skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Thanks for the lead.

http://www.nber.org/~rosenbla/econ110-04/lecture/stickywages... [pdf]

Mr Bewley’s theory has some interesting implications. Pay cuts are more likely at firms whose demand for labour is price-sensitive, such as those in highly competitive industries. Since many markets are becoming more competitive, wages may also be getting more flexible—and unemployment may rise less in recessions. Wages are also likely to be less rigid in short-term jobs, where workers do not become attached to their firm.

...

Mr Bewley’s book is not the last word on sticky wages. Some of his findings are probably specific to the north-eastern United States in the early 1990s.
If that works --- it will create a lot of jobs in China and India.
I tend to think that ideas are a dime a dozen, and actually doing it is what makes the difference - Boyer-Moore is one of the few counter-examples. But if you also had the idea... could it be that you're unusually smart?

The details of Boyer-Moore seem obvious to me, in that you bump into them in trying to get it working, even if you don't foresee them. They are like workshop improvements. Did you manage to implement a version of it, as a kid? Or is this another instance of showing that actually doing it is what counts?
That's not technically true. Asimo has preprogrammed paths, but not motor movements. Even in a semi controlled environment, a preprogrammed biped would fall.

The difference is between electric motors and pneumatics: today's pneumatics are just jerkier.

And static balancing doesn't mean that it is preprogrammed, just that at any point (unless it is running), all movement could stop and the robot would stay standing.

If humans stop moving, we collapse.

I guess the best reason to say Asimo is not more natural is that no animal in nature is statically stable. All animals with legs have actuators with the characteristics of pneumatics and springs (in humans, tendons are springs).

We can also turn to efficiency. The electric motors on Asimo will _never_ be practical. It takes too much energy for the bot to ever be sold as a product. No animal in nature has a 15 minute battery life :)
At least not directly. E.g. it's easier to sell more stock or sell a bond with a healthy stock price.

Viewed another way, the stock _is_ the company.
You're right dude, it's the patriarchy, it isn't that she:

*makes a living blogging (and is part of that circle)
*wastes money
*essentially has no other skills
*writes like a pierced emotion
*embellishes everything (how can you be truthful about your life when all you do is blog?)
*is not level-headed (wish she was my CEO!)
*is running a goofy business
*contributes nothing to this business beyond her money and her celebrity

If Fred Wilson or Mark Zuckerberg wrote this blog post how would people react? The only reason you're defending her is because she is a woman, and, in fact, you've been sucked into her 'read my blog' trap. You need to check yourself man, because it sounds like you have some mushy ideas in your head.

This is about a FAILING BUSINESS, not about which extracurricular gets equal time down by the quad.
It's probably best to set firefox to delete cookies when you close the browser then setup a whitelist. Mine's only 15 sites long & I'm a power user.
Thanks. It was really that "guy in the early 20th century" part that was really confusing to me.

Anyway, I guess we agree. I find it plausible that Dvorak would be more efficient (I've even switched briefly before), but don't think there is any credible scientific evidence of it.
On second thought, a flamingo standing on one leg might actually be statically stable, and there might be other examples. But flamingos are weird, amirite?
At a glance, I'm pretty sure this doesn't work. The average jump is not to the bisection between the current node and the node you're seeking, it's to the bisection between the current node and the end of the list. As you get closer to the node you seek, the probability gets higher and higher that the skip link points past the node you seek, in which case it does nothing for you and you continue sequentially searching. I haven't done the math, but I think the expected search is O(n) - though possibly faster in practice than a simple sequential search.
It came at a risk, though.
What's particularly interesting is Apple don't really do the smugness stuff (anymore). If you see the new iPhone ads, it's all iPhone, on screen, doing stuff. MS have enormous potential here, they could just show PCs running games for example, the PC has loads more games than OSX, they win that one hands down. Instead they come off as looking like a poor imitation.
There is a lot more happening on the enterprise/university front. My new startup took pre-commercial funding from a fund set up between a consortium of universities. I think this is a potential solution to the problems the blog author identified, but for the funds to work properly, they need to be administered and run by business people, not academics, and especially not academic administrators.
For toll roads, some sort of in car item that will receive a short audio ad and play it. Thus using the ad money to pay my toll. I realize there are several issues immediately off the top of it, but it could be a viable alternative to having to pay tolls.
These things would be great for romantic dates between shy people. Imagine: two telepresence robots, in a car at a drive-in movie -- or taking a long roll on a beach, or in a park.
Fred Wilson's 'My focus group of one'
Asking CEOs about sources of innovation seems rather biased. I think it is rather difficult to tackle difficult problems of certain kinds in a startup. Usually, you want to have an idea before you start that you can succeed.

Take the face recognition thing that Apple just announced. OK, that one came from a corporation, but one with lots of money. I think for a startup it would have been difficult to say "let's create a startup about face recognition in photos" because until recently, no sufficiently good method for doing it was known.
Agreed, I actually live in downtown DC and I'm going out of town for inauguration... but I'd like to come home and find the TV is still there.
wake me up when I can write plugins for Chrome.
Unemployment Rate 7.2%
Word is that demand has actually relatively low for the "sleep on my couch" type offers: http://thecaucus.blogs.nytimes.com/2009/01/08/washington-ren...

Though, that said, I've heard that people are getting hotels in Fredrick, MD or even Philly for inauguration. That's just nuts.
Who knows? He might do it, if it's fun.
How Not To Design A Logo
Lexus to roll out system that lets its cars talk to drivers
Reality check in learning javascript
I think this concept of a traditional company doesn't really exist, or is fairly rare.

Most companies care about their employees, and care about their work. They aren't trying to get every $ they can.
I second that - really great collage begging to be clicked on - make us able to interact with it somehow. One suggestion would be a bit of information about each destination on mouse over.
> Mr Bewley’s book is not the last word on sticky wages. Some of his findings are probably specific to the north-eastern United States in the early 1990s.

That's probably true.

His book consists of interviews with managers etc. It makes for an interesting read.
America: Is This is End of an Era?
Using a Woofmote?
Relevant point, but money was created to abstract before we had general-purpose abstracting machines like computers with their associated tools. If it wouldn't get you in trouble with the IRS (big "if"), I think it'd be fascinating to see the new tool applied to the old problem. It might create an entirely new kind of market.
Here is the login procedure:

* Send out some xml spam to "create a stream"
* Receive a stream reply, with feature sets.
* Send out starttls
* Get a reply back
* Switch to secure mode
* Send out some xml spam to "create a stream" inside the first stream
* Receive reply back, check supported auth modes
* Send out auth
* Receive reply back
* Send out some *MORE* xml spam to "create a stream" inside the first 2
* Receive reply back, with features
* Bind
* Create session

THEN you can do something useful. Most of the verboseness is idiotic XML:

eg <proceed xmlns="urn:ietf:params:xml:ns:xmpp-tls"/>

Those xmlns's are everywhere, and are stupidly verbose.

You can write IRC commands by hand into telnet. But typing in xml is just not feasable since it's so stupidly verbose.
We've glanced at Apple. From what I can tell, there's no IrDA (a near dealbreaker for use) and no Bluetooth SPP (serial port profile) support. Not sure--maybe there's a serial port on the dock connector? And I don't see any easy way to add 'em, as the I/O is pretty pathetic. Without a way to comm with our embedded hardware, it's not an option.

I guess we'll run the Palm Z22 until we can't get 'em, then buy or build something else.
That is an interesting idea, however certain tolls (e.g. london city) have not the goal to earn money, but to keep people away. playing ads won't keep them away.
A very satisfied client with brand new cpn and 6 tardelines (financial/new york/189425)
I use ` as my command prefix, works well with emacs and is only one key. the only issue comes if you cut and paste lines with back ticks, which disconnects your screen session, but since its screen its trivial to reattach.
Thank you guys for the CTL+] and CTL+\ excape sequences...
I had been struggling with CTL+A, I tend to like "go to the beginning of the command line" a lot so this was my main beef with the default sequence.

One of the major uses of screen for me has been teaching.
You can have multiple users attach to the same screen -- just follow this guide: http://slaptijack.com/system-administration/multiuser-gnu-sc...

Imagine doing a conference demo and allowing everyone to "attach" to your screen session and watch you code \buzzword using \buzzword :)
Telenurse.com . Webnurse.com . Netnurse.com . Plentyofnurses.com

http://news.google.com/news?q=aging+population+health
> "a "high security" option that didn't trust password authentication and couldn't re-give you your secret key"

And no way to reset it? What if you have VMs currently running that need to be stopped ($$)? And if there's a reset then it's the same thing as your point, anyone with your password has access (unless you're thinking email but that's worse than the current https delivery of secret keys IMO).

I like the idea in spirit.

I also think they would do well with a delegation of rights model (that included limited delegation). Any of these portals (Rightscale etc.) need you to upload your full credentials for anything to work.
Rails Rankings
Mobile replacing computer internet use at home?
So, many cities have bus systems and those bus systems now-a-days are usually GPS equipped for several reasons (notably that a central office can monitor the system and that the busses can announce ADA-compliant stop messages based on location without the driver being involved).

I'd love to have something on my phone that would tell me where the next bus was on a cool Google Map (or other) and an estimated time to arrival (which could be calculated by Google Maps). Of course, you'd have to get your transit authority to give you access to their GPS results.

But this would probably be one of the most helpful things a transit authority could do. The problem most people have with public transit is that it can be inconvenient, but often it is convenient if you have better/more complete knowledge of it. For example, when I get up in the morning, I have no idea whether a bus went by a minute ago and it'll be another 20+ minutes waiting or whether a bus is 2 minutes away.

This could also help trip planning. Often in a mass transit system, there are multiple routes to get anywhere. The trip planners we have today are primitive in that they often don't take current information into account (such as speed at various times of day, location of the next bus/trolly/subway train in proximity, etc.). Using GPS information would greatly change that.
I'm in Tokyo too - would love to meet up with you guys sometime. ideas at jawaad mahmood [!do/t] com
Ukrainian history
Basically Ukraine is a peaceful country with high culture and many times Russia has tried to exploit Ukraine, like the current situation.
They should add competitors - lots of companies are simply first followers.
And to be the contrarian:

The NFP is Meaningless

http://www.ritholtz.com/blog/2009/01/counter-intuitive-nfp/
One of the Great Peace Organizations
For learning the ins and outs of JavaScript I heartily recommend http://eloquentjavascript.net/

I’ve been meaning to make the time to try out a project using Dean Edwards’ [1] base2 library [2]. If you’re worried about being abstracted too far away from the underlying language this might be a good fit…

Because this library is standards-based it means that you don’t have to learn a new API. It uses standard (DOM, ECMAScript) properties and methods throughout which also means that there is no need for a lot of accompanying documentation.

[1] http://dean.edwards.name/

[2] http://code.google.com/p/base2/
Or you could use the cables that came with the iPod + a USB hub or 2
Has anyone seen that she's at it again with http://inYourShirt.TV? Seems like they killed the thread on here that was promoting it: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=425555

I sure hope they resurrect that soon as she's doing a great job.
Craig Hockenberry Revisits iPhone “Crapware” (Video Interview)
It was never about showing the shirt in person for her. It's about sharing it with the world and she has a lot of heavy hitter traffic out there.
ff plugin/addon that saves the state of my browsing session online, so that i don't lose my open tabs when i move from one computer to another. it probably won't work for sites which require login but i don't mind.
page search searches in text boxes, too
Safari's private browsing is flawed and its been shown that it does not always remove cookies.
Leechblock partially solves that I think https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/4476
I can't read any of the sample CAPTCHAs provided.
Hands on: Google leaps forward with Chrome 2.0 dev. preview
>1. PCs are cheaper than Macs, hardware wise, so if you compare them at price-point, Windows will probably still come out on top. 2gb ram on a PC is probably cheaper than 1gb ram on a Mac.

Maybe you haven't heard, but Macs use Intel chipsets now. RAM is RAM. The 90% of the mac faithful that have actually bought a mac before switcher ads know that you never buy RAM from Apple. And let's avoid the price-point argument because it can really go either way depending on what you're doing and what you're looking for.

>2. There's a "Classic View" option on the side of the control panel that allows you to see "Add/Remove Programs"

FAIL. I was using classic view. Its not called "Add/Remove Programs" anymore. I even fired up my Vista Business VHD image on my XP workstation to double check...and yup....FAIL UI still FAILs at UI. The control panel is called "Programs and Features".

Also, your analogy makes no sense whatsoever. GM is billing for pensions and obligations it agreed to shoulder in good faith, but never funded, because it assumed it would never faulter in terms of revenue, and thus, it would have the income to pay out those obligations at a later date. Unions are about 3% of the problem. Bad Design and Bad Management are the other insignificant 97%.
Time management tricks I learned from years of hating Tim Ferris (of the 4 hour work week)
I'm also in Tokyo, and I'd love to attend one of these.

This is the only one I know about, but its primarily about functional programming. http://www.starling-software.com/en/tsac.html
Solar powered light-seeking desktop miniature robot?

http://www.solarbotics.net/library.html
http://bestiary.solarbotics.net/default.htm

We're planning to build one here at work soon as a project to teach new programmers about the basics of hardware.
We actually use a Skype Chat for this. Why? Because it's persistent, which IRC isn't...

We used Campfire for a while, but it was not as good as Skype Chat (and it caused my Firefox to crash in a way such that I had to reboot my Mac to get it working again).
Something I have not seen pointed out yet (in articles and discussions over the preceding many years) is the fact that CAPTCHA tests are essentially Gestalt Completion tests. A Gestalt Completion test is a type of IQ test. As CAPTCHA tests get progressively more difficult to solve, they might weed out progressively larger portions of the population - the human population, that is.

Perhaps, as a side-effect, the quality of web-based discussion will rise.

.

From Arthur Jensen's 1980 book Bias in Mental Testing (pp157-158):

Gestalt Completion. Familiar words and objects are shown in various degrees of "mutilation" and the subject must infer what the word or object is. Performance is scored according to the average time taken per item or the number of items completed within a given time limit. The difficulty of any given item is a function of its familiarity and the extent of the "mutilation"; these can be varied independently in making up items. ... Gestalt completion items, which are known to be a good measure of the general intelligence factor (as well as of a small group factor labeled speed of closure), merit further experimental investigation in their own right.
How to Know Gmail is Hacked or Not
These Days Most of the Users are Using Gmail Mail Box, Your email account can contain a lot of personal information, from bank alerts to love letters. So you don,t want to Share all these Mail with others. And most of the time you worried about hacking of your Gmail Account.
What does the -q0 option on nc do? Neither Linux or OS X appear to have this option available.
Beautiful Code Documentation
"The fool doth think he is wise, but the wise man knows himself to be a fool."
- William Shakespeare from "As You Like It"
I've been thinking about this one for a while, with half an eye to coding it up:
Mousehole or some other lightweight proxy with a list of sites. When you go to one of those sites, it redirects you to your "to-do" list; google notebook or rememberTheMilk or something with similar capabilities. There's a button to continue to your intended site, but you've got the reminders right there of what you really intended to do instead of spending time on a site you have marked as a time waster.

Could have priority markings and due dates integrated if it were a customized task list instead of google or RTM, and pop up the interstitial less often or less obtrusively when there's no important deadlines approaching, etc.
His timeline doesn't apply to Computer Science - and possibly other fields like engineering, but I have much less experience with them. Because CS Ph.D.s can get industry jobs, there's less need for them to do postdocs. Some do, but it's still common for freshly minted Ph.D.s to get academic jobs. Of course, getting those positions is still just as difficult as it is for the real sciences, but there's not necessarily the 2-6 year delay.

I've given this topic some thought recently. Academia has it's problems, but what I do like is that I can work on things that are interesting and useful, but not necessarily profitable.

How can something be useful without being profitable? I do research in systems and high performance. In theory, the software we create could be sold. Some startups exist that do just that - Cilk Arts and RapidMind are two examples. But I'm skeptical of their viability; companies that exists solely to sell compilers rarely do well.

The kind of research I do is valuable to companies, but rarely as something to sell on its own. Intel, for example, does research in programming models for emerging architectures not because they want to sell that software, but because they need it so programmers can use the processors they do sell.
>Even if its a truly bad convention (e.g. the Add/Remove Programs control panel does more than Add or Remove) its better than nothing. At the very least, if you're going to rename it -- have names that are clear and obvious like "Uninstall Software" for its name.

I decided to re-quote that. Its just one of the tenants of Human-Computer-Interaction. Microsoft apologists can ignore that all they want, but an existing convention, even a wrong one, beats a change that is equally poor.

Does "Programs and Features" do anything more/less than "Add/Remove Programs" in Vista SP3? No.

Its like if MS had done a UI study and concluded that left-click and right-click's functionality should be reversed. Sure, maybe it is "more usable". But to those of us who have been "right clicking" for a contextual menu for 15-20 years, it will feel alien.

>You seem to be one of those people that complains that Microsoft didn't add enough features in Vista in one thread and then complain in another that they changed everything around. You're complaining about superficial changes and willfully ignoring real functionality - the search-focused UI is a dramatic improvement, and you can claim it was taken from OS X or what have you but that doesn't make Vista's implementation any less useful.

Sir, I've made no such claims, and you're putting words in my mouth. With regards to search, I've found their implementation inferior not only to OS X's spotlight, but also Google Desktop Search. Especially pre-SP1 Vista search. But assuming you don't have Google Desktop Search installed (like the average user) it is still a usability win. But again, not worth a $400 upgrade, considering Google Desktop Search is free and runs great on XP SP3.

>Real power users will learn the new methods and features and probably learn to love them, and probably upgrade and/or dualboot/virtualize Linux. That's what I've been doing, and I'll continue to do that. On the other hand, whiny noobs on the internet will continue to whine about everything Microsoft does because they can't adjust to change.

Most of us Real Power Users whine about Microsoft is because they only time we're exposed to Vista is when something has broken. Like most Real Power Users I've adapted to the big change (internet apps) and haven't seen MS as technically relevant since I stopped working as a .NET developer in 2005. (Disclaimer: In the past six months I've started doing .NET development again.)

So yeah, most of us have adjusted to change. By bypassing crap when there are better alternatives.
They forgot the most important line item.

Billion Dollar Marketing Budget: No || Yes
I think the most reasonable solution is to replace pollution controwls with a tax that is send to every american.

AKA CO2 costs 3$ per 1000lb. Every billion pounds you collect 3 million and every American get's their pollution check for 1c. This can still be corrupted but because the government is not spending the money it's more balanced.

PS: IMO the secret is for markets to price the correct information not for some group to tell them what to do.
A 2x2 matrix - must be a consultant.
>That's clearly not a fact at all! There are lots of things that companies do that aren't directly billable to clients.

Yes. Like I said before, you hire for your business based on need. The idea you'd have "more employees" because of a "tax surplus" is a myth. Especially from business owners that condescend to their employees and coerce their votes. I've worked for people just like this guy, and believe me, the idea he is spouting off is ridiculous.
In that case, the device could output not an advertisement but a 45-second uninterruptible lecture about what too much car traffic does to the city.

(but who would voluntarily install that...)