmet more than makes up for the slight increase chance of being hit by a car. Especially when considering being hit by a car isn't the only way to crash.
Because more people read 37signals than read the Hulu blog. This is how I came across the message, too. And some people use the HN autosubmit bookmarklet for fast posting.
"If you love what you're doing, why would you want to do it less?"

Gee, I don't know...I love chocolate cake, but I don't want to eat it for every meal.
I just wanted to reply to this to see how far to the right the text would go.
I'll take that bet, please.
Instead of trying to make "small talk," try to figure out what the other person is interested in, and ask them about that.

Resist the urge to think of a weakness (having a hard time socializing) as a strength.
Rate my program: ESPN Fantasy Football Analyzer
Sometimes you want to know whose fantasy team is better, right? Well, now you can calculate your "optimum" points scored and record, which is a more accurate way to measure how good your team is.

This is a pretty diverse crowd, so I figure there are some people who enjoy a little fantasy football and wouldn't mind an extra tool to settle disputes about whose team is better and who's better/worse at playing fantasy football.
mine is 100826099
Sure, you can learn something, but will that something be worth the effort? That's the $64k question here, and I believe the answer for most people is "no."

Being alone sucks, but before you kill the pain with the companionship of idiots, you should ask if the cure is worse than the disease. Looking back, I regret time spent on idiots a lot more than time spent alone. YMMV, of course.
"Seems" being the key word there. Its the same reason that sooo many people get screwed in the stockmarket. They look in the past and in retrospect, the great upheavals seem to obvious that they think that they can predict them and before they know it, they are down 50%. Same with great ideas. The concept of the wheel may seem simple to us now but I wonder how much thought it took to come up with it for the first time.
It takes a couple hours for the DNS to switch over, but overall it's pretty painless.
All drugs for ADD are amphetamines

I don't think Methylphenidate is an amphetamine. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ritalin
If market forces increased the number of deaths from air travel by .5% for 10% off ticket prices, I don't think that would necessarily be a bad thing. There's value in cheaper travel, and it might even be value that saves a life -- granted, the kid in Africa who died this morning of starvation because his mother is unemployed because his country is not a tourist destination because it costs too much to go there did not die in a photo-friendly fireball, but is his death any less meaningful?

LOTS of very useful things will kill far more people this year than commercial air travel. Water buckets. Bicycles. Doctors. Cars, in about the first two hours of the year.

(If you took a Boeing 747 full of American patients to a doctor's office, more than one would die due to medical error. Remember that checklists article from yesterday?)

Air travel gets the evil eye because the deaths are very visible. The same factor would make market-regulated air travel very safe.
M = Master's student
P = PhD candidate

M discovers P is wrong and says why.

P realizes his mistake and admits it like any honest academic would.

M keeps on going on like P is sticking to his guns.

P relents again, embarassed, since sticking to his guns would be anathema to his being.

M keeps on going on like P is sticking to his guns.

P tries harder to make it clear that he's relenting.

M keeps on going on like P is sticking to his guns...

I wish I could remember what they were talking about. M kept the other guy going for quite awhile and got him pretty riled up.

In essence, it was Trolling, but in person. (There is a good chance that this thread is trolling of the more common online variety.)
Bonus points for explaining how market forces would encourage surgeons to use checklists.
I will check it out.

I won my ESPN fantasy football league this year. It is a tough league where we keep 7 players each year and draft new one. The league is now 6 or 7 years old and all of the owners are getting pretty good.

This year I created a spreadsheet to help me draft the most consistent players. It is similar to what you are doing in that it should help me ensure an "optimum" score each week. Since I won the league I think my method works.

So, here is my initial feedback from reading your description.

What counts in fantasy football is the number of wins and losses. Changing the goal to one of winning based on "optimum" points matters none to me. I want it to help me win (without redefining what a win is).

So instead of historical analysis, how about focusing on prediction? An ESPN fantasy football tool that helps with the draft and helps pick starters for a week is useful. You are close, but it doesn't sound like it is there yet.

I think your idea of optimum points can be useful for making those predictions.
Yes, by pg, I mean Paul Graham. I guess I hadn't really noticed that the community here had grown large enough to need the full name for my meaning to be clear. I'm glad it has grown, of course, and I'll try to remember to not be so insular in the future.
There are forms of retaliation that have far less collateral damage. Israel has employed such techniques in the past with great success. They are "dirty"? Sure they are, but they are far more selective too.

I really can't accept the justification for such a massive retaliation that's bound to have a huge cost in terms of civilian lives. This is no longer collateral damage - it's not like casualities are mostly Hamas combatants. Gaza is one of the most densely populated areas in the planet and for evey Hamas militant they hit, they will also kill at least a dozen of civilians that, until now, didn't represent any threat to Israel.

As for the Israelis, they will have to endure the consequences of electing such a reckless government.

When someone spends the last decade firing rockets at you that kill, on average about five people per year, it's very clear they are not really good at that. By making this disproportionate reaction, the Israeli government is not caring for the safety of their citizens - they are in more danger now than they ever were.

This ugly war is going to get far uglier.

There is no end in sight.
Note that the parent comment to yours mentioned an example where letting the market sort out airline safety works. Your comment suggests that you believe people should be forced by the FAA to travel on lower cost airlines even if they would avoid them due to poor safety reputation. I assume, instead, that you're implicitly excluding any non-price information from "market forces" even when people are making decisions based on it, but that's incorrect.
Thanks for the clarification. I guess I was wondering if the adding of new features & function took away from the simplicity. I think thats the challenge for both Posterous and Tumblr: satisfying existing users while still making the end product dead simple for new users (e.g. my parents).
There are a couple things I would change about the interface (easy insertion), but I am generally extremely impressed. In my case, I knew the score, wrote out several measures and realized I missed a note. They don't seem to have any simple way to reconcile this problem.
Not while working...
And took full responsibility instead of shedding the blame on others. Talk about defying expectations, Hulu is incredible.
The Power to Fight Eviction
Do any start-ups here power their (startup) blog using Tumblr?

If so why did you choose Tumblr over creating your own; easier to create/maintain, better SEO, additional way to promote your work.... ?
For best results you need not relay on just software solutions. Think about visual composition first. I can't give you any useful url, but start here [ http://faculty.cua.edu/johnsong/hitchcock/pages/montage/mont... ] and you can google more.
I want a small effective government and I vote Democrat. From what I can tell Democrats are more focused on actually reducing government spending than Republicans. As to the effects of "large government" look at how many freedoms each side wants to remove and Democrats win again. Limiting how old you need to be to buy video games pales in comparison to the loss of due process etc.

National Heath care might seem like bad voodoo, but the government is already pay for over 1/2 of all medical spending in the US yet medical bills are still the leading cause of bankruptcy in the US. Most countries with a national heath care system spend less money per person and relative to their GDP than we do now and we still have a crappy patchwork. When a hobo shows up at a hospital he is going to get treatment and we are going to pay his bill but I still need to buy expensive medical insurance.

PS: I am a consultant working for the DoD and I have saved the US taxpayer millions. If you had any idea what games where being played you would probably also vote Democrat because it saves you money.
Exactly. Along with a very emphatic "none of this actually matters yet so stop worrying about it".
Bare WSGI vs. Python frameworks - Django chapter
If you like that piece, you should go ahead and read Gladwell's new book Outliers.
Writing Blazing Fast, Infinitely Scalable, Pure-WSGI Utilities
I used to run a big affiliate network and have about 10 years experience in lead generation.

Can't think of any great published resources off the top of my head, but here is some general advice:

1) Make contact with a real person at the networks you source your lead generation offers from (you mentioned network in your post, so I assume that is your plan). Many people just sign up for a commission junction, linkshare, etc. account and never actually talk or exchange emails with a real person. The benefit of contacting someone is that they can typically pay you more right out of the gate if you ask. Also, these network reps are used to seeing very low quality sites. So, if you have a high quality web app they will typically get excited about the opportunity to partner with you. This is obviously good for your revenue prospects. Bypassing the networks altogether and trying to go advertiser direct is even better, since you are cutting out the middle man in most cases. But, this isn't always possible with limited resources, etc.

2) Lead gen works best when it is heavily integrated and niche focused. Try to find offers that solve a problem related to why people use your web app in the first place.

3) Let the metrics be your guide. Test lots of different lead gen offers, offer placement in your app flow etc.

Feel free to contact me if you have any specific questions I can help out with. My email is in my profile.
I took up an internship at a public radio station because I thought the people there would be interesting, and the people there are great, but the age difference between me and everyone can be a bit awkward at times.

Excellent! Don't dismiss the old-timers. Some of the most interesting people I've ever known have been a lot older than me. In fact, actually, most of the truly interesting folks I've know have been older than me--they've just had more time to acquire crazy and funny stories. I took a job at an independent television station when I was in college, and that was a great experience (it got acquired by the WB, now CW, while I was there, and the character of the station changed and most of the old-timers left). Several of the folks I worked with had been involved in building the tower and broadcast station back in the sixties. Those old guys (and one gal) had some fantastic stories about the birth and growth (and changing mores, like the fact that smoking pot in master control on the night shift was accepted practice in the 70's) of the station, and had a lot of interesting insight into technology and changes; they'd seen the station go from film to analog video of multiple types to digital video, along with the introduction of satellites and other wonders of modern technology.

Work past the awkward, be friendly and interested in their stories (fake it till you make it), and you'll probably learn something about making friends with folks who aren't exactly like you. Older folks are also more likely to be able and willing to make up for your lack of social graces. Generally, the older you get, the less clique-oriented you become...you might get more set in your ways in a lot of regards, but older folks tend to be happier to talk to new and different people, especially if the new people are truly interested in what they have to say.

Another interesting old-timer story: A friend of mine worked with a lady who was maybe 10-15 years older than her. They became friends, because they were both vegetarian, and had a few other things in common. Turns out the lady was Jimmy Dale Gilmore's (probably best known as Smokey from The Big Lebowski outside of Texas, but he's a famous Grammy-wielding country musician) wife. You want interesting stories? Ask an old music star. Point is, you never know who you're going to find when you actually get to know someone.

Anyway, the old-timers aren't generally going to be your best friends, of course. But, socializing merely for the sake of socializing is good for you.
I am neither of Israeli nor Palestinian descent, but I have to agree that when a sovereign nation(+) is attacked, they have the right to retaliate in order to defend their nation. The risk of non-combatant casualties has to be considered, but does not have to be avoided at all costs, nor does the retaliation have to be strictly less deadly than the original attacks.

The more Isreal can turn Gaza's inhabitants against Hamas, the better it is for Isreal.

Honestly, if I was in Gaza and a non-combatant, you can bet that I'd be more likely to be anti-Hamas than anti-Isreal at this point.

+- You can debate whether Isreal "should" be sovereign, but the fact of the matter is that they are, and are defending themselves against rocket attacks.
Dropbox uses S3.
It's a follow-up to their recent post on this subject: http://37signals.com/svn/posts/1528-the-bullshit-of-outage-l... (posted here as http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=432737).
TV has physical limits; they can't broadcast every episode of every show whenever people want to watch it. The Internet doesn't have those limits; the whole point of Hulu is that it should inherit the benefits of the Internet.
I am wondering what the best way to look for co-founders is. I'm only 16, and I've got nothing to pay them, and a bad economy staring us down. Do you have any tips?
Ah, okay. It was just the last sentence that threw me for a loop:

"Never have I seen someone so distressed at being told he was right."

From the anecdote I understood that the PhD candidate was being told he was wrong. Anyway, I promise I'm not a troll, at least not on purpose.
streaming video on the iphone is not easy, at all. At least, not without really clever hacks. It takes very smart people to get something like this working well, and perhaps slingbox doesn't have that talent in, or the talent is not motivated enough to do the impossible.
Wink is great! The only downside is that it cannot produce mp4 video files. To do that, you can use Jing Pro ($15) to capture the Wink screencast playing.
That has to be illegal. Projecting unauthorized lane markers on the road is a hazard. That could easily cause accidents. Drowsy driver at night suddenly sees a bike lane appear out of nowhere, and he's straddling it or about to be, swerves...
Yeah, my bad. Still, isn't Adderall prescribed for ADD almost exclusively these days?