skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Seriously, if the first forked revision simply normalized the parameter order of core functions, and standardized on verb_noun() (or noun_verb(), I don't care) function naming, I'd be happy. Yes, it's a cosmetic failing only, but it would go a long way to making the whole language seem coherent.
Acoustic Tweezers
The Swiss national bank has intervened repeatedly over the last year to devalue the franc. They do it for the same mercantilist reason that China does it: to subsidize export industries.

So even though Swiss consumers may not be seeing nominal price inflation, they are most definitely paying higher prices than they would have otherwise been paying if the SNB really maintained a hard currency.
None of those listings are in the Castro, and most of them are temporary sublets.
I love how you use the impersonal "they". Who would that actually be? The actual users of the site? No, they voted it up. The founders of the site? No, Jeff Atwood in this very discussion said that he thought it was on topic.

No, the "they" in question seem to be the people who hang out on meta, and who spend a serious fraction of their time agreeing on and enforcing rules against everyone else.

Perhaps if "they" stopped to ask whether they should be acting in a way that is not wanted by users, at least one founder, and which drives away contributers, then they might act differently.

Seriously, when you're applying a FAQ and come to the opposite conclusion from the people who wrote it, something is wrong.
In Firefox 13, the explosions don't correspond to the clicked locations/where the bombs are placed.
Most parts of India suffer power outage of more than 12 hours a day. I understand that you have UPS and power generators, but does it provide enough reliability to run your servers on it?

I have UPS and generator at home; the cost of running a power generator exceeds $1,000 a month but it is still not reliable.

Wouldn't servers at Hetzner cost cheaper and more reliable than hosting in your garage in India? You can get an i7 server with 16 GB RAM is for $60 and 32 GB for $72, and no hardware setup & maintenance cost.

http://www.hetzner.de/en/hosting/produktmatrix/rootserver-pr...
In C, I can do something like this (pardon my rusty x86/intel syntax):

int variable = 0xdeadbeef;
__asm {
ldw eax, $(variable) # load from variable
int 0x3 # trip interrupt.. maybe read from a IO port or something.
stw $(variable), $eax # get result, put into C variable
}
return variable;

This allows me to express certain things to the computer that are outside the range of expressibility of the language model.

What I would like to be able to do in Lisp is to execute the semantic equivalent of the above code fragment. I've considered hacking it into SBCL, but I have had higher priorities so far.
A checkbox on the bottom right (under the text fields, that is).
In Defense Of Implicit Code In C++
Discovery Of A Middleweight Black Hole | sciencefeature.com
You underestimate the positive effect massive scale has in the bandwidth market.
All you are doing is spitting out strings from memory. With a beefy box it could probably be higher than that.
Recline.JS: a Javascript library to build data apps in browser
Strictly speaking, we have that option - the multiplier of profits, &c., is just a matter of what the market will bear, however.
This is an impressive one as well (basically a big snowball that grows bigger picking up page elements): http://kathack.com/

I've always wondered if these sorts of tools could be a useful gimmick for traffic-generation
And then migrate to native ES6 modules when they're implemented: http://wiki.ecmascript.org/doku.php?id=harmony:modules
last a few days Cisco pushed a firmware update to several of its most popular routers that bricked the device unless you signed up for Cisco’s “cloud” service.

It did no such thing, even for very liberal uses of the term "brick."
Nope. Definitely need to add that fallback there. Good point!
The Nifty MiniDrive (Micro SD drive solution for MacBooks)
I've heard from a lot of ex-amazonian's that in practice there's a lot of blaming as part of the process at least in part because of the compensation/promotional processes. But maybe that's changed recently?

Of course, I've also heard that there is a wide diversity of culture between teams, so maybe that plays in to it, too.
Yahoo and Facebook Strike Patent Peace Deal
I have the same thing set up with a couple of lines in the terminal with rails though, it's just a matter of having some experience with the tools.
I'm not criticizing them for questionable spending at all. They simply don't have the capital to take advantage of better purchasing options.
"If all major currencies (including home currency) float down, then I don't lose very much."

That's not true -- they're all floating down relative to actual goods and services.

Coordinated devaluation prevents massive capital flight from country to country, but only by making things suck equally everywhere.
Yea, I see that now. He's complaining about both. Still, asking 4chan add-on developers to be courteous seems pretty silly. Gotta detect/ban/rate-limit them on the back-end.
It'd be a fun exercise to weight the domains. I've personally considered (but haven't gone through with) trying to implement a metaphone or soundex algorithm to determine if the resulting words "sounded" English based on comparison with dictionary data phonemes. Phonemes in general are the reason I decided to go with combinations of high frequency digrams and trigrams.
Yep. Safari runs a 3D CSS demo/benchmark/unrealistic-stress-test I made much smoother than Chrome.
Reminds me of joke I heard at cocktail party recently, told by a rather attractive female scientist:

"So, what do mathematicians and physicists use for birth control? Their personalities."
All true. And if you say "I could do better..." and it is in a remotely profitable field, perhaps you should be doing just that. Much of innovation happens because someone said, "I could do better" and then did. Nothing good came of people saying "I could do better..." and then watching TV.
> Aside from first mover advantage, what is stopping copycats from moving in and starting a price war with Airbnb?

First mover advantage is only part of the story. The network effect is already pretty powerful and only gets stronger. AirBNB has done all the work to polish the experience, and hosts are making money using the site. That's very sticky. On top of that, as a guest, you now know that there's nowhere you can go to get a bigger selection (which co-incidentally, gets bigger everyday) of reputable hosts. Same is true for hosts, with the added benefit that guests are insured.

> just like the Groupon copycats, it'll be worth it for copycats to "buy" users to gain market share.

Whatever the copycats can pay, AirBnB can pay more, and even then, the hosts have no incentive to switch from AirBnB to something else. They might list elsewhere, but as long as more guests are coming through AirBnB, they wont cancel their AirBnB accounts.

Fundamentally - AirBnB enabled people to monetize something that lay fallow before. The thing that makes people switch wont be a lower transaction cost; it will be a greater chance of booking (and thus revenues).
Heh ... I had to read the "Hacker" sentence thrice before I got it.
Humm.. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=x2DgwY5QQBk
Wow this one is impressive!
As someone else pointed out just because something is difficult to measure doesn't make it unimportant.

One part of your post intrigues me.

> don't have colleagues interrupting me with questions ever 10 minutes

Let's assume that your colleagues aren't idiots. That they need these questions answered. Either they are having to go away and ask someone else, or they are having to figure the answer out themselves (potentially taking a lot more time than if you had simply given the answer) or they are deciding to make do without the answer.

Each of those is potentially detrimental to the organisation's effectivenesses as a whole. Your "productiveness" is more than simply the sum of the code that you produce.

Moreover you're missing all those 'interesting little problems' that turn up, that you would know the answer to, if anyone only thought to ask you.

You're at risk of diminishing your total value.

(And yes, I primarily teleworked for several years).
#1 - I've never seen UI work that simple. Ever. Maybe my problem is that I'm working on interesting projects.

#2 - Tom Lasseter (Pixar) supposedly said "We release snapshots of our movies, they're never done."
> nobody's got the guts to declare PEAR a failure, put it down, and start something new.

https://github.com/composer/composer
Are many people buying only one screw at a time?
Yes, I acknowledged this point in the original post and I don't disagree that it is a substantial hurdle.

One could have made the same argument for Groupon circa 2009. Look at it now.
(see: http://www.nytimes.com/2011/03/10/business/smallbusiness/10s... or their stock price chart)

Here's an example competitor:
http://www.onefinestay.com/
ICO: Employee poached by Google ‘never worked on Streetview’
I conveyed this to the developers[1] a few months ago, this would be a great acquisition for the Google Glass project.

[1]https://twitter.com/inkaudio/status/195677653049683969
The ‘good enough’ threshold
A few years ago, Bombardier showed off a concept that's very similar, but with a small retracting pair front wheel used at low speed.

http://www.gizmag.com/embrio-one-wheel-concept/2350/
I'm not particularly knowledgable in this area, but shouldn't a revenue generating company with a $1B valuation be making more than that? 4X revenue is $732M
Do you have any references for the egg thing? I have a hard time picturing that? Aren't there individual cells inside a chicken egg (before it starts developing?)
The REAL problem with PHP
These numbers are so off that I had to log in to flag this post.

Airbnb's commission is 3%, not 13% as in the post. That makes a world of difference. The post also assumes an increasing growth rate in the number of rooms booked and a substantial increase in the prices of rooms booked and in the average length of each stay.

Basically, this post is just some guy trying to bring people to his blog using Airbnb for free press and made up numbers to make it seem like he has something to say.
If you know your market well and have a variety of "X" and "Y" keywords, I'd highly suggest checking out http://bustaname.com. The site is fantastic for generating available word combinations.
I'm sure it depends a lot on your team and your manager. Also, some people see a process like that and automatically assume blame is being assigned even if it isn't.
You shouldn't try to fit your code in that bookmarklet...! Updatability issues aside (your original, server-loaded approach is absolutely valid), there definitely are limits to a bookmarklet's size, just as there are browser-specific limits to URL length... See: http://stackoverflow.com/questions/417142/what-is-the-maximu...

EDIT: _jb's right regarding the security concern though; the server-hosted code could be changed to something malicious after everyone has installed it
About as objective and useful as the filters most startups use in selecting candidates, actually.
Bootstrap Tour, easy product tours with Bootstrap from Twitter
Amazon Is Reportedly Working On A Smartphone
The point is more that academic research is reinventing the wheel rather than doing genuinely productive research. Instead of researchers researching stuff that needs to be researched, a significant number of them are researching things that other researchers have known the answer to for years. It is not an effective use of human capital.
There's also a security concern. OP could change the code to a malicious script without anyone noticing.
I was interested in this too.
Shallow googling found, that there are problems with emulating even more simple organisms: http://lesswrong.com/lw/88g/whole_brain_emulation_looking_at...
Each Chez JJ captain screens for the best mix at the house, and none of us are developers by trade. We are designers, scientists, teachers, and entrepreneurs. Each of us has many ties within the tech industry and also without, and we sometimes purposefully accept non-technical residents for balance.

We really do care about creating an atmosphere which facilitates growth and innovation best, and we've put a lot of thought into the community we're helping to build.
I think you can't differentiate between political theory and realpolitik. Having elections don't make a country free. We can argue infinitely about the same on other places but Argentina has a long history of constraining individual freedom and policies against productive companies
If you were to invest that at 6% for 18 years, (say when your child was born), you'd end up with $155K before adjusting for inflation. That would pay for a lot of college.

And for the poverty family, this would be about $77K.
Sometimes though, it is enough just to criticise. Sometimes it's someone else's job to make things right and to listen to other people who may not be able to spend the time and effort on getting stuck in and doing it themselves. Sometimes that person isn't even capable of joining in, due to factors outside their control (it's a closed insular corporation for example).

And sometimes, the people dealing with the problem are only taking the approach that they're taking because they're tackling the problem from within a particular organisation that has its own related set of problems that affect its take on the solution. And in such cases, the best solution is sometimes not the one that's open to that organisation, so they take a different (less good) path. The best solution may even be one that destroys the organisation involved, and it may be really obvious.

If nobody is allowed to criticise anything that they're not actively involved in trying to fix, the world would be a very boring place (and Government would have a very easy job).
Higher inflation would lead the central banks (who want lower levels of inflation) to raise interest rates in order to control inflation.

We've been living with nearly 5 years of historically low rates of interest and inflation due to fiscal stimulus measures. The nasty side effect of that is that it is nearly risk-free for people with surplus capital to hold onto that capital.

Generally speaking, high inflation is bad for savers. But virtually no inflation is also bad for savers, as you get no return investment without incurring significant risk.
I've been working on following the good parts for my latest project. I've started to cringe any time people talk about the prototype or using "this"
The author should release it in its original, CoffeeScript form..! ;-)
>and its still more efficient all around than most other tools for the problems most people need to solve in the real world.

How exactly? I always see vague assertions that PHP is somehow better for "stuff I do in the real world", but nothing concrete. Guess what, the rest of the world is real too. I am not writing haskell code for my imaginary friend, I am writing it for real users to use in the real world, and a real business relies on it to provide real people with real incomes to feed their real families. How exactly would PHP be "more efficient all around"?
Sure, but we can fire up a room full of servers instead.
Furthermore, in the soft sciences (including politics and economics), much of the status quo is built on assumptions that, while they have a basis in historically observed human behavior, are still not "true" in the hard-science sense, and might become false if aggregate human behavior changes even a little.
To add to what has been said - on 4chan, the very "controversial" topics are beaten over and over and over again.

Go to /pol/ and you will see at least two rasict threads at any given moment, then some other name-calling and misoginy. Go to /g/ and you will see non-stop dumb OS wars ("Mac OS X sucks!" - "STFU, your mother is a whore"), and so on.

Feminism, homosexuality, religion, those topics are always popular no matter the board.
If it can do that, it will be pretty easy to make it appear to "take the clothes off" people. (Note, I'm very much not saying this should be done, just that it will be done.) They say that to calm your nerves when public speaking, you should visualize your audience in their underwear. Will be psychologically interesting, at least, to see how that works out for the first Glasses-wearing presenter to try it. Strange world we live in.
Somewhat unrelated, but I love Warby Parker's 2011 "Annual Report".

Clean, engaging, and aesthetically pleasing.

http://www.warbyparker.com/annual-report-2011/
I'm disagreeing that fiat money = inflation. The Swiss franc and price levels are stable thanks to intervention - else we'd be seeing debilitating deflation.
Plug $400/month into an investment calculator (@6%) and see what 40 years would do you... You'd be surprised how much a modest amount of savings can do when compounded over time.
So cool, Good work Phil
Here it is: https://github.com/plehoux/fontBomb/tree/master/src/coffee
I want to thank the flask team for this. we are using flask + gevent in production and it has been highly performant (1200 requests a second for our app) and stable :-)
I've been using R because I have an amateur's interest in statistics.

As a programmer, it seems like an awkward language, although no more awkward than SAS, SPSS, etc. And as I do more analysis the language makes more sense. It's a special-purpose language made to do a specific task.

The general workflow for doing data analysis is 1) import the data 2) clean it and format it properly as input for a pre-built package that does the actual analysis 3) feed it to the package and 4) interpret the results.

To that end, typically R programs are short and pretty declarative. R packages contain C or FORTRAN extensions that do all the heavy lifting. Substantial amount of imperative R code is going to be slow. For instance, looping over a vector is always worse than applying a vector transformation, and R provides a rich set of transformations for all its data types.

R has gotten popular because the proprietary guys dropped the ball at the universities. I recall reading a posting by one researcher who said he switched to R because his students could only use SAS at the school's stats lab, whereas they could run R on their computers at home.

Once researchers switched to R, they started publishing their work with code meant to be run with R. The cutting edge is important in stats, so people want a short lead time between when a new test or model is published and when it's available. SAS's "cathedral" can't really keep up. Combine that with SAS's licensing costs (both arms and a kidney too) as well as its overall "mainframey" feel, and you can see why R is winning.

EDIT: Another big win for R that I forgot to mention is its support for visualizations. A step that should perhaps come after importing the data above is investigating it with various diagnostic charts (scatter charts, box charts, etc) these are all just function calls in R. In addition, R has a powerful graphics engine and there are a huge number of packages available to create more sophisticated visualizations: http://addictedtor.free.fr/graphiques/
100% awesome!
http://www.airbnb.com/help/question/104

"We charge guests a 6-12% service fee for every reservation booked, depending on the total of the reservation."

"Airbnb also charges hosts a 3% fee for every booking that is completed, which covers the cost of processing guest payments."

9 to 15% range and the author chose 13%
The actual Tim O'Reilly post: https://plus.google.com/107033731246200681024/posts/jP4g9KKT...
Openworm: c.elegans worm simulation
Most of those questions can be answered by reading articles online and running some scenarios in a spreadsheet. if you want to get deeper into the financial side, I recommend the book Handbook of Financing Growth: Strategies, Capital Structure, and M&A Transactions. [1] It assumes some background in corporate finance, but it is a good primer on growth financing with a lot of good case studies from which you can develop some spreadsheet models.

[1] http://www.amazon.com/The-Handbook-Financing-Growth-Transact...
I wouldn't quickly assume Walmart's strange pricing practices are psychological.

I know that Walmart uses advanced analytics for doing pricing and expectation of sales. So it could be possible that these odd cent items aren't for psychological purposes but instead for building accurate pricing models. I can only speculate though but this is what I do and I know that's why we like odd cent items. My company helps eCommerce shops with pricing.

Articles such as this on Wikipedia (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Psychological_pricing#Historica...) can give you an idea about how much speculation there is in pricing.

While I don't have the study readily present, there was actually one done where 7th and 8th graders were shown a number of items with "odd prices" most notably "x.99" prices and were asked later on if they could recall the prices, the distribution were heavily weighted against odd pricing. Most of students recalled either the exact price or rounded up. Very few rounded down.
Anything you can do, I can do meta
Couldn't find a contact point for you. Feel free to send me an email and I'll see what I can do to help! :)
Ranking CERN's products. #1, WWW. #2, Higgs boson.
Did you read the words you quoted? You did not make a case that it is a good language, that is exactly what I said. PHP is not a good language because "it is equal to other languages in one respect, and vastly worse in a dozen other ways". That is the argument you put forth, but it most certainly does not make the case that PHP is a good language.
Space lets you write code together, in real-time, from your browser.
Korean Messaging App Has More US Users Than Path
VIDEO tour of The Factory – Berlin’s ultimate tech hub
cool video and first impression of berlins new coworking space!
That makes sense on the surface, and there's certainly value to spreading knowledge, but when you're in the same room there's a much lower barrier, so the tendency is to ask questions first, rather than making a serious attempt at solving the problem on your own. Make no mistake, we still ask each other questions when we're in a bind, but this communication is asynchronous. We ping the other person over chat, but that person is free to respond in their own time. I can't count the number of times I've gotten an IM from a colleague asking a question, only to get a "nevermind, I figured it out :)" message 5 minutes later. To me, that's a much more productive workflow for both individuals and the organization as a whole.
Does anyone know how big they are in terms of sales?

I considered interviewing them for Mixergy because I hear they're doing well, but the only metric I see for their success is valuation.
> - Why are large parts of the implementation barely maintainable?

What parts?

------------

Possibly the part that essentially required \ as a namespace separator. This was because ZE2 simply couldn't be coaxed to deal with a different separator, and no one has yet spearheaded a ZE3 to take the lessons learned over the last decade and revamp the internals to allow for more modularized growth/modifications.

Most other languages have had underlying VM changes which allow for better language enhancements. Every PHP language change in the last 12 years has had to work within the confines of the existing VM, and I've not seen any substantial changes to it in 12 years.
> Whatever the copycats can pay, AirBnB can pay more

If AirBnB has to "pay" to defend market share, then this would be an example scenario of competitive pressure reducing margins.

Again, I think AirBnB is an amazing company and agree with all your points. Just curious what the competitive landscape will look like in one or two years.
He's so bundled up he looks like he may be wearing body armor...
That's why I like your definition. It also frames me. It is witty. ^_^