skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
The issue is that the first $1000 gained is worth more than the second $1000. Similarly, the first $1000 lost hurts more than the second $1000.

On the gain side, the different values should be self evident. I think we can all intuitively understand why making $100000 instead of $50000 is bigger deal than $150000 instead of $100000. So let's assign utility to the numbers:

first $1000 = 1
second $1000 = .8
third = .6
fourth = .4

Option #1 gives us 2.4 whereas option #2 gives us 2.24.

I'd argue that we can similarly rank the losses the same:

first $1000 lost = -1
second = -.8
etc.

which gives us -2.4 vs --2.24 meaning we should obviously take the option #2.

Now the interesting question is why we can assign similar yet negative values for the losses. I'll give two examples that might show why this is true.

First, consider living paycheck to paycheck. I only have $500 of buffer. In this case, while losing $2000 instead of $1000 is worse, it's not worse by a lot because either way I can't afford rent and I'm evicted.

As a second example, consider bankruptcy. If we take losses to high values, eventually each additional loss doesn't subtract anything from my "happiness". I've already hit the bankruptcy point and nothing worse can happen.

These are of course the two extremes, but I think it's easy to complete the spectrum and show that for any $x the first loss of $x hurts more than the second loss of $x.
To the best of my knowledge:

1. No

2. No

3. Look at their profile and go to the "submissions" and "comments" links at the end.
Apple says goodbye to Google
Real-time blog comments in Go, backbone.js, socket.io, and redis
'The Hardest Logic Puzzle Ever' Made Even Harder
Ok was able to read (thanks scarmig).

Their claim is that we alter approximately 2.27 acres worth of environment to support each person (mainly nutrients). This comes out to 40%?? of the land of Earth being transformed and showing state change.

Through this transformation of land and our consumption of primary nutrients we currently consume between 20-40% of the biota production and also degrade the whole production chain.

Their claim is that at current human growth levels we will exceed 50% transformation of the land mass and this will cause rapid, unpredictable changes (state change) and we will reach this in 2025.

Interestingly, they claim that through greenhouse gas emissions we have delayed this massive state change (by putting more energy into the environment).
I'm pretty sure this is the first step to create an Arc Reactor.

Tony Stark built it in a cave ... with a box of scraps
V8?
THE IRON WORKS
There is and can be no ethical principle [..]

I wasn't addressing the ethical part of your claim at all, but since you insist: there can be a moral argument in favor of patents. It goes like this:

* Corporations are legal entities that are allowed because they were expected to, and have been shown to, advance our average wellbeing

* Corporations more effectively increase our average wellbeing if they are encouraged to heavily invest in innovation. They receive this encouragement by allowing them temporary monopolies on their inventions, thus enabling them to profit from their investment

* On average, the population profits: they have more free time, more money, a better health and can engage in 'creating and trading' all they want, except for a few specific instances that have been sacrificed in order to enable them to have these resources and this wellbeing in the first place

It's a trade-off our government made for us, in the belief it would be a net benefit. Things seems to have taken a wrong turn somewhere, but the original intent of the patent system was for the public good. That is a valid moral argument. Which doesn't mean you have to agree with it.
ironically Peter Thiel has quoted that quote about Rhodes scholars in the class he is teaching at stanford.
There are so many online shopping websites today that I'm forced to ask what's your USP?
Liquid hydrogen/liquid oxygen is the most efficient chemical rocket fuel possible. Most famously used by the Space Shuttle Main Engines.
It's sounds incredibly controlling, which would explain the lack of freedom on iOS and Apple's various platforms. It's not enough to own the entire ecosystem, anything outside is not allowed to run on the hardware (at least for iOS devices). Great for investors and Apple's bottom line, but horrible for consumers (e.g. this story: http://niederfamily.blogspot.be/2012/06/silencing-of-maya.ht...)
Yes, definitely. You can port this letter as PDF and link to its outputted URL. We hope to see you try it.
Star Infranet - Zynga Shares Hit All-Time Low - Tathastu Information Technology
Zynga has not had the best of performancethe past few weeks on the stock market after the Facebook IPO opened to disasterand an investigation from the SEC and Congress. It looked like it was maybe getting better for a bit, but then Zynga got kicked in the teeth again."
> I think your question assumes a level of planning that simply didn't really exist. It wasn't so much about me having any particular expectations of what would happen when I made the original kernel sources available: a lot of the impetus for releasing it was simply a kind of "hey, look at what I've done".

I love that. Just a couple of guys randomly working together on something that at the time sounded like a toy.

> In other words, I do not see open source as some big goody-goody "let's all sing kumbaya around the campfire and make the world a better place". No, open source only really works if everybody is contributing for their own selfish reasons.

And there's the cynicism we all know and love.
The Curse of Over-Capitalization
A few things that have worked for me in the past, or things that I have seen work in the past:

1. Quickly "accept", mentally, that it has failed. If you're the person who wrote the code, there is a chance you are surprised that it could fail so you switch to debug mode. Don't do that, just move on.

2. Keep talking. The show becomes more awkward when there is a large uncomfortable silence. If your demo has a presentation alongside it, then restart your app/whatever and quickly move on to your next talking point.

3. If your audience is technically inclined, sometimes it's fun to just quickly describe what went wrong. It could help you connect with your audience better.

4. Continue with everything else that can still work, and don't bring up what failed! Unless something critical went down, there's a good chance the rest of your system will work. The demo might not be as impressive as you wanted, but it's always better than nothing. Oh and don't retry the same feature again. Seeing it fail twice is worse than seeing it fail once, unless you know that it works on even-numbered runs or something :)

5. Carry a backup of your demo if you can, and switch to that quickly. It always helps to have someone else along who can help you switch quickly if need be. This may not be cost-effective or viable, but it's the best option.
Taking more shortcuts as I get older too - a constant battle to stop and think...
I was addressing your experiences with HR and legal departments.

The Gender Gap Index does not measure harassment -
"The Index benchmarks national gender gaps on economic, political, education- and health-based criteria" (from the 2011 report) - so I do not see the relevance to a discussion on sexual harassment.
"retracted" is a bit strong: more accurate would be, put on hold temporarily while a statistical flaw is fixed. Even the author of the blog concedes that the overall paper could stand perfectly fine after the flaw is corrected.

It's also interesting to note how the "auditors" compare to the scientists: while the scientists graciously send a thank you for pointing out a flaw and get to work on fixing it, the auditors seem almost entirely focused on crowing, getting a scalp and spreading conspiracy theories and innuendo. Interesting.
As a frequent LW contributor, I agree that Less Wrong users can be arrogant in a way that's counterproductive. I'm actually planning to write a series of posts presenting a sophisticated argument for this at some point.

I'm curious if you think there is anything else we could stand to work on. I interpreted your use of the word "wisdom" to mean a lack of arrogance, but if you were using it to mean other stuff as well I'd love to know.

(I'm a fan of yours, BTW.)
Have you read the amount of comments about Microsoft and loving to be an intern here?

I'm sorry but I have to ask, is this some sort of smart advertising campaign?
There needs to be a word or term for the phenomenon where someone says, "X is Y!!!" when it's pretty clear that overall and in the general case there are a much larger number of non-X things that are much more Y.

"The US Federal government bureaucracy is an agile, fast-moving cheetah!"

Yes, except all those businesses which are even more agile and faster-moving super-cheetahs. But okay.
Queen of England
A lot of companies are just fixing stuff for their software and hardware, by submitting patches it almost guarantees it will turn up everywhere - I could imagine getting Microsoft or Apple to provide a feature to all their customers is a lot harder.

The other reason is maintainability, it's time consuming to maintain a patch outside the tree and people will end up submitting them so that it doesn't get bitrot.

Doesn't really seem altruistic to me.
I started in 2007 as an intern on a project for Outlook. When I came back I joined a Forefront-related team where I stayed until the beginning of last year.
I'm not sure anyone would ever claim that patents are morally justified. Their justification is cultural, in a sense. They are there that invention is worth it. Invention and innovation, in turn, bring about advances for the entire culture that has surrendered these specific rights, because it sees more value in progress than in the rights that are given up for it. I don't know whether a culture without patents would still advance and have as many inventors, but on the surface, this sounds like a reasonable trade-off.

I would restrict patent law to force a patent holder to license their patents to whomever for a reasonable price. We already have that for standards relevant patents, but i think it should apply to all patents.
you apparently never were on a stage, bring illuminated by giant lights. it often is uncomfortably hot. this is also a problem in video recording.
If you define altruism in an artificially stringent way - e.g. if you decide that actions cannot be altruistic unless they result in pain, cannot be habitual, have nothing to do with any relationship, have nothing to do with sympathy, have nothing to do with any ideology, have nothing to do with trying to be a better person... then of course you will conclude that it does not exist. Not because it is not a real thing, but because you wanted to determine that it does not exist, and therefore artificially ruled out all the ordinary cases.

But this is a game of words because that's not what altruism is. Altruism can be based on kinship, reciprocity, ideology, self-image, sympathy, habit and other things which are active in normal people's minds.

IBM and Google are public corporations, meaning that turning a profit is the whole point of their existence, and that their leadership have a legal responsibility to shareholders. The same is not true of human beings, much as a few have decided that turning a profit is the whole point of their own personal existences.
Like all the advocates are saying, read the paper. To that I add follow up on the citations.

The advocates don't go into detail about their amazing findings, they just wax poetic about the brilliance of the paper without offering details.

Since that's clearly the accepted standard, that's exactly where I'm standing on it as well. Does "Critical thresholds associated with habitat loss" refer to planetary scale changes or microenvironments? Does it support a tipping point of 50% altered planet? Read the paper to find out. That's just one reference. There's 100 to follow through on for the most fun.

That's also the only way this can be seriously discussed. Otherwise every single damn thing I will point out here will be nitpicked to death by the population purge advocates. If everybody loads up on the facts then that can't happen. So reading the paper and following all the citations is the only way to decide for yourself. Anything advocates or critics say could be bullshit here. People won't know unless they go see for themselves.

In this and the other thread discussing this paper, a number of people pointed out that they did not actually have proven models that really showed planetary doom, and it was also questioned whether 43% of the land mass on the planet is really either farm or city. To these responses, advocates attacked them, accused them of not reading the paper, and insisted the paper, and its citations, did support that. None of these advocates were willing to provide details about that.

So at this point the only way to know is to read the paper and all the citations and decide if the advocates are right about this or not.

I didn't have to read all 100 citations fortunately to find out since the claims are specifically footnoted.
Tin Pan Valley: The Coming Shakeout for App Makers
> That software is my property. I own it

Technically, no. I'm pretty sure that if you cashed for a copy of WordPerfect on Apple II, that software was licensed to you for unlimited time use and you don't own any bit of it.
Growth Hacker: "It’s the person that understands metrics,can send out email marketing campaigns and run A/B tests on a fly among other traditional marketing stuff."

It's a marketer, re-marketed.

The word 'hacker' denotes a particular spirit & competence. I'm sure at the highest levels of marketing there are hackers. Skip the double-speak.
> I'm 26 - have worked at Microsoft since I was 24.

Please, share with us your wisdom. :-)
Wow - people on HN are unforgiving. The site design is great. Yes, it is dog slow at the moment, but otherwise it is fun and beautifully made with some nice mapping etc.

People seem to be criticising it on UI terms (it's confusing/hard to use) but I think it works because the site isn't trying to market a product (like most HN sites) but tell a story, so it is not unreasonable to expect/encourage the user to explore.

Basically, I think it is more interesting even if it is harder to use.
Unveil the Secrets of Graphic Design Software—Logo Maker Pro
Huh? Quoting out of context much?

> Of these 10, some go study medicine/law/engineering and disappear from the pool. Down to 1-2. Most of these guys fail.

Well there's your Peter Thiel.
" Warning: this site is currently in private beta for 6 more days. Unless you committed to its Area 51 site proposal, you won’t be able to log in!"

Well that was a let down.
Oh, sweet, a chance to link to xkcd: Researcher Translation again :D http://xkcd.com/678
> When talking about a fair world, people usually mean a world where everyone is equal, which is not tit-for-tat fairness.

Citation needed.
Actually, at 3840x2400 then downsample.
I know the debate about altruism and I was implying that I'm on the side
of people who reject the hypothesis that it doesn't exist.

I do agree about finding common ground and shared interests, but I don't
think all of this is an end by itself - it's a means to achieve a fair
world. This goes for the GPL, too, and indeed free software in general,
and I think this is what Linus does not understand from his purely
technical perspective.
Linus Torvalds, a great hero of mine, I do not know about you, he is certainly my King of Geeks
What Facebook Knows
The guy also wrote a book about how the game works, which has some good insights into real geopolitics. Can't find the link, unfortunately, but it was a really good read.
I agree entirely with that approach and it's how I operate.
Well, iOS is also the only OS to run on iDevices. You can't switch to Android on your iPhone, you need to get a new phone altogether, just like you would've had to get a new Mac, instead of just installing another(BeOS) OS.
Signed up too. I kind of started freelance work but like Alan's post, the c# freelance world was either "contract" or "permi".

Found some good guys to do work with now on a kind of "per project" approach which is good.

Interested to read the book as I found my weaknesses to be:

1. Charging for my work. I still find I undercharge as I enjoy the work and feel awkward asking for large amounts per billable hour. I'm now kind of trapped on low billable hours with my initial clients...

2. Finances. I've learnt enough and in the UK you can survive for the first 6 months without an accountant. I'm probably going to get one soon to handle the more complex tax/pay stuff.

3. Work out a proper hourly rate. Don't use the same broken formula I did thinking I can work 7 billable hours per day. I end up with about 4.5. I didn't account for the gaps between work. I now understand why freelancers have high rates.
now if only one could buy the damn thing. You might as well say unicorns instead of raspberry pi, same shit.

You cannot buy one unless you wait for, months. After you finally receive an email that one is available you cannot unless you provide your company name. With a few calls you manage to get past that and now they ask you when your credit card was issued? Who the fuck knows, sometime in the past.

And when you buy one you find out it's underpowered, so you need a powered usb hub. All in all, at the end you're way past the 25$.
That's just ok, but with OSM, they doesn't have to contribute.
I really like the design a lot. It's very clean.

I'm not fond of the name too much.
There's a caveat, of course: you have to be
talking to omniscient Gods who understand
English but refuse to speak it.

Another, perhaps bigger caveat is that they Gods have to be perfect logicians.

There's a simple version of this puzzle:

Two doors are guarded, each by one sentry.
One sentry always speaks the truth, the
other always lies. Behind one door lies
death, behind the other, freedom. You
have one "Yes-No" question. What do you
ask?

The trick is to ask a double question in one:

If I asked you if this is the door to freedom,
would you answer "Yes"?

My experience is that most people can't answer that question correctly, even when it's explained carefully in several different ways. People aren't logic machines, and English (and probably every natural language) is a poor vehicle for such discussions.
really interesting to a recent grad like me who's had a hard time imagining how things learnt at university will be applied at a 'big company scale'
Keep in mind it only works if the light is being sent to an area that is cooler than where the lamp is.

It's basically converting the heat difference into light.

So you can't use it just to cool, it doesn't work that way.
Are we really blaming the technology here? You're neglecting the reality: that a person--a living, breathing, thinking person--is behind the switch or lever that eliminates access.

Connected computing is the inevitable future. We will always hold less physical computing capability in our hands then can be beamed to us from afar on-demand.

What is ridiculous is the systems--the people systems--we have built that fostered this ethical failure. The social system of law that constrains Apple's behaviors. The internal social system at Apple whose 'conservative' default behavior is to remove rather then remit. There's a dude at Apple whose fear for losing his job overrides any sense of disgust he may have felt doing this.

The technology is not at fault. Our contemporary framework for regulating that technology--our society's response to that technology--is at fault.
I use and like mailjet.com.

You can also checkout the following pdf table which provides a comparison of transactional email delivery: http://www.ombud.com/asset/3000
I had no idea :D.

Do you have a link or can you quote in context. I may have more in common with Peter Thiel than I first thought - or not :D.
Having dealt with Microsoft support, you are right. They genuinely don't want to provide a code fix as that means hassle. You just don't get that with open source whether you fix it yourself or report a bug.
And this would make it worse. It cools the lamp by sending the heat outward in the form of light. It does not cool the recipient in any way, in fact it requires that the recipient already be cooler than where the lamp is.
Bridge Cranes, Workstation Cranes
Millsom Materials Handling has been designing and manufacturing Cranes, Bridge Cranes, Jib Cranes, Workstation Cranes, Overhead Cranes, Slewing Cranes, Light Track Cranes, Single Girder Cranes, Double Girder Cranes, Light Capacity Track Cranes since 1975.
Previous discussion: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3669688
How Barbara Arrowsmith-Young rebuilt her own brain
Quite a spectacular waste of potential HN traffic… In 6 days time this submission will be nowhere, and and _new_ submissions will just be dupes of this sunk-to-he-depths post. Pretty silly timing alexchamberlain…
Ask HN: Anyone awake at 4am and feel like critiquing my copywriting?
I'm going to distribute this sales letter all over Philadelphia and Bucks County tomorrow morning, I'd love to get some feedback while I still have time. If anyone's interested, I'll upload the pdf somewhere.

https://www.dropbox.com/s/zk8onfzkvw6iazj/tom-hyndman-copywriting.pdf
I am sorry that I cannot elaborate more on that for now(4am) but the cooling effects of light are known for quite some time already. Please check laser cooling as a keyphrase.
Just because they have plenty of notes doesn't mean that they've come up with something worthwhile. Their "theory" is nothing more substantive than New Age mysticism. They talk about states, state shifts, and forcings but do not fully describe any of them except at the most superficial levels. They put forward no tests (quantitative or qualitative) to determine the boundaries of a state or to test whether a "state shift" has occurred. That is a flaw at the very lowest level of their "theory". On top of that they build many fanciful constructs which have even less basis in the scientific method.

I've commented on this before, but it bears repeating. Here is "Figure 2" from the article: http://i.imgur.com/Zi3uB.png. Neither axis is meaningful, they both lack a definition for what is being measured, let alone how, let alone how to sort it, even qualitatively. This is junk. It's no better than a diagram with "mood" on the y-axis and "emotional energy" on the x-axis, it's utterly, utterly meaningless.
It does NOT cool things. To use it you have to heat it hotter than wherever it is shining into.

It uses that heat to make light, but it is not a cooler (i.e. a heat pump).
Please note that you could already have had 512 threads per 4 socket server since two years ago:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SPARC_T3
GERMANY VS NETHERLANDS LIVE EUROPEAN CHAMPIONSHIP ON JUNE 13, 2012
Live Online European Championship Match between Netherlands vs Germany. Please do not miss the today’s great match between Netherlands vs Germany.
The message I've taken from this entire subthread is "try to laugh rather than shake my head." The behavior makes a lot of sense if I frame it in status signaling (which helps make sense of so much that I suspect it of being too broad a framework). My own comment on the topic of living is: so it may be physically impossible to live forever, I think shooting for even a "mere" 200 years is doable and would be fucking awesome. At least we're not dogs, they get less than two decades.
An bankrupt beats spiderman Headphone
I don't think I quoted out of context. You seemed to be identifying people being taken out of the "successful pool." Here is the context:

"1000 possible billionaires are born everyday. Most die in the third world. The remainder come from low socioeconomic backgrounds. Cuts that to about 100. Of those 100, few are located in places like Silicon Valley. Now you are around 10. Of these 10, some go study medicine/law/engineering and disappear from the pool. Down to 1-2. Most of these guys fail."