skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I agree with you inasmuch as an economy is about people, but what if it isn't about people so much as some larger "thing" (an incomprehensible interaction of systems, perhaps?) that individuals, and even governments, have to deal/interact with? What if that's just as true for the so-called global "elites" as for the rest of us? I suspect that it is. I think that what you say about people controlling other people is accurate; I just think it's only a small percentage of the data we have to account for.
I'd consider DH slightly more important.
I think some of this is driven from the google toolbar, which many people confuse with the address bar.

On a side note, what really boggles the mind is the number of searches for "google" or "google.com". According to the Keyword Tool, there were approximately 30mil exact searches for "google", and 7.4mil searches for "google.com"!
"The bad debt that has accumulated needs to be accounted for, losses have to be taken, companies need to go into bankruptcy (which is often reorganization, not necessarily going out of business.)"

I get the feeling that while this is intuitively the best idea, it is also far riskier. What if allowing the economy to tank sends us into some kind of never before seen death spiral? The stakes here are extremely high and there is much that is not understood. Considering the circumstances, it seems better to take conservative actions which, though they may not be a great solution, at least prevent disaster.
As long as individuals aren't identified, a graph seems fine.
Graphene is an interesting area of research, and one that is very "hot" right now. My lab mate is doing research on it and it seems like every experiment he tries to do, someone else comes out with a paper in Nature about it the next week.

From what I gather, as soon as graphene can reliably be "printed", we'll get to see some interesting devices. Already some teams have had success with building transistors. http://physicsworld.com/cws/article/news/37204

Lots of interesting Physics is still left to do. There will be many breakthroughs in the coming years.
What do you think the fundamental flaw of capitalism is? The wording is a little odd, but capitalism by its very nature has a tendency to concentrate capital in the hands of the few.
It's not stalking, it's a darn handshake
New Garyvaynerchuk.com, it'll rock your face off.
Malware: Google and Berkowitz
Social networking isn't a 6th grade dance, get out there and add folks!
The scientifically un-rigorous interpretation on my part is that women instinctively lie about sex much more than men. This is quite understandable as a woman's survival in the ancestral environment was most often about how effectively she capitalized on her sex appeal. This would involve pretending to be more aroused in situations where she was expected to be aroused (i.e. an alpha male wants her to be aroused) and not showing signs of arousal in situations where she shouldn't (don't let the alpha male see you lusting after a different male).

Now the fact that women responded to a broader range of pictures than men I have no ideas about. Perhaps it is not an adaptation but merely a side effect of women being more empathetic. Do women have more/more highly reactive mirror neurons? Have any studies been done on this?
ordered by importance:

touch typing: 10 fingers + numbers

a decent editor: vim

html+css

jquery (i guess it's the lispiest framework)

server-side: lisp / scheme

unix command: piping, awk, grep, find, xargs (a 'mapping' equivalent)

gimp: script-fu (tiny-scheme) and imagemagick of course

os: openbsd (i find it easier -- altho more stern -- than linux)
Why would you lose files because you switch to Linux? When I switched I just put my old windows hard drive in my computer and copied them - which is the same thing I would have done with a new Windows installation.

I don't know if that's still possible. That was in the FAT32 days. But I'm sure that it's still possible to transfer files from one computer to another.
Great article, although a little depressing at times. For example, I really didn't know there was a lack of understanding about where desire comes from in women. There was even a paragraph in there that mentioned that even with good relationships, desire is sometimes not guaranteed. As a male, I'd like to think otherwise...but science is science I guess.
SEE YOU AT SXSW GARY!!
Love the video.
A few important ones:

Lempel-Ziv compression: Though it's hard to point to things that would have been impossible without it, it's saved so much transfer and storage capacity in its time that the economic impact would be huge.

Apriori association mining: Of fairly limited application, but it's use in market basket data has probably had quite a large impact on our retail sector for one.
it's the truth!
Love the video Gary. You always pump out great content!
rock the realness!
radool!!! :)
this is kind of cute, but not entertaining enough to make the lack of intellectual interestingness worthwhile. execution ok but not stellar: graphics are large and invasive.

with a little thought this could have been cute. inject the images into the dom, maybe to replace advertisements or brighten logos. do a little data mining or randomness to inject stormclouds every-so-often. do something cute when used on weather sites.
I meant that as a complement. I think an "entertainer" is not just a random actor, singer, or blogger, but someone who does those things and makes real money from it. To do that generally takes leveraging popularity. Granted you can make a living as a backup dancer, but I think he has separated himself from the herd.
I think he meant only credit the user with 10 karma points. The comment can still be boosted based on the number of up-mods it receives.
There's a much bigger fear of deflation rather than inflation at the moment. Also, the dollar has actually been relatively strong since the financial crisis because there's been a large increase in the demand for safer assets, ie cash and treasury bills. A weakening dollar would probably be better for the economy as goods manufactured in America would be cheaper abroad, leading to an increase in net exports.

I don't quite follow the reasoning of cheap American goods -> exodus of capital.
Review My App: Things I Did
It's all fun and games until you execute this on facebook and the Unicorns steal your cookie and hijack your account.

Yes, bookmarklets can do that.
Thanks :). Complex numbers befuddled me for a long time too.
So once your master password is found (brute force/keylogger/shoulder surfing), the attacker has a handy bookmarklet to log into all of your accounts.
Pew Pulling at Straws to Measure the Blogosphere
Thanks for the kind words! It really means a lot knowing it's coming in useful.
Eye push-ups:

http://gordinmedical.com/articles/chiropractic/eye_pushups.p...
am I missing something?
And Stanford Law switched this year. They have a no-pass/pass/high-pass system.
The importance of play is well confirmed in other animals as well. Some of the primary research literature is cited in The Nature of Paleolithic Art

http://www.amazon.com/Nature-Paleolithic-Art-Dale-Guthrie/dp...

(by a biologist who is also an artist), my favorite book of last year.
Thanks -- ironically, I was planning on spending this weekend writing some more :)
I think you forgot to include a user interface.
I'd have to collect the data before I graphed it, so probably not. I'm busy now trying to improve performance. All my recent gains in that dept have already been consumed by growth.

I'm probably going to get rid of override anyway.
As more people use the site the Karma swings are going to increase. He got a + 24 on the same thread so IMO it balances out.
No worries, the business model is fully thought through. We're expecting to be profitable in phase 3.
I was going to separately nominate back-projection for producing CAT scans, but its really another vote for the importance of FFTs.
This is old news. Since then, the NYT Co has gotten itself a financial lifeline by taking out a 250M loan from Carlos Slim, a Mexican billionaire.

http://www.editorandpublisher.com/eandp/news/article_display...
Summary? The description of the experiment in the beginning sounded interesting, but then the article got carried away a lot. I guess the author wanted to milk the subject for all he (or she?) could.

Only guessing, but I expect that the conclusion of the article is "no idea"...
Why is that a bad thing? Successful companies in the free market are successful because they have given people something they want for a voluntary exchange of capital. These companies turn around and develop more products that people want.

Why do you seek a flaw in capitalism? Capitalism simply means the voluntary exchange of goods and services. The alternative is non-voluntary exchange i.e. you are forced.

If you don't know why privately controlled means of production are good you have a lot of reading to do. Might I point you to the Cato Institute or Ludwig Von Mises Institute (google for free literature). Or for a more popular example check out Friedman's bestsellers.

For the ugly and fast version:
Would you put up with wal-mart taking $40 from your paycheck every month and telling you that you can come get a gallon of milk every week for "free"?

first you should be free to choose whether you want milk or not and whether to support it with your money.

second you have no way of knowing if you're overpaying because you have no idea what price milk would sell for if several companies were competing for your business.

thirdly you have no recourse if the quality of the milk goes down. you can try to sue wal mart..good luck with that. You might claim that people are still free to go buy other milk, but any other company selling milk is at a huge disadvantage. People have to pay that $40 a month regardless, so most figure they might as well get the milk out of it. competitors milk could cost half of what wal-mart charges, $20 a month. But from the perspective of the citizen that "private milk" costs $60 a month since they have to pay the $40 regardless.

In this scenario wal-mart has you as a captive customer. Before it made money by convincing you to buy milk from it with high quality and a low price. Freed of having to convince you to buy it wal-mart doesn't have to care much about customer service or product quality.

This is essentially the scenario of state owned goods and services. you're assuming that the central planner can come up with a better solution than lots of entrepreneurs taking a crack at it.
Pretty cool, but before anyone starts talking about the coming age of bio computation, keep in mind neurons are a horribly inefficient way of carrying out this kind of computation.
Not really, people with high Karma can flag posts and get them taken down. This happens a lot more with politics than other types of controversial topics. Personally I could flag this post, but it's interesting AND novel so IMO it stays.

Edit: "The story is on topic." (PG) http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=460159
A lot of the comments here seem to be enjoying the joke and having fun, but shouldn't we take the review requests on HN a little more seriously? It's the only resource on the web that allows for this form of quality feedback from such great talent and experience as is present on HN. I'd just hate to start seeing it abused, and then fade away as people stop paying attention to the review requests.

edit: Or maybe I should just cornify my site :-)
Sorry to disappoint you. We're focusing on "less is more" and after long debates we decided that frolicing was something our users could live without. We take your feedback serious and if there is more user request, we will certainly be open to a later implementation.
This has the promise of something exciting and he's certainly right about the cross pollination from amateurs.
My wife just bought a big ass F250 pickup with the 7.3L Powerstroke diesel and that immediately began to feed my interest in biodiesel.
My background is in designing controllers and writing software to control machinery. As I was researching the amateur ways of making diesel from waste vegetable oil, I was struck by how it lends itself to automation: pour WVO in at one end, push a button and get diesel and glycerine out the other. But yet almost everyone still seems to be doing it by hand in their garages.
It'd be a better topic if the title wasn't linkbait that encouraged off topic comments. And the article didn't start with a big kiss picture and a statement about making animal porn.

BTW, calling my comment superficial violates your guidelines. It's not civil. It's not an argument. It's an insult.
Sorry. Will fix this issue asap.
Yes, but it once was the case that noise comments were given a single downvote and left alone by everyone else.

Negative numbers here are like a slap in the face, and when overused they will be even more corrosive to the community than a flood of juvenile comments would be.

More to the point, those scores are not supposed to be used to represent entertainment value, because people are not participating here for pure mindless entertainment.
IE7 doesn't allow bookmarklets to be dragged to the Links toolbar, presumably due to the security risk. Instead, right-click and Add to favorites...
To add to this, it should be stated that downmodding a comment to less than 1 because you simply disagree with it is against the nature of the site. Negative points are for comments that are entirely out of line.
When they show up dead, but I guess if they don't have showdead on then there is no feedback that the post is killed.
why did this comment deserve downvotes? it's not abrasive, and it's true! the same thing happened to me.

seems like every site that has a mobile version does this. you follow a link from somewhere else, and instead of getting to the page you wanted to read, you wind up at the top page of their mobile site. annoying.
I just ask them. That seems to work out alright.
A.T.&T. is changing from a subsidized and regulated service-oriented company to a free-market, competitive-marketing technology company. A.T.&T.’s products per se have never been of the highest quality. All you have to do is go look at their telephones. They’re somewhat of an embarrassment. - Steve Jobs

Some early foreshadowing.

This is one of the best Jobs interview I've seen. It's long but it's well worth it; Greatly inspiring.
I agree with Joel here: Bob is being unfair. Here's what I heard Jeff and Joel say when I listened to their podcast:

Quality matters, but there are other things that also matter, such as actually getting working code written. Some of us (and I've personally struggled with this for a long time) have a hard time letting go of our quest for perfection and settling for shipping code that's imperfect but works. When Jeff says that "quality just doesn't matter that much," what I took this to mean is: quality matters, but it matters less than we sometimes feel like it does. And that doesn't mean he's condoning writing crappy code; he's simply saying that we tend to overvalue this abstract concept of quality and that can have a crippling effect on our productivity.

Joel focuses on dogmatic adherence to development methodologies/principles as an example, specifically testing. I got the impression that he thinks testing is great and it has its place in the software development ecosystem. It tends to increase software quality and there are certain types of software for which it is really, really important (Jeff mentions framework code as an example). That said, taken to an extreme, testing can get in the way of getting things done... getting working code written and out the door / live on the server / whatever. It can also get in the way of modifying working code, as intentional changes to the way that code works always breaks some percentage of your unit tests, just as a regression will. And while catching unintentional regressions is great (and one of the best reasons you should unit test), constantly having to rewrite your tests every time you change the behavior of an internal class can be a real drag on your productivity. And that can be bad.

The key is to avoid being overly dogmatic in your adherence to development principles. Instead, be pragmatic and find a balance. Test enough to ensure adequate quality (whatever that happens to be for your product), but no more. Otherwise you're just doing yourself (or your employer) a disservice.
The bug being the policy of discouraging feedback to commenters/submitters on exactly why their comment/article was down-modded. Meta-discussion, last I checked, was no-no.
Feature request: Additional pictures, please. You do not have a suitable variety to satiate my thirst for Unicorns and rainbows.

Additionally, a Unicorn puking rainbows would make me invest.
My daughter loves it.
I still remember when I first heard of Chandler on slashdot around 2001. It's good to see it released; looks pretty nice too.
Do you have firebug installed?

for (var i = 0; i < 10000; ++i) { cornify_add() }
What if massive government spending sends us into some kind of never before seen (1) death spiral?

Fearmongering about the end of the world can cut both ways, but it usually cuts in the direction you were already leaning.

(1) Actually, the "stimulus"-caused inflationary death spiral has been seen before. However, I'm not going to argue that this will or will not happen as a result of the currently proposed stimulus. Fact is, I have no idea.
if you s/testing/unit testing/g, that's pretty much on target.
Well, what exactly do you want us to review? You created a classic login/logout and it easily displays what you submit to the server. That works great. But what else?

You need to create more value. Any good hacker can whip this up in 10 minutes. I can get the same functionality out of gmail...or a pencil and a piece of paper for that matter.
If we want a community of intelligent, civil posters, asking its citizens to look beyond titles and examine the articles themselves seems like a reasonable expectation.
The Deutsch-Jozsa Algorithm, while not immediately "practical" in the sense that it solved some real-world problem that had been vexing computer scientists, was instrumental in showing conclusively that quantum computers could be asymptotically faster than classical computers for some problems. This then led the way for more applied quantum algorithms such as Shor's Algorithm (itself a special case of QFT and period-finding algorithms). So I'd like to nominate DJA for an algorithm that changed the world.
This might lead to a deeper understanding of how neural nets work (or an easier way of implementing them in the hardware, as it were). If we can design regular logic in neurons, we can (eventually?) do some of the fancy neural nets, and then we have the basis of an actually useful breakthrough.

Cool stuff though.
I have to second simulated annealing if only because it gets too ignored normally. It's a wonderful technique for attacking the optimization of intractable problems, and one that belongs in any good mental toolkit for optimization.
The underreported half of Google's new Measurement Lab
how does this affect the developer? would this affect their royalties?
Since I'm spending a lot of time on 4chan lately as research for an article, I got a fit of giggles when you mentioned the hormone-drunk adolescents that rule...Reddit.
How about putting [joke] or something in the title, so those of us short on time can skip it?
They'll notice the submissions get no comments or upvotes.
Meta-discussion is not needed. You can teach a neural net to dance simply by saying Yes, and No. The problem with saying "you did X wrong here is how you fix it" is many people only hear "Only do Y" where we want any acceptable submission even if it's on juggling (http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=418460).
Monte Carlo methods is a family of algorithms no?

I still haven't groked exactly what is so special about them. Incredibly useful, sure, but aren't they just simulations?
Ie, isn't it something anyone would have come up with(sorry if I'm just ignorant here)?
You are engaging in meta discussion too :)

I think only certain types of meta discussion are harmful, and one has to differentiate.
Scholarship is to be created not by compulsion, but by awakening a pure interest in knowledge. The wise instructor accomplishes this by opening to his pupils precisely the attractions the study has for himself. The marking is a system for schools, not for the college; for boys, not for men; and it is an ungracious work to put on a professor.

-- Emerson
"A little dirt is good for you" strikes me as a bittersweet lesson for those of us who avoid the conflict and drudgery that's necessary to reach any worthwhile dream.

Plus now I'm hungry for some beef.
On the Flickr support in iPhoto ‘09
"Managing the economy" is not what Keynesianism is really about. It's about correcting a specific flaw in capitalist economies (the existence of multiple inefficient equilibrium positions). The idea is that once you correct that specific flaw, the economy will run itself better.

To look at it another way: Keynes argued that no one can manage the market, including the market itself. But that doesn't mean it can't be managed better than it is.
My lament against capitalism doesn't propose a solution. There are no alternatives.
I've got the "interesting to hackers" bit.

What happens is somebody makes a comment, gets downmodded, then wonders why. So they ask (trust me, I've tried this). Their question itself then gets downmodded -- meta discussions not tolerated. So the commenter, who is not psychic, is left with negative feedback from the moderation system without any idea at all what or what not to do in the future.

This idea of treating HN as just a large dataset with contributors simply being data suppliers to train the neural net has some really big limitations. Last I checked, the board was full of human beings, and posting in some fashion approximates the social activity of having a conversation. The further the system strays from the social/linguistic/psychological needs of conversation, the less effective it is as a community facilitator, in my opinion.

Meta-discussion might not be needed by the computer, but it's a natural part of human behavior and to the degree the system does not allow this, the system is broken.

My opinion only.
ten year old girls is definitely an untapped market opportunity just waiting for monetary exploitation by devious but brilliant entrepreneurs eager to enhance shareholder value.

I'm sure Mattell are shaking in their pants, knowing that their core market is about to be exploited heavily by a soon to be funded by Draper Fisher Jurvetson and quickly acquired by Google, company much more aligned with web 2.0 and an uncanny ability to align the interests of multiple stakeholders in the fast changing world of international webcommerce.
I tend to down vote things that are at +50 karma and up vote stuff that get's really low unless they are extremely good or bad. However, think of it like a threading problem. If 30 people that think like I do see the comment at 10 and all up vote it it's going to hit 40 without updating it's value to those people.
The Big Fix
Alex Payne: The Case Against Everything Buckets
Interested parties should also check out pyrex, Python2C, and pysco.
That doesn't mean the NYT is going to suddenly become profitable though, we'll see if $250M more is enough burn for them to figure out a new business model.
To be fair, Richard Nixon also said 'I am not a crook' and that turned out to be untrue.
Our Love Affair With Shopping Malls Is on the Rocks
Extinct ibex is resurrected by cloning
As a related question:

Could you learn as much taking a free course online (MIT OpenCourseware or Stanford's free courses)? No grades, no need to hand in assignments, no mandatory exams.

I'm trying it as an experiment right now. Any bets on whether I finish the course and/or learn anything?
The Internet Could Use Some Work