skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
It's plainly evident that as journalists and pop- social- science writers go, Gladwell is spectacularly successful. This article posits that the reason for that success is that he has hit on a formula of catchy titles and appeals to lucrative audiences.

Do any of you actually believe this? If so, square that belief with the fact that the author of this blog post could clearly apply the same formula. Why isn't he spectacularly successful too?

My guess: however easy this blogger thinks it is to come up with the theme of a Gladwell book, it is far, far harder to write that book as compellingly as Gladwell does. Put differently: Gladwell is just an extremely talented writer.

Jab at him all you want for the superficiality of the ideas he's trafficking in, or for being beholden to corporate sponsors. I'm not sticking up for what he writes. But what he writes isn't the key to his success. Gladwell could write the phone book and it'd be more convincing than this post was.
What always annoys me in emulation is how it always reacts so bad to slowdown. Was trying to get my Tony Hawk's Pro Skater 3 on, but apparently my poor Core 2 Duo E6600 and GTX 275 couldn't handle it. I was getting 30fps - which would be fine in a regular game, but in an emulator actually means playing the game at half speed (full speed being 60fps). Including the music, which, well, that was interesting.

Still, I'm glad to see progress being made in emulation. I think it's extremely important that we will have access to gaming history for a long time to come, even after most of the hardware has died or simply can't be hooked up to modern TV systems.

Seems like the next big step will be Xbox 1 emulation, which no one has tackled yet. Anyone know why?
EBay Now, Purchases Now Available On Same Day Shipping
It's also a pretty obvious implementation. In fact, the function is so simple, it's hard to implement in any other way.
What part of it looks hard?

Depending on your programming knowledge integrating a payment gateway shouldn't be too hard. Take a look at some of the ones that have already been done: https://bitbucket.org/stephenmcd/cartridge/src/5be5cd01496b/...

If you look at the Authorize.net one for example, most of the lines of code are setting up the POST data. The actual posting is only about 6 lines or so.
If I am downloading more than one item (and maybe I am waiting for a particular one), it's not telling me which ones are finished.
Vietnam's blog shame
It's about 40mins from Penn to JFK via the LIRR/Airtrain (to go maybe 20 miles). There's about 6 trains/hour. I really don't see how you'd get this journey down to 15 minutes without having to build a new tunnel all the way, it's never going to happen.

The real annoyance is how hard it is to get to LGA and that you're reliant on buses. It's a shame that they ran out of money building the N/R and it stops at Ditmars instead of continuing on to the airport.

I fly out of NYC biweekly, I generally fly out of JFK so I can take the E/Airtrain there (about 50 mins) and then fly back to LGA and take a towncar home, due to landing later and avoiding traffic. I'd never take a cab to JFK, it can be nearly 2 hours from midtown in traffic.
An interesting article demonstrating the performance dependency of emulation: http://arstechnica.com/gaming/2011/08/accuracy-takes-power-o...
A local eBay could start to challenge Craigstlist. I bet they could figure out how to map stuff too.
John Carmack: Sorry for borked release; console vs PC; VR headsets revolution
That's the problem that financing addresses.

Assuming that the activity you're financing will return future positive captureable value (farebox revenues, increased taxable business activity), then borrowing money now to pay for current activities ensuring ability to pay back the loan makes perfect sense.

Note that that assumption of future benefit may not hold out, but if it does, failing to undertake the financing is cutting off your nose to spite your face.
Weekend project: Readable, bookmarklet for uncluttering (some) websites & blogs
> A highschooler could also write Rebecca Black's "Friday" (indeed, one did)

I doubt that a) Rebecca Black came out with it in two minutes and b) hers is the most obvious implementation of "song".
>> there is not denying that C# is 'Java done right/better', so I really see no reason to use Java over C#

I see plenty and I've done both and stuff that existed before Java or C# either one existed like C++, C, BASIC and Assembly.
> They key is not eating at all for a full 24 hours including your sleep cycle and then to only eat a normal meal on the days you eat.

I've gone on 7-21 day fasts, with good results and improved health. I agree with you, except I think the "24 hour" limit is rather arbitrary - up to 30 days yearly is common in some eastern religions with no irreversible damage (note - I'm not recommending everyone go on a 30 day fast; just that 24 hours is arbitrary, and the real limit is apparently some 30 times higher)
"HANGING back and allowing children to make mistakes is one of the greatest challenges of parenting."

I would agree with this, you (as the parent) know its a mistake and you want them not to suffer for something they could avoid but you can't teach what the mistake does.

That said, I am a big fan of having your kids make their mistakes and failures early and often. It is so easy to help your child avoid failing at some task, and yet doing so robs them of the value of not failing. Or more succinctly Success is measured in failures. If you try to do something and fail at it several times and then succeed, that success is that much sweeter than trying something and exceeding without ever failing. Thus success without failure is hollow.

So like the example of watching and encouraging your kid to walk, responding to failure with compassion and support is just as important.
I dont believe that. It all depends on how you die, not how long you live. My grandfather died at home at 96 years of age, no nurse, no equipment. Just my grandmom and him, at home. I'd bet his medical cost of passing away is far lower than a type-2 diabetic in their mid-60s hospitalized for 5 years before passing, or a lung cancer patient (vis a vis Gladwell's example) going through chemo for 5 years before expiring. His analysis needs much more rigor, imo.
I agree politics is a very important part of our society and people should be interested in it.

But technology is a means to solve problems whether they're presented by the struggle of humans to make their life better against the elements - in which case the solution would ought to be non-political - or whether they are presented by humans living, interacting and governing themselves in a society - in which case a solution may be driven by politics but is a solution nonetheless.

A blueprint of a missile doesn't say that it's driven by a particular ideology - it's just a solution for a political/social problem. Anyone can discuss it without involving politics. However, humans by their very nature add context to things (in this case, it'd be political) and that's perfectly alright. My argument is - ok, it is possible to discuss these things productively without involving politics or political opinions at all.
Was your startup successful? Knowing that would help readers decide whether your advice is credible.
I'm asuming there would be an entire board of directors or some such who were aware of this decision. They can't all be so naive that they dont realize the danger of undermining their brand reputation.

They must have made an informed decision.
not an apple lover, but prefer open source and open tools vs everything MS on top of increasing cost of development, on top of reliance on MS for everything from using an MS stack.
This article is specifically for startup founders. Startups are very different from lifestyle businesses.
This reminds me of Iain M Bank's Player of Games in which the hero finds a winning strategy in an elaborate StarCraft style board game by decentralising the production and strength of his ranks, so that his territory was a sprawl of self sufficient mini-empires. I think Banks meant it as an allegory for Islamic/Persian/Asian empires being eventually swept aside by Western civilisation, but it seems relevant here.

However one factor I generally find missing in a lot of economic analyses is that no matter how 'feudal' or 'hierarchical' an organisation may be, workers choose whether to work there or not. The classic characteristic of soviet states was that you couldn't leave even if you wanted to...
Does this mean there have been non-solid-state receivers at this frequency? Or is this a use of 'solid state' I'm not familiar with?
>> it isn't even more expensive than linux hosting

A specific comparison would be nice, blanket statements are not helpful.
You can lock in rates through issuing bonds which is how these things are typically financed. Variable rate debt is fairly rare here.
Things I Hate About git
It is times like this that I wish I had down voting rights.

Groklaw is an amazing site and 30 seconds of research would have shown your whole argument as invalid.
If you think of it as a CPU running at that speed and what is needed to achive that then that might help get an idea about this in terms of achievement. As for radio the higher the frequency (think sin wave) the shorter the wavelength (distance between sin waves). This also means smaller recievering antentna and etc. One other use this does have is one day your computers chips and memory wont need loads and loads of intricate expensive wires to connect them together as they will talk wirelessly.

That all said I'm sure others will explain this news in far better terms and alot more acurately.
Joshua Porter works at HubSpot because they bought his previous startup, Performable. That pricing page design may have preceded him.

A Google image search for 'Performable' turns up lots of screenshots.
Your point cuts, but is valid. It's not like there's a shortage of great reads bringing statistics and economics to the everyman though.
They've been trying to for years. They launched Kijiji in 2005, which caught on in Canada but not in the U.S., and was later rebranded (except in Canada) to "eBay Classifieds". I believe they had some kind of local-listings attempt that preceded that as well. They've also (with more success) been specifically targeting the used-car-sales portion of the local market with eBay Motors.
Curiosity's Grand Entrance (with Wil Wheaton)
Final Fantasy VI bug, early airship, character weirdness, play as General Leo
With VS2010 they forced users to use a tabbed doc view, so I still use VS2008.
This sort of article sounds like s/unix/git/g of rants against UNIX/Linux command line & filesystem concepts that were common in the late 90's, as it was becoming clear that UNIX wasn't actually going to be killed by Windows NT, but rather was resurgent. Examples included:

- "Yuck, why such different terminology from DOS?"
- "Commands are inconsistent and there are too many, where's my One Command or (better yet) One GUI that does everything they way I think about it?"
- "Yuck, scripts that make things easier for my particular workflow, why didn't they just build it right the first time?"

Fundamentally it comes down to people who believe version control is a simple problem, and git confuses that for no good reason, or those who believe version control is an inherently complicated problem, and tends to require some study to understand the concepts. Git doesn't hand-hold, it exposes the core concepts at the data level, thus supporting any workflow for any size of team or work style. If you prefer a dictated workflow and task structure, there are plenty of wrappers that will help you - just don't be surprised if not every team agrees with your preferred workflow.
What makes a great logo?
they have hundreds if not thousands of clients some of who in turn each have thousands of customers... so yeah they will be executing a high throughput. And often large orders get broken up into smaller pieces so as to minimised market impact.
Malcolm Gladwell obviously does much more than just applying this formula. First of all, he applies it well. And we know here that ideas are nothing, execution is everything. He also plays and looks the part of a sophisticated modern intellectual, publishes in the New Yorker, gives inspiring speeches, even if they're just excerpts from his books.

None of that means that his works don't follow a predictable pattern. And none of his achievements should stop anyone from poking fun at that.
Thanks for the link! Especially loved this quote, explaining why a performance-intensive emulator that strived for accuracy is more important than a speed-oriented one:

"Video games are a piece of our history, and we need to respect the fact that there is a "true" form they had when released. Imagine if we only had a JPEG of the Mona Lisa, a RealVideo stream of the moon landing, or a MIDI rendition of "Walking in the Air." We have the ability to keep our past alive, and I feel like it's almost a duty to do so."
Getting codes in different languages to interact
The fastest information can ever travel is the speed of light (possibly ignoring quantum entanglement effects---I'm not up to scratch on that) and this is just a theoretical maximum, so it takes multiple clock cycles for information to travel around on a piece of hardware, and thus optimising its layout is immensely important for performance.
> I tend to favor going by what the experts say, and overwhelmingly they say to eat normally every day. The more progressive might admit that there's value in further study.

I tend to follow experts when I don't have time to do my own research. But when I do, I find -- very often, with nutrition advice, and too often for comfort with medical advice -- that there's actually no scientific basis for these recommendations; rather that they are somewhere between "leap of faith" (that is sometimes provably wrong), superstition, and "that's the way we've been doing for a while so we assume it's the right way".

For example, many experts still insist that you should limit egg yolk consumption to no more than a few a week, although there's no science behind it - just a 60 year hypothesis that's been repeatedly disproved over the last 30 years (although the belief is so strong almost no one seems to be aware of those results).

And many still insist that the more cushioning for your ankle on your shoe the better - although there was never any research indicating that this should be true, and there is very consistent evidence showing that it is in fact harmful.

> On a different note... A couple years ago (long before I started fasting), I was in a meeting and I got super hungry. It was painful. I realized that many people live with this daily for decades. I think going hungry for a short period of time might make some people more empathetic.

I had fasted for 21 days once, and did not feel any discomfort throughout (on the contrary - up until day 14 or so, I felt disgusted at the thought of food; after that, it just wasn't appealing). And then I felt hunger. Which is something completely different from appetite, which is what I referred to as hunger before.

hunger is something that I've only ever felt at the end of the fast, and at the end of an army training camp that didn't provide enough food -- and I assume most people in the western world never do (although you might have - I can't really tell).

It's not pain. It's an obsession with food that will not go away when you do something interesting, which is unlike food craving or appetite - but I can't really put it into words.
The primary argument against 24 hour operation is that it allows for track maintenance, and is required because BART lacks redundancy throughout its system. The system is shut down for 4 hours, from midnight through 4am, nightly (counting end-point departures, service actually runs slightly later from some intermediate stations).

That said, it's double-tracked in many (though possibly not all) sections, which might allow for running periodic service along one set of tracks, assuming switching and train control systems would allow for this. With a full circumnavigation of the Bay, it might also be possible to phase system downtime such that service might run on either eastern (Contra Costa) or western (Penninsula) lines, with service between SF and SJ. By phasing which specific track segments are down for maintenance at any one time, effective coverage of much of the system might be possible (at the cost of greater scheduling and maintenance complexity).

Triple-tracking the system could also provide for this, though at much greater infrastructure and land costs.

As it is, the 4 hour shutdown doesn't affect too many patrons, and service during operating hours is very reliable (much more so than other regional transit sywtems, or driving).

http://www.bart.gov/guide/latenight.aspx
This was ~2002
There's also an ethical constraint that prevents people like the author from copying Gladwell's model. And it's plainly obvious that things in general are much easier, when you don't have to adhere to a set of ethics.

Gladwell is clearly a talented writer - the guy can make an entertaining presentation about condiments, which is no small feat.

Mike Daisey is a gifted spoken-word artist as well. Yet he is someone whose example I doubt many here would aspire to.

Gladwell might be a compelling - albeit extremely formulaic - writer, but how does he fare as a journalist?
Here's a rule that was broken: Try to not present more than 7 to 10 choices or items at one time (and yes a list of 20 bullet points that scrolls under the fold breaks that rule)
I think you either replied to the wrong person or misread my post :P

I asked about hangouts specifically. I agree with you there should be more focus on quality. But I was curious to know why exactly do you think hangouts was a missed opportunity. When it seems it's an ongoing work in progress instead. You seem to know more than I about the details. So why was games on hangouts a missed opportunity when there are games for hangouts already?
This is interesting, I'm a c++ developer by day and like Rails on the weekend so it tickles my main interests.

Building a large app that needs performance? I could see a C++ web framework being useful, but basing it around Rails is a weird choice. Rails is great for what Rails is great at, try a whole new bag that works with the language benefits and the expected use cases.
Friend once said the difference between solid-state and non, was that solid-state didn't use magic crystals.

But personaly I don't like the term as it is not as clear-cut in all peoples perspectives. You could say one solid-state is digital and non solid state is not 100% digital. Though some would also argue that digital is mearly a perception of measurement in a analogue World.

I'll let you read the wiki on it and draw your own conclusions:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Solid-state_(electronics)
Who is responsible for Grooveshark serving malware?
Visited Grooveshark this morning, selected a Playlist of mine and hit Play All. Was then unceremoniously served Malware. It's your basic security alert redirecting to an off-site domain (www1.servantinspectionon-line.pl) which served a JavaScript alert "Viruses were found on your computer. You need to clean your computer to prevent system crash.".

I've already emailed support@grooveshark.com about this issue, but upon a cursory search noticed that this has been an ongoing issue (since 2009 which I'm assuming is its inception):

http://www.siteadvisor.com/sites/grooveshark.com/msgpage
http://onerudedude.blogspot.com/2009/12/beware-grooveshark.html
http://www.brucebnews.com/2010/02/grooveshark-malware-warning/

My question would be, after such a prolonged history of serving malware by Grooveshark, who is responsible? The company? Their ad provider? Adobe Flash/Flex? I would presume the buck stops at the top. It's almost as if they don't give a shit.

Am I wrong or is there a problem that's so unsolvable that Grooveshark can do nothing about serving malware for the last 3 years?
I think you are being too critical. Yes, examples would be nice but all of these principles seem very reasonable. Also the design is beautiful.

Of course "One hundred clear screens is preferable to a single cluttered one." should not be taken literally. The point is that clear screen is much better than cluttered screen.
> Sometimes after a really hard boxing practice I can be so hungry that I physically can't eat any more food, but I'm still hungry.

For me it is the complete opposite - I can't eat or even think of food for a while, and am definitely not hungry or have any appetite -- and the harder the practice is, the longer it takes appetite to recover. (My practice of choice is thai boxing, btw...)
Physical IDs don't get faked [in places where serious physical IDs are used, USA driverlicences in bars don't count] - it's simpler to make counterfeit dollars than counterfeit passports; from what I have seen from banking fraud statistics, if physical IDs are required, fake ID's are an extremely rare circumstance. You do get cases of (a) stolen IDs and (b) IDs bought off of homeless guys, and then used to open accounts and register companies for money laundering, etc. But not fake IDs - it's apparently too much effort and risk when compared to stealing or buying identities.
Most suburban Chicago commute lines have much lower service frequency than BART. More comparable to CalTrain along the Penninsula, with some 1-2 hour midday gaps in service.
Highlights from EA's lawsuit against Zynga
If you use the same database, and just change the code accessing it, it is.
1). But is PJ actually writing these articles? Or is PJ just publishing them? Is that a stupid allegation to make, or are people scared of mentioning that?

Are other corporations actively supporting her? To what degree? Financially, for hosting the site? Sources? Evidence? Opinions?

2). None are held with the same esteem as Groklaw, which I know most people default to for current news about patents and copyrights.

What isn't being covered by Groklaw? I'm not smart enough to answer that, and I doubt few here are. Is that something to be worried about? We are all trusting an expert which few people here can call out.

3). You are right, there is nothing special about this copyright case in particular. However, I do have a problem with the level of trust that Groklaw receives from the rest of the community. I have supported everything Groklaw has done to this point; however, I am severely worried about the lack of competition when it comes to giving the same level of reporting. One perspective is always bad.
That never occurred to me. Thanks for the suggestion.
As long as you use some tricks to hide the .php from your URLs, else you'll have to add tons of redirects.

But PHP is quite good. Especially PHP 5.4, which has lots of nice things like short array syntax.
I almost had an heart attack after doing `git push --mirror`.

It deleted 95% of branches locally and on origin without leaving much of a trace, or any way to undo (well, none that i know of).

Good thing I had a clone on a machine at home, so I drove home, made local branches for each remote branch and then pushed each.

So yeah, there might be a way to get that stuff back, and I don't even have experience with non-DVCS, but the lesson I learned a long time ago with darcs is that you better have up-to-date off-site backups of your repositories, never trust yourself or your DVCS too much.

The upside is that keeping backups is easy, and good practice anyway, so if you're not doing it yet, don't wait.
Good stuff. Reminds of me Common Lisp's http://clhs.lisp.se/Body/f_upda_1.htm#update-instance-for-re...
Zach Weiner might not be 'spectacularly' successful, but he's not exactly doing poorly for himself. Most recently: http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/999790007/trial-of-the-c...

In any case, I think you missed the thrust of the post, ie, that the content is formulaic (and bad), not that the writing isn't compelling.
..another vote for .Net, MVC and SQL Server from me.

A great example of this stack, is that it powers stackoverflow.com