skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
It is funny how we are being taught other people's truth as opposed to digging for our own. And then magically when you get to college or the working field they want you to come up with answers to real problems. Well "I don't remember being taught how to think for myself, but let me Google the answer".
How to comment on a blog: The US Air Force's step-by-step flowchart
Not only is this older than the web, but the fact that it's a bunch of made-up bullshit undermines its point.
Yea, we jumped to a 6 and blogged about A New Year a New Page Rank. http://www.newmediacampaigns.com/page/page-rank-updated-in-d...

I think submitting to Yahoo and getting some press for our microsite were the biggest factors. We also put footers on the bottom of our sites linking back to us which can't hurt
I think there's a degree of deception involved when you try to pin stories like these to actual people. If you leave out the last line, yes, the story has value. But the fabricated link makes one more likely to dismiss the story as junk.
Social Gaming in 2009: Challenges and Opportunities
More Open Source Group Collaboration
And I bet you didn't document your failure... like everyone else before you.
A link to an analysis based on an actual study was modded down?

Who are you people and what did you do to HN.
"if some business really wants to remain private about their success, then why blame the media or anyone else for not talking about them"

Because it's the news media's job to tell us about interesting and important things that are happening in the world, regardless of whether the people directly involved want us to know. If you get your facts from the news, you get a distorted picture of how money is being made, and that means that the news has failed you.
When I first realized that various small businesses and websites I was familiar with were quietly making millions, it changed the direction of my ambitions and got me interested in starting a business. So, I found that pretty interesting.
I still like the 360 (games) over the wii and ps3, but console itself is still plagued with problems; most recently related to the latest xbox live update

MS still seems to care more about meeting the shipping date than it does about quality
Outstanding post. I believe I bookmarked this a while back to read later, but never got around to it. This morning I woke up with client work to do, but of course I went to HN first instead. Noticed this, and spent 2 hours reading and thinking about the points. Very worthwhile.
What is the conventional way to do it?
> Is rent-control the best way to achieve that goal -- I don't know -- [...] -- I haven't heard anyone propose something better -- just complain about it based on hearsay.

What if rent control is actually causing shortages were there's no physical scarcity? We can mostly agree on intent, but sometimes, collectively, we enact plans that cause the opposite of what we want.

It happens that I'm just reading Thomas Sowell's Basic Economics. In the chapter on price controls, he argues that rent control (and price controls, in general) cause shortages where there is no scarcity of the underlying commodity.

As you point out, I'm not an expert, and FWIW I haven't read the original sources. I have some problems with his analysis of medical care price controls, but I'll get to that later.

Here are some quotes and his cites...

All the quotes are from:

Sowell, T. (2007). Basic Economics. A Common Sense Guide to the Economy. 3rd ed. New York: Basic Books.

"Before rent control was imposed in Sweden, less than one-fourth of all unmarried adults there lived in their own separate housing units in 1940, but that proportion rose over the years until just over half did by 1975." (p.41)

... from the article, "The Rise, Fall and Revival of Swedish Rent Control", in the book Roofs or Ceilings? by Milton Friedman and George Stigler.

"In San Francisco, a study in 2001 showed that 49 percent of that city's rent-controlled apartments had only a single occupant, while a severe housing shortage in the city had thousands of people living considerable distances away and making long commutes to their jobs in San Francisco." (p.41)

... from p.21 of San Francisco Housing DataBook, commissioned by the city, and produced by consultants Bay Area Economics, in 2001.

"Meanwhile, a Census report showed likewise that 48 percent of all households in Manhattan, where most apartments are under some form of rent control, are occupied by only one person." (p.41)

... from page A2 of the September 3, 2005 issue of the San Francisco Chronicle, title: "Census: More Americans Living Alone."

"A study published in 2001 showed that more than one-fourth of the occupants of rent-controlled apartments in San Francisco had household incomes of more than $100,000 a year." (p.48)

... not sure where he got this -- I need to get back to coding -- if you care, check out his Sources chapter.

Without looking further into the issue, I'm reasonably convinced that rent control drives up rental prices, and creates housing shortages (at the artificially low price levels).

BUT ...

What this doesn't consider is that my home is not a fungible or liquid asset for most people. You may be able to change residences easily, but it will take time for your new residence to become your home.

It's a lot easier to consume a bit less power, produce a bit less garbage, or spend a little less money in response to changing market conditions.

Because of this, people feel very strongly about holding on to their homes, even if by this hoarding, they're harming others.
The new macbooks have powerful processors so they run out of juice very fast, but the older ones are much better. PowerBook G4 can last almost an entire flight from CA to New York.
Coal Ash Sludge Covers 400 Acres in Tennessee
If it's fifty-fifty between genders, and each birth is an independent event, but a boy + girl is like umm.. a chain of independent events or something?

My guess is 25% - 0,5 times 0,5..

But what exactly is the right answer? There doesn't seem to be a consensus yet.
We shopped at Waitrose at Gloucester Road tube station in London, and there was a Tesco Express right across the street. The prices seemed similar to us but each store had a different selection. I don't remember being asked at Tesco if I had a club card.
Okay, fine. They still get displaced.
Grab a good textbook or two. I learned mostly from Paul Samuelson for microeconomics and Gregory Mankiw for macroeconomics. Other good sources: Benjamin Graham's investing books, Warren Buffett's Berkshire Hathaway letters from the chairman. If you want to understand anything about Keynesianism, I'd suggest reading the original Keynes (The General Theory of Interest, Employment, and Money); almost everyone who writes stuff about Keynesianism on the net doesn't understand it.

I'd be skeptical of almost every easily-understandable article you read on the net. They always seem to fall into one of two categories:

a.) They're written by amateurs who don't really understand economics but think they do. (This covers nearly everything on Reddit.)

b.) They're written by professionals who understand economics but are writing for an audience that doesn't, and so they leave out crucial detail. (This includes Krugman's columns and most econ blogs.)

Expect to pay money; it's not like computer science, where nearly all the good stuff is available for free on the net. You don't need to pay a lot of money though; my dad picked up Samuelson's textbook for me for $5 at a flea market in Harvard Square. And unless you've got a really good professor, textbooks are just as good as courses.
Woohoo http://ticketstumbler.com is now a 5!
If they cared about meeting the shipping date, Vista would have been way worse than it is.
we feed the data monster om nom nom nom! </reddit>
and the misspelled name doesn't help either.
It would seem embarrassing to write up in a paper; but excellent filler (and justified) in a thesis. The thesis goes online, google indexes it; now it's available as lit.
i've had some success but mostly irritation over this... for the most part computers in general are both my hobby and my career, and that mostly works out, although can be exhausting, so i find other things.

specifically aspects of computerdom, administration like things used be a hobby for me, but not anymore now that i'm an admin, so my hobby is programming.

then i got moonlighting work on special programming projects. lots of fun, but now i just feel like making art and music more... and hopefully i can avoid making those a job just because i want to keep it fun.

i don't know... i might go back into design fulltime and become just a hobby hacker again, but i guess i need that in depth analysis of systems troubleshooting to feel relevant. it used to be a cool rewarding hobby, but now it is a cool and rewarding job, so i guess i can't complain, and it still works for me
From what I've heard from friends at MS, it seems their dead wood is in management - there's a culture of ass-covering and doing the bare minimum on many teams, which goes a long way to explain why MS rarely does anything revolutionary. Great ideas that are risky don't make it very far in that company.
Really? I don't know what he's done aside from id and Armadillo, and he's obviously a mathematical genius, but I can't quite see Doom, Quake, etc. and their underlying technology as "prime mover" material. And I actually think it's kind of hilarious that Fountainhead Entertainment would make "Doom RPG", or even be an entertainment company to begin with. Rand, I'm sure, is rolling in her grave.
Thomas Sowell's Basic Economics. In the chapter on price controls, he argues that rent control (and price controls, in general) cause shortages where there is no scarcity of the underlying commodity.

Price controls also prevent productive individuals from accessing the resources that they otherwise use to produce surplus resources -- thus making everyone poorer.
So that's why you diversify :).
Because they can't speculate about this at work, or on a company-approved internal forum? MS is notorious in disallowing criticism of itself internally.

Hell, I've even heard of people being asked to refrain from inviting coworkers to "Wii parties" via company mailing list.
If a Zune dies in the forest, and nobody owns one, does Microsoft still hear the bloggers complain?
I wouldn't say the Xbox 360 has a terrible reputation. It's crushing the PS3 in unit sales, plus Xbox Live Arcade is monetizing like crazy. It does have quality issues (I'm on my 3rd) but Microsoft handles them so well, and the box is so great, that it doesn't seem to matter at all.
A Beginner's Guide to Creating a MMORPG
The implication of the comment is that the poster spoke with MSFT employees who said things like "everyone is really hard working", "The people I work with are so smart", "Everyone pulls their weight". That is to say denials are rarely blunt. None the less they are still denials. In a organization of any significant size these generalizations have near zero chance of being true.
Not really New Year's resolutions, but I am committed to 100 pressups by end of March and a Marathon in May. Both of these will take me at 33 to fitter than I was when I was an 18-year-old lifeguard.
It's Baaaack. Oregon, Once Again, Pursuing GPS Driving Tax
Simple Python code for Amazon EC2
It isn't inflation, though I think we agree -- what I'm saying is that universal prosperity is an unattainable notion: price inflation would necessarily follow any universal prosperity, until there once again was differential prosperity. Rich/Poor is always relative.
Craigslist, eBay & Amazon: 2008 Trending & Site Efficiency
To have "a good ROI via recruiting," never mind the etc., he just has to improve his profits by more than 40k per year, by making better products than he would have otherwise, by hiring better people than he would have otherwise --- or by having to pay 40k less per year in salary, although that seems less likely. Although the chain of causality here has a lot of randomness attached to it, if he has a few million dollars in revenue per year, such an improvement hardly seems implausible.

The flip side is that spending a lot of money on something apparently unnecessary might incline you to spend more money on things that are actually unnecessary.

(I'm assuming "a good ROI" means 4% per year.)
Matt Cutts officially confirmed a pagerank increase yesterday on twitter - http://twitter.com/mattcutts/status/1087531183
Will Microsoft cut deeply into its workforce?
This is an interesting article, but I will admit what I really want to know is: how do I figure out if a given startup is good for me?

The people here at HN seem to have had wildly different experiences with various startups, and I'm a bit leery of walking myself into an impending disaster.
How to roll your own Mac for under $240
http://www.overcomingbias.com 7... we get a lot of random incoming Google traffic.

Though it's worth noting that our traffic stats fell off a cliff over winter break, for some odd reason. Anyone else seen this? Or is it just that OB is commonly read as a procrastinating substitute for school/work?

Holiday cliff: http://www.sitemeter.com/?a=stats&s=s28overcomingbias...
There's also a nice pdf version here: http://www.changethis.com/6.HowToBeCreative
Top Social Media Sites of 2008 (Facebook Still Rising)
I don't see any shame in discussing the environment. The post in question is not about hacking or even technology, but the "religious experience" of driving.

Perhaps because I'm not a gamer, I don't see the point in enumerating Carmack's accomplishments. I'm happy for him, but I'm here to talk about hacking, not hero worship. I vote for stories and comments here by what they say, not who's saying them.

And no, I am not an engineer, nor have I ever claimed to be one, and I don't see how a meta-question to hackers about their philosophy is "trivial political Redditism".
The Zune Screen Of Death
2009 Security Predictions Collection
In terms of reliability, the Xbox 360 does have a terrible reputation. Everyone who owns any console knows what "RRoD" means - Can you tell me what the failure response for a PS3 or a Wii is?

Reliability is not what most people look for when buying a console, so I don't think it hurts their sales terribly; but all of these problems cannot be good for Microsoft's bottom line.

I'm on my second 360, and other than the terrible phone support, their RMA process is decent. But when I bought my 360 I knew that this might happen because of all the other reports of RRoD out in the wild.
Mibbit fell off a cliff also. Just starting to recover...
Read the TOS next time. Seriously. Web 2.0 isn't a democracy.
Take a poll on the bizarre Zune death drama
Spend more of my time and money on others who need it more. This past year has been an eye-opener for me when it comes to realizing how much people are struggling around the globe. Too much of our time now is spent on things we can't take with us to the grave while those around us continue to suffer.
just guessing: record pressure at bottom of building, record at top, whip out a table and find the height. I think this is how they used to determine the elevation of mountains.
That's a great idea for a blog post, thanks!

If you're willing to share, what are some of the stories, fears, or worries you've heard or have?
Congrats! Same with the frog. Posterous and CO2Stats are up to 6 now, wtg guys.
Is this iTunes app spam or smart marketing?
Check out the utility section of the app store. Some guy created dozens of different “Call so and so” apps. They all do the same thing but have different names. Now he has the whole first page of the utilities section and half the second one.

(Here's a screenshot that I took: http://www.flickr.com/photos/andrew-warner/3154443184/)

What do you think? Is iTunes allowing itself to be spammed? Or is this a useful set of apps that are smartly marketed?
Went from 4 to 5.
how appropriate...a message board about zunes, not working.
Cringley: In an effort to move forward, Intel dusts off old supercomputing technology.
Finish a project. It's easy to start a hundred projects, but hard to finish one.
Facebook App Revenues to Surpass Facebook.com Revenues in 2009
Yes, a meta-resolution. When I want to get something done, I will break up the project into specific tasks that can be done in less than one day, and then make a written commitment about when I will finish that task.

If it's a big project, I can start by breaking off the early steps without figuring out all the steps at once.

The idea is to make myself take actual actions, no matter how paltry, rather than staying stuck in daydream mode.

My first actual resolution: create a text file on my desktop to store this list of to-dos, until I decide on a better approach. Due: 2008-12-31 13:15. Done!
Interesting talk, although as he calls out, his ideas are reinventions of other languages.

I really like ruby in the historical context of scripting languages. It's a perfect child of perl, has roots in shell scripting, and makes "normal" tasks trivial. Open a file, print all lines is quick and easy for instance.

I feel like ruby has mastered it's niche and other languages have mastered theirs. If I want parallelism, haskell makes a lot of sense, due to the riggerous math and magic it has to verify everything.

For his closure based language, he invented javascript. And so on.

I'm not against any of these ideas in particular, but I don't think Ruby is a great start language to shoehorn into other ideas, or other types of languages.
Do those stores get deleted when you clear private data from the browser?
No, wild fluctuations are wild -- your adjective -- continual change up and down. May I suggest a dictionary?

fluc⋅tu⋅a⋅tion   [fluhk-choo-ey-shuhn] Show IPA Pronunciation
–noun
1.	continual change from one point or condition to another.
2.	wavelike motion; undulation.

This does not subsume longer-term trends.

EDIT: I want to know if your issue is simply with rising prices. If it is -- and it seems pretty clear that it is -- don't use misleading/distracting/inaccurate verbiage like "wild fluctuations".
I know there's a fine line differentiating "social media" sites from everything else, but if a list like this is going to compare Flickr, Facebook and Blogger.com as if they're in a single category, then I don't see why sites like YouTube or Digg aren't included as well.
Microsoft plague threatens 30GB Zune extinction
Whoa, a post from the future!

What's 2009 like? Is it awesome? :)

Happy New Year, HN! I hope you all have a healthy and prosperous new year.
Zune users, you are fired as of today
Free, updated ebook called "Introduction to Economic Analysis": http://www.introecon.com/ (subtitled "The Open Source Introduction to Microeconomics")

Haven't had the chance to read it, but I've heard great things. I think I may have even got the link to it here on HN.
And neither does the incorrect substitution of "tact" for "tack".
From the site:

Smushit.com is a service that goes beyond the limitations of Photoshop, Fireworks & Co. It uses image format specific non-lossy image optimization tools to squeeze the last bytes out of your images - without changing their look or visual quality. You'll get a report of how many bytes you can save by optimizing your images and all the changed images as a single zip for download.
I'm not sure we do agree. :) I would say that there is a difference between an increase in the amount of money for the same actual wealth, and an increase in the wealth itself. One is inflation, and the other is growth. Growth can mean that everyone is rich by the standards of previous times in terms of how much of everything they can afford, which could be reflected in the prices for everything dropping. Universal prosperity in computing hardware, for example, has resulted in exactly the opposite of the price inflation you seem to expect.
Empowerment Zone
The analysis you linked to does not refute anything said here. In fact, the conclusions of the study you showed are a necessary assumption for this problem (that each gender has an equal probability and independent of birth order). This problem has nothing to do with biology but rather using posterior information to come up with a probability given a statistical experiment.

However, I did not vote you down.
I'm not sure how this is better than dual-booting on your current machine, or using an old pc.
Am I missing something?
Any idea what kind of battery life TC figured, for their spec?
Plain text in the body of an email is my preference since it makes the content easily searchable in my inbox.
Never made resolutions. If I want to do something I just do it. If it don't I don't. If I want to improve myself I just tell people what I am trying to do and ask them to ensure I don't stray. Otherwise I always felt it is deceiving myself that I will miraculously change myself somehow.
Def working more on my own or oss projects... but gotta shamelessly plug our startup - http://www.ichange.com to help you change yourself with reminders and accountability from the community.
Happy 2oo9!
新年快乐！
Exactly correct. Your comment should be at the top of this discussion. It took me forever to figure the above out when I first ran into this puzzle in 7th grade.

And although this problem is often used to show that humans are bad at doing probability in their heads, note how simple it is to do the probability calculation for the two scenarios that you've mentioned.

What's actually hard for humans is describing models or simulations, not doing the probability. Once you explained the possibilities for original problem in a more detailed way, the answer(s) becomes obvious.
Fine,

let it be true that everything is not computable and
we have an equation for omega. Now, if we ignore all
omegas from the inputs what is computable? My hunch
is that pretty much is.
" I think this is how they used to determine the elevation of mountains."

And also by years and years of meticulous surveying,

The Great Arc by John Keay tells the story of how the height of the world's tallest peak was measured.

Hint: You start from zero and work your way up :-)
Faster sites mean users do more stuff
It doesn't require anything you name here except the absence of force. No libertarian thinks or assumes everyone must be nice and no libertarian thinker has ever predicated his argument on such.

You know, there actually have been some highly intelligent and thoughtful libertarian thinkers, far from whatever fantasy you may have.
But why does it necessarily have nothing to do with biology? It seems you've added a condition to the question that does not exist. Additional data points are quite useful, and using them to find the correct "real world," outcome seems most logical.
I hadn't really thought of this before, but I guess I am actually the fourth generation of entrepreneurs in my family. Great-grandparents on either side owned their own businesses and both grandpas were entrepreneurs in different fields. My dad was an attorney, but started his own firm with a co-founder right out of law school that he ran for over 30 years.
Does anyone else remember this from the pilot episode of "Head of the Class"?
Not spam, from the looks of it(disclaimer: I don't have an iPhone) what the app does is let you add a custom button to your apps for easy 1-click calling. And this way the user can have more than 1 name installed at the same time.

Actually its pretty genius, since most people would be buying that app more than once.
Shift+!
It is nicer but it doesn't have all the 38 points.

I like the layout though.
not having to give up an established million dollar company with tons of paying customers is a win in my book. Even if he paid a million in penalties, he is still better off.
Definitely App Spam.
Feynman on Looking at things from a new point of view
Why is this being voted up? He advocates downloading Leopard from the pirate bay. The only 'Mac' thing about this computer is the OS and he recommends stealing it.