skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
If you are more curious about the contemporary art world market and why $29M is not that expensive[1], I recommend "The $12 Million Stuffed Shark: The Curious Economics of Contemporary Art".

In general, brand (in this case Christie's and Sotheby's) ranks supreme above all else. Once you are branded, you can pretty much sell anything as expensive art.

Also, an interesting factoid - when we hear of Far East/Middle East buyers bidding tens of millions (or more) for a painting, we naturally tend to think - who buys that without seeing it - but as the book points out - the painting has most likely gone to see the buyer already (e.g. Dubai/Hong Kong pre-auction private tour).

Excerpts from the book:

"Money itself has little meaning in the upper echelons of the art world -- everyone has it. What impresses is ownership of a rare and treasured work such as Jasper Johns' 1958 White Flag. The person who owns it (currently Michael Ovitz in Los Angeles) is above the art crowd, untouchable. What the rich seem to want to acquire is what economists call positional good; things that prove to the rest of the world that they really are rich."

Jasper Johns' White Flag

http://michaelovitz.blogspot.com/2011/04/weve-featured-this-...

http://www.metmuseum.org/toah/works-of-art/1998.329

Estimates on the artist economy:

"40k artists resident in London (about same number in NYC)

For London and NYC each:

75 superstar artists (>$1M/yr income)

300 mature, successful artists (>$100k/yr income)

5,000 part time artists (need to supplement their income)"

http://www.amazon.com/The-Million-Stuffed-Shark-Contemporary...

[1] "If a great apartment costs $30 million, than a Rothko [big deal famous contemporary artist] that hangs in the featured spot in the living room can also be worth $30 million - as much as the value of the apartment. But no one could envision a $72.8 million apartment to use for comparison..."
"with few exceptions"

I can't back it up with facts but I do have the impression this sort of thing is significantly more common in the US than in any European, Asian, African or South American country.

I guess you would have to compile statistics for "Mass murderers with no clear motive per capita" and compile all the incidents going back at least 20 years and you might have evidence for or against.

For example, I can imagine this happening in any African countries I am familiar with, so to me it is clear that there is an element of culture involved.
As long as CSS opacity is not explicitly specified for any SVG element, I have found FF is not very slower than Chrome/Safari. But the moment opacity attribute is added even for a single element (even if the value is specified as 1), FF really slows down.

So I tend not to use opacity in my JS rendered SVG especially if there are any animations.
Actually scientist are of strong belief that mind is deterministic (it's a hypothesis so far, but all signs to point to it). However if people believe they are slaves to determinism then they act worse, since their actions are not their fault.
Overall society on large must believe that they posses the freedom in order to make life bearable.

Other way to look on that is this. If _you_ are not responsible for your actions than _me_ will punish you since neither of us is responsible for their actions.
I, for one, would welcome it if FB would drift away into irrelevance.

It's not about the users anymore (not that it ever was, but it's becoming more visible daily) so it's just a matter of time until even the most clueless will wake up and take their data elsewhere (wherever that might be)..
I am a foreigner who has been working as a developer or manager in the software sector in Germany for around 10 years. For a couple of years I have been trying to move towards self-employment, with some ups and downs, but I am making progress on a project together with my wife. Last year I had the chance to switch jobs and move elsewhere so I naturally targeted Berlin. I would like to keep working in a high-paying job while funding the startup that I work on in my free time. I noticed a few things:

There are a quite a few startup jobs, but they are low end, low paying. Many pay even less than what I started on 10 years ago. They are looking for those starting their first job I think. I get the feeling Berlin startups get a lot less funding that other startups.
Even the non-startup jobs that require more experience seem to pay a lot less, and even with the slightly cheaper rent than other cities, I couldn't find any attractive options.
The official work experience I have on my CV is more enterprisy stuff like .NET and lots of stuff startups care less about like Scrum, Kanban, management in general and agile software development. I do have experience with things like Ruby, Python and JavaScript, but even startup employers were only interested in what was on my CV.

Not complaining or anything, just trying to help get a feel on what I found while looking there last year.

I found a good job near Frankfurt, and who knows, maybe I will end up in Berlin later, but I feel I might not need to. Frankfurt has a startup scene (and a rich financial sector). So does Cologne where I used to live.
It's odd to say society must believe that they possess a freedom which isn't really there. Of course, in punishing me, you are not responsible, but by exposing this idea, I do hope your mindset will change. But if you punish me, I can't blame you.

I see ideas as agents that change trajectories of free will.
Two good examples of institutional logbooks in the form of weekly notes:

http://berglondon.com/blog/tag/weeknotes/

http://www.helsinkidesignlab.org/categories/weeknote
The last thing the government wants to be involved with is selling real estate, art and other illiquid assets. There is a very real possibility that the government would lose money if it is unable to sell the asset at the original valuation.
Don't give them too much credit though; they had to wait five months until the tax season is over, and people forget about the original story that appeared in Forbes: http://www.forbes.com/sites/janetnovack/2012/02/22/the-irs-i...
You don't know what may have never existed with no patents. Maybe Jobs doesn't even consider the iPhone. This sort of thing is just speculative without a control.
"Psychologists describe depression as anger turned inward."

Correction: Freud described depression as anger turned inwards.

Specifically, he described anger at external forces (your mother, etc.) turned inwards. In his view, the only way to get rid of depression would be to allow this anger to express itself against the actual external force. This is very, very far away from the majority view of modern psychology (which has dismissed the vast majority of Freudian thought), but I still hear it repeated all the damn time.

The reason I think it's important to correct it is that therapies based on Freud's notion of depression not only aren't helpful, they in many cases made a person worse. It turns out, getting a person to focus on all the things that should make them angry in their life is, in fact, not helpful for their general mental health.

It is true that depressives tend to think a lot of shitty things about themselves. More successful cognitive behavioral therapy (which has been clinically proven to be as helpful as antidepressants in treating non-severe depression), tries to train people to think of alternatives to those shitty thoughts without necessarily saying which one alternative is right. Turns out, getting in the habit of thinking not just the worse thing possible is actually quite helpful. It gets you out of the rut your in.
Although interesting, it's not a particularly new theory. I advise you to read some philosophy. Modern philosophers will agree with you that the concept of free will poses many issues and contradictions. Among those alive, you could consult Kane, and for classical philosophers, you could read Steiner. Although, your own judgement should ultimately be drawn from neuroscience as well (using your free will ;)
True. There is some semantic mismatch.
One example I can see is something like testing branches of a financial institution. Send out 100 of these things to branches all over the country and just have the manager plug them in. You don't even have to tell them what it is.

It's much easier and cost effective than to roll a truck and when your finished you can mail them to another branch. Or just leave them in place for future spot checks.
Probably because US events get a lot more media attention. But no, this is happening all around the world. Just look at this list: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_rampage_killers
Fuzzy matching autocomplete library in java with built in http server
We respond to external stimuli in a unique way, true. I'm not saying free will does not exist, but YOU as an agent do not have that will. It's actually a combination of genes + historical feedback loop between environment and you. When you are asked to pick between a color (red or green), on what basis do you pick that color?

The recent book on Free Will by Sam Harris: http://www.amazon.com/Free-Will-Sam-Harris/dp/1451683405 is relevant here.
I'm not sure the "middle class individuals who turn out to be lunatics calling them self the Joker or trench coat mafia" in Brazil and Columbia have the necessary street smarts and contacts to buy assault rifles from the black market so easily. Furthermore, as access to guns is a factor amongst many others, it would be more useful to compare the US with countries more culturally and economically closer like the UK, Australia, Germany, Canada etc.
Thanks, that was what I was referencing. How well do you think Opus will compare to AAC?
If you take away easy access to guns then sure the hard criminals will still have guns but the wannabe criminals and the lunatics will do less damage.

Taking away legal access != eliminating easy access to guns. It still may well be the case that it is easy to buy guns on the black market.

On the other hand, you also disarm the population, making them easier target for mass murderer.
>Wow, your kids are going to have more issues than Playboy.

My useless comment of the week - hahaha!
Er...

"Please don't submit comments complaining that a submission is inappropriate for the site. If you think something is spam or offtopic, flag it by going to its page and clicking on the "flag" link. If you flag something, please don't also comment that you did."
Yes, I meant a new theory for me. I was undecided about free will (I still am to a large extent) but this idea is quite appealing. But it has interesting consequences on crime and morality.

If science would agree to this version of the theory, why isn't punishment or imprisonment getting banned? Isn't training and coaching (exposure to different ideas) a better way to "cure" people than executing them?
That's not right. it should be 2 Giga-samples-per-second. You can pack a large number of bits into each symbol.
The thing is, a mass murder incident is significantly rare enough to warrant media coverage. The American may simply be unlucky.
I've heard of Roy, and even though I know very little about it or about LiveScript, comparing Haskell to Roy immediately makes more sense than comparing it to a language that "has a relatively straightforward mapping to JavaScript."
Skype Won't Say Whether It Can Eavesdrop on Your Conversations
13 Million Australians spend over 18 Hours a Day Online
4 advice for better blogging
4 friendly advice for better blogging, and problogging. In Bulgarian.
I think this is too dismissive, and is the equivalent of sweeping it underneath the rug and hoping it doesn't happen again. To me, this is a symptom that there is something broken with society. The way I see it, energy builds up in the system, and needs to be released somehow. If there's no way for that energy to be released, it builds up and reaches a phase-transition state, like how water will slowly boil but then explosively turn into steam. But something about the structure of society creates a kind of feedback loop, something like this happens, people dismiss it as a "natural bizarre event" and dismiss the person as "having some kind of hardware bug." People then carry on with their lives, forget about it, and then a few years later it happens again. People don't change. People haven't changed one bit since the beginning of time. People have the same exact emotions that they had 2000 years ago, and they react in the same exact way. This is why history repeats, because the way people react to emotions never changes.
"Resist the temptation to extrapolate details prematurely into a whole."

The author of this article spent a decade researching the Columbine tragedy[1]. Here, he's describing how readily mass tragedies and shooting sprees lend themselves to misinformation by the media and mythologizing by the public. We can think of the perpetrators as always being loner outcasts, but the effort to make sense of their motives isn't that simple. They might be clinical psychopaths or suicidal depressives or paranoid narcissists or something else.

[1] - http://www.columbine-online.com/
The amount of determination required to do that much killing with a knife would have had its effects amplified by the ready availability of a gun.

You think some person with a handgun would stand much of a chance against someone in body armor with an assault rifle?
You don't have AdBlock? I haven't seen an ad (youtube or otherwise) in as long as I can remember.
There are 12,000 annual murder in a population of 300,000 million. The hardware bug is pretty rare in the first place.
By the numbers, Germany's public education system is basically identical to that of the US (scoring 525 and 524, respectively).

http://super-economy.blogspot.com/2010/12/amazing-truth-abou...

What makes you believe it's education system is better? Or it's health care system, for that matter?
In practice, novelty is determined by prior patents because that is what the examiners search.

"Yes, for the patent definition of obvious, basically all the parts are going to have to be either patented, or in some printed publication." -- Patent Examiner "lordnecro" (http://www.reddit.com/r/Android/comments/ww982/iama_patent_e...)

See the rest of the thread for the example where an idea is used in open source software prior to a patent application by a third party. The patent examiner concedes that this would likely not be found by the examiner, therefore the patent would be granted. It likely would not stand up in court, but that doesn't help anyone that can't afford the legal defense.
I guess I should clarify: there are different sorts of licenses. Some are per device or product sold. I was referring to an unlimited use license. The idea being (with the formula) that if your idea is good enough that every one of your competitors wants to use it, then they will effectively pay you for the full cost of discovery/development (at industry average R&D costs).

So at $10 per patent, you'd pay $2.5 mil as a one-time fee. I'm curious how that would stack up to current litigation and other legal costs to fight/prevent patent litigation.
Around the world in five years
Hi,

Sorry to hear you're having difficulties signing up - you're quite correct that .ac.uk should be allowed. At present the signup page requires an email address that ends in '.edu' (or '.edu.*' for country specific edu emails) to qualify for the free plan. We're adding region specific exceptions (such as .ac.uk) as we come across them.

The Cambridge users signed up for Lexim during the private beta period in which we had no restrictions on email addresses.

I've flagged this as an issue with our development team, and it will be addressed within in the next 12 - 24 hours (it's currently just gone midnight on Monday morning here in Australia).

In the interim if you'd still like to play with Lexim, feel free to shoot me your email address to my private email and I'll make sure you can get sorted on the free plan.

Sorry again, appreciate your interest and feedback!

Thanks,

Michael
Oh - and I completely understand where you're coming from with unwanted marketing crap, something we'll never do :)
Paypal? No. I just signed up for an account using my debit card. Instantly, my account is suspicious. They then demand access to my bank accounts and scans of my social security card, birth certificate, photo ID, etc. No thank you.
"Of course they’re sad; they’ve probably gone their entire day getting berated relentlessly, by the single person in the world whose opinion they hold most dear — themselves."

This is the most important part of the article.

All of us to some degree have wrestled with negative self-talk in our lives; a feeling of not liking yourself or just not being “good enough.” For some, it can be a steady, continuous feedback loop that’s difficult to break. I’ve wrestled with it myself. For me, it takes the form of the “imposter phenomenon” and it becomes more pronounced when I’m in groups of smarter people or when I perceive there to be particularly more at stake than normal situations. “What are you doing here, you’re not smart enough, how did you get this job, you’re not good enough to run a successful startup etc.” In the past, it’s caused me to freeze up, have trouble articulating what I want to get across or (worst of all) escape the situation entirely. As I’ve gotten closer & closer to where I want to be as it relates to the startup ecosystem and my place in it, that inner voice has gotten louder. So I can certainly relate to that aspect of it. It’s a battle that’s fought anew every day.

And sometimes it does manifest itself in a more social context, e.g. “nobody cares about me, etc.” which can also be difficult to quell, particularly for someone who’s more of an introvert at heart. Left unchecked, I can clearly see how that can get the better of someone and send them down a destructive path, although I still think to take that anger and push it back out to society in such a violent way requires a synapse somewhere else misfiring.

It's a good reminder that external stimuli alone aren't usually to blame for negative, depressing feelings.
Let’s talk about Sparrow
India-nigger
Thanks - glad you appreciate what we're doing.

You've summed up our motivation really well, and we completely agree with you about the current state of the industry.

Teacher's deserve better, and hopefully Lexim will help them create an awesome learning experience for them and their students.
I guess we would have to first settle the debate of whether shootings are a more strongly American phenomenon. I tried to do a bit of Googling and couldn't find a satisfying answer.
(1) The main advantage you get from setting your rate daily is that you will attract employers that see this as a way to eek more hours per day out of you. You can choose not to work with employers like this, but you won't actually know they will do this until they do it. In the end though, that is your time, and your rate goes down if you work more for the same amount.

(2) You will frequently work less than a day and charge for a day. This will of course keep some employers from hiring you, because they'll worry about your higher effective rate that what they would calculate for an 8 or even 6 hour day. But, let's say that they hire you. At some point, you'll send an email stating that you are done with the feature earlier in the day rather than later, because you have somewhere to be that night and don't want to forget, and then this puts the seed in their head that you didn't work a full day, and that for all they know, you may do that everyday with them if they aren't communicating with you all day to determine you are working for them.

(3) Although potential employers may attempt to do the math and convert what they perceive as your hourly rate based on your daily rate to what they get out of other hourly workers, much of the time, they won't want to bother. If anything, if I were trying to estimate your hourly rate, I'd divide your daily rate by 4 and assume that is basically your effective rate. And that is probably not right.

Then there is the whole thing about the perceived amount on your bill. It may seem higher if they see your daily rate vs. an hourly rate, even if it is less.
Outsourcing to India- Is it slavery?
Is it slavery to outsourcing our business to India and China?
I disagree with your second point. Most players who shot a normal jump shot well are not the type of players who shoot a hook shot well.

And your third point makes me wary. I'm not sure who these normal jump shooters are that have atrocious free throw percentages. They definitely don't seem to be the majority.
Indeed, what you say makes sense. _If_ we know how to "cure" those people. That's one big if, but I agree that (in general) society should do all what is possible to understand the human behavior and brain.
Why would you trust hardware you are not really sure you control (do you know all the backdoors and bugs in that thing?) and knowingly give it access to your networks? It's already a hacking power tool, it only needs the hacker.
Good point, his description of depression doesn't really match with what I was told by a person who was diagnosed with depression.

Actually, this tiny bit of the article makes me skeptical about its whole content. "Complicated"? - highly likely, but I think the author probably underestimate the real complexity.
Cara Alami Mengobati Sakit Pinggang
Cara Alami Mengobati Sakit pinggang,- Sakit pinggang merupakan penyakit yang pada umumnya sering terjadi pada usia lanjut namun usia muda pun tidak dipungkiri sering dijengkelkan oleh rasa sakit yang satu ini. Selain menjadi masalah yang mengganggu aktivitas, jika dibiarkan sakit pinggang akan menjadi masalah yang kronis. Untuk itu segera atasi rasa sakit pinggang anda dengan Ace maxs yang terbuktu ampuh dan sangat tepat untuk cara alami mengobati sakit pinggang.Cara Alami Mengobati Sakit Pinggang dengan Obat Ace Maxs solusi pengobatan secara cepat,aman tanpa efek samping untuk menyembuhkan sakit pinggang,Obat Ace Maxs adalah obat Alami yang terbuat dari perpaduan antara kulit manggis dan daun sirsak. Daun Sirsak dan Kulit Manggis sudah terkenal di dunia kesehatan yang berperan untuk penyembuhan berbagai penyakit diantaranya penyakit kanker, asam urat, stroke, gagal ginjal, dan lain-lain.

Cara Alami Mengobati sakit Pinggang dengan obat ace maxs juga aman bagi penderita yang memiliki keluhan seputar maag dan asam lambung. karena selain memiliki khasiat dari daun sirsak dan kulit manggis obat ace maxs ini juga memiliki khasiat dari bunga black rosella yang mampu menetralisir keasaman yang berlebihan dalam lambung.

Bagi anda yang ingin merasakan sendiri obat alami ace maxs anda dapat memesannya kepada kami melalui sms dengan format :

OM: Jumlah Pesanan : Nama : Alamat Pengiriman: No. Hp / Telepon
kirim ke 085.221.330.085

Contoh Pemesanan:
OM: 2 botol : Susi : Jl. Pataruman No 41 Rt/Rw 07/07 kec. Tawang Kel. Empangsari, Tasikmalaya Jawa Barat: 085.221.330.085
Honest question, if I have a software idea and am thinking about patenting it, but then don't (although I've developed the idea), what happens if someone else re-creates the idea and then patents it themselves. Would I now be infringing on their patent?
A Nation That’s Losing Its Toolbox
If you have a bunch of neurons with different thresholds to trigger their action potentials, then you slowly raise the amount of activity sent to them equally, then the lowest one is going to trigger first. I guess you could call it a search.
Did they seriously use the word "Nutscrape" in this article?
10 Keys to Making an Entrepreneur Website Credible
I know I'm not the only one, but I rarely buy iphone/ios apps, mostly because there's often no trial process, and there's no return/refund policy. Yes, it might get abused, but give vendors the ability to do more (time limited trials, functional trials with in-app upgrades, etc). Some vendors try to provide this, but... they're fighting against Apple App Store policies.

Yes, you can argue "hey, it's just $x" ($2? $1? $3?) Over time, those tend to add up, and when there's no recourse, I'd rather just not participate much.