skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I went to a very large public university. The engineering program was so-so, and they valued ABET over actual learning.

Senior Design was known as the "gauntlet," not necessarily due to the actual building of something, but for the 100-page research paper that they required. They assumed that if each member of the team writes about 25 pages, then they must understand the underlying concepts.

This didn't affect me as much as it did my team. As you can tell, my long-windedness knows no bounds when behind a keyboard. My team however had the collective grammatical know-how of [insert punchline here].

It was my job to proofread the paper. It was straight copy and paste. Utter bullshit.

And I understand that it was my ethical obligation to correct this, if not report it. But it was clearly stated at the beginning of the class: "if one fails, you all fail." I was not prepared to deal with that. So I compromised my standards and just finished the assignment.

I knew that there wouldn't be repercussions; all they do is count the number of pages, make sure there isn't too much whitespace, and that there's no more than 50% of space devoted to pictures.

What can be done? With this particular example there was a large discrepancy with the overall goals that should have been, the goals that were, and the metrics that they measured it.
Thanks for the link to WSGI 2.0. I think that's a step in the right direction, though I agree with the hash table instead of a list of tuples...
Porn most watched in Sunday mornings
esides sleeping, shopping and meeting friends, Sunday has one more important utility – watching pornographic movies. According to a site, morning of the last day of the week is the most popular time in Britain for visiting ‘naughty’ sites.
Unless you're saying it to someone who is dying of a horrendously painful, incurable disease.

My war on universal quantifiers continues...
"There's a sandwich in the fridge, if you're hungry."

"No, there is a sandwich in the fridge whether or not I'm hungry. In fact, if I'm hungry, it's more likely that there is not a sandwich in the fridge, since I would have eaten it by now.

I hate Magical Grammar -- any sentence structured so that the existence of a need leads to the existence of a means of fulfilling it is annoying.
ComScore says U.S. online gaming audience grew 27 percent in 2008
There could be a correlation between programming and the habits you've pointed out but correlation does not imply causation.
Because VCs don't invest anything less than a crapload of money?
Per my last parenthetical comment, youtube doesn't actually "stream", and it's also fairly easy to download youtube videos directly, last I knew. Interesting tidbit, no?

But my point isn't that people aren't flocking to "streaming" sites. It's that if you gave them the choice between a forced stream, like the way Netflix streams movies, or a file that downloaded as quickly as possible, persisted, and could be viewed as it came in if your connection is good enough, they'll take the second one every time. The only way "streaming" wins is when it has something that isn't available that second way. (Or people don't realize it's available, or, gasp, don't actually want to break the law to get it.)
The funniest cheating I have seen in a "class room" was during a philosophy class. Tests for the class were multiple choice and given out on a computer. Every student for some reason good two guesses for each question and there were five answers. This meant that you needed to work with two other people and you could get all the answers right. So during the tests you would hear. Fred - "A" nope. Stan - "B" nope, Jeff - "C" yes. Then everyone would enter C for question one and then repeat.

It was quite hilarious actually.
Summary: "some kinds of transitions are easier to predict: the ones that follow something like Moore's law. Here are a few of those upcoming transitions. I won't try to tell you when they'll come, but perhaps they'll give you some ideas. For context, I'll include a few that have already happened."
TechCrunch founder Mike Arrington to take a break
Friqing Out with Python Closures
There's a really good Jonathan Franzen essay about the Chicago post office in the early '90s (it was notoriously mismanaged). I was surprised by how important the post actually is; most families receive and pay all their bills through it.

On the other hand, cutting from 6 to 5 days seems like a reasonable concession to priorities in the 21st century.
Honey Bees Can Tell The Difference Between Different Numbers At A Glance
> Comments?

That is the issue. Giving users a public voice on your site is what kills everything in the end.
a lesson in civility from MA? The guy's an asshole. If you can't take the consequences for talking shit about people, stop talking shit. He's done real damage to people with the crap he puts up. If he said the shit he publishes in a bar, he'd get his ass kicked. And he's surprised he got spit on?
Well for tests, let students have a formula sheet. I don't understand why in this day and age we need to learn everything by heart, when in the real world everything is 1 search query away.

Or you can just forbid all TI calculators with memory, and just have them work with a $10 special(but thats just a way to screw over the kids).

Then you can have smaller classes. Its a little harder to cheat in a 20 person class, compared to a 300 person auditorium.

For big projects etc, split those in a lot of parts. This way the students won't be tempted to cheat, when they remember that they have a 40 page paper due tomorrow.
Other: fun. I love it.
One million dollars to the first person who can make Internet users nicer.

- No, stabbing doesn't count. DANCE does.

- Tie everything you do to your personal, real-you identity? Too much, privacy concerns.

- Raise awareness about how being good to others is better? Since the dawn of mankind we've been trying.

- Mark it as an unsolvable problem? Nah, not here.

- Have somekind of "boy scouts of the internet"? Give recognition with badges (achievements for you gaming folks)?

- Setup a website (this is an old idea I had) "the-golden-rule.com", where you post what YOU want others to do to you, and users can do these stuff to people they know, and brag on the website how they did it? And earn good-doer points?

- Slashdot moderation applied to random content? Imagine if you could select a DOM node (like Firebug's inspect) and label it "flamebait", "funny", which is sent to a central server, so your blog software can filter your comments not showing some? Or users can assign opacity to "bad" content? (I actually thought of this when I saw Snipd working)

Whatever it is, I think the solution goes around promoting good content, and downplaying bad. Just like in real life... bad people are cast aside, becoming pariahs. Yes, I am fully aware it'll be hard to determine what's good and what's bad. Quis custodiet ipsos custodes?

But anyway, it would be cool to see some kind of tool along these lines.
The barrier to entry has toppled by an order of magnitude and the market is slow to adapt to such changes.
I think there are two different phenomena going on here. First, you have anonymous jerks making stupid comments and threats all over the web. No surprise there; people are less thoughtful when they don't have to put their identity behind their words. The second phenomena is when someone tries to make a name for themselves by criticizing something or someone popular. Again, no surprise; it's been shown to be an effective way to get attention.

I don't really have a solution for either of these problems, but I think it's important to make the distinction between these two cases.
null pointer on your drink-bottle instance results in fatal runtime exception.
I think there are plenty of important things for people to do (automation, biotech, energy). Unfortunately, I think they are getting harder and harder to do (and ergo fewer and fewer people have the skills necessary to do them (retraining at the local community college, just won't do)).

The other problem seems to be that they are longer term problems with much lower success rates. Businesses, and I get the feeling VCs, are focused on the sure thing with a high return in a short time period. I don't think "important things" fit in that group.

Ultimately I think we will all be enjoying a lot more free time, but it think it will take a painful transition to a different social structure to get there.
Making useless clutter is not productive.
Under pressure of mounting evidence and upon consideration I confess that "passion for technology" is not a sufficient criteria.

I guess there is more nuance to this.

Among my friends the ones I emphatise the most with are the ones who do something. Solve coding puzzles, write code that's useful for others, tinker with new technologies just to satisfy their own curiosity or even only talk about doing these things (which I think is a precursor). This in contrast to those who spend their free time watching TV, doing sports or hanging out.

OTOH I can easily believe that there are people who can do these coding things yet wouldn't be much fun at all. Somehow I just don't meet them.
A few other options:

1. Privatize. What does the government have to lose by doing this? (other than less money). I've dealt with both UPS and USPS when mail I sent through each had deliverability issues, UPS was far more pleasant and easy to deal with. I would far rather deal with a few private mail companies, imagine the type of innovation we might see in a market that has been stagnant for as long as I can remember.

2. Charge to cover costs. Is there a Laffer Curve type effect with postal rates (spam snail mail companies switching to email maybe)? I imagine that in most cases charging more would simply equal more revenue, why not just charge $0.50 a stamp instead of $0.43. Its seems much fairer to do this, instead of having taxpayers subsidize the cost that the actual users of the system generate.
I suspect there's a heavy amount of marketing, as most startups that receive millions of VC money tend to have enormous 'growth' - in parenthesis because im sure there's an artificial part of it - I suspect that some of them increase their traffic by paying for fake traffic, so they can say 'look at how our service is popular'.
Threshold: "Latency of an Internet-accessible server is as low as a LAN-connected one. (This will never happen, dooming various efforts that still depend on the assumption that it will.)"

But it could become close enough to not matter.
1) Salaries. Many engineers, salesmen, etc who have been out of college for a year or two don't want to go back to making basically nothing. Yes, you can find talented people who will work for you for little, but it's going to take a long time to do so. It's lovely to think that every company should be able to bootstrap off ramen indefinitely, but it turns out that often times you find that in order to do all the things that need to be done you need to expand beyond the founding team, and, so sorry, those new mouths want to get fed.

2) Capital expenditures. It's nice to run on EC2 for awhile, but it might not be the best hardware fit for your product. Similarly, it's nice to use Cisco switches and not crappy switches when you want your network to work at high volumes.

3) Marginal costs. When you have millions of people using your site all the time, bandwidth, power, free tshirts you give new signups, etc all cost more and more money.

For many companies that are pre-product/market fit, raising millions of VC might not make sense. But for many rapidly growing companies where there is a lag time between user acquisition and user monetization, something needs to fill in the gap. Guess what that is.
My brother had an issue where he had finished a programming assignment early. Some other people found out and asked for help. Being the good-natured (totally naive) freshman he was, he sat down and started to explain his own code to them. Sure enough, they ended up asking the age old question, "I just need to look at it for a while. Could you just send me the code?" Nothing happened until grades came out and he failed. Weeks of interrogations and protests later, he finally cleared his name.

Moral of the story? Never send a copy of your code.
They must be getting hit hard, the servers all are busy or down for the actual servers in San Francisco...

It sounds like a great idea though.
I do this too.

Cheers!
There's luck in every success. But that doesn't mean that success is attributable to luck.
I'm annoyed by stupid/lazy/inept/sloppy people. But I try not to show it - because I really dislike pedantry as well.
If I'm ordering food at a place like Subway, I'll list the toppings I don't want if it's shorter than the list that I do want.
I ran for election last year. I plan to run again in 4 years. I can't post in my real name. While many internet posters tend to follow Gabriel's G.I.F.T., I'm not interested in doing so.

http://www.penny-arcade.com/comic/2004/03/19/
How to innovate right now
Payroll and office space. Occasionally Aeron chairs.
How to detect bullshit
Good, evil and technology
Putin's words may be rough, but it is probably true that Russia does not need Michael Dell's help or any other U.S. IT powerhouse.

This is a key difference between China and Russia culture. China also does not need placating "help" from western companies. But they'll smile and take it until they have the upper hand ;).
I believe it's meant to be read "It might be useful to you to know, if you're hungry, that there's a sandwich in the fridge." However, "It might be useful to you to know" is a universally applicable prefix to every single statement people make--otherwise, why would they be saying it?--and so it's dropped, even when the other clauses in the sentence happen to refer to it instead of to its subjunctive.
Unfortunately, I can't advise you to try to duplicate my setup. I happened to have a valid Windows 98 license and a valid Win4lin license, neither of which you can buy anymore

I don't know about win4lin, but acquiring a Windows98 license can be as easy as picking up an ancient, free PC from Craigslist with a registration sticker on it.
For a VC backed startup that's at 15-25 employees with a successful product I can make up some numbers that aren't totally unrealistic:

Advertising: $30k/mo

PR firm: $10k/mo

Rent: $12k/mo

Salaries: $100k/mo

Servers/bandwidth: $20k/mo

That's a $2 million/year run rate and I don't think this is even particularly on the high side and doesn't include upfront investments in servers, desktops, furniture, software, etc. I'm leaving out lots of stuff, really.

Taking VC means you're aiming high. Spending $2 million/year to take a shot at becoming a huge business is not that extravagant.
10 people making 80k per year, that's a million dollars already. Now add taxes.

If you think VCs are interested in companies that won't need 10 people to run their business, ever... you're thinking to small :) And not only there are your employees, but imagine hiring accountants, lawyers, cleaning staff... the list, only with actual human beings, is already huge!

Now add costs like transportation, hotels, food, all the furniture, the stuff you need just to have the office open, like electricity and water and... fumigation? Ad on Techcrunch? 20k for 2 months. NY Times front page on Sundays? 100k. And let's not even mention prime-time TV... It just costs a lot of money to have a big business running.

Open a spreadsheet anyday and do some calculations. I've only skimmed some of the costs with my examples here (even though I am sure someone will comment how NY Times ads don't apply to your question).
"Arrington has every right to write about what he wants, however he wants to - and to do so without being harassed by the community."

The community didn't harass him, a few nutcases did... depending on your threshold for what constitutes harassment.
Making a really big website does cost money. You can't host yelp on your VPS account. On the other hand, startups that have raised money when they aren't basically failing due to inability to serve up content due to too high of demand are idiots (and the people who hand them money are double idiots).
Big ticket items:

* Carrying inventory, if you sell hardware.

* A 6-10 region direct sales force.

* A full time customer service operation.

* The reconstituted powdered startup marketing packets they sell you when you buy your CEO.

* The pro-forma engineering staff-up you do almost subconsciously to end up with a 50/50 b-team/engineering split.
By "productively occupied" I mean "people do something that they think is useful". This in contrast to watching TV where people are occupied but do not have illusion of doing anything.

I believe this distinction is important to the well-being of those people and the community they are in - prolonged idleness has negative effects.
Here is the video of the creator testing it with his own finger: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=E3mzhvMgrLE
Why open video?
I meant it more in the sense of a koan
$10k/mo for a PR firm. Like, I know that people do it, but it's such a stunningly retarded expense.

$100k/mo salary for 20 people is a fully loaded $60k/yr; that's less than half of what your mean FTE headcount cost will be in the Bay area.
Enough money for the rest of your life is freedom. Enough money to live a lavish lifestyle is a stronger chain than most.
Hey, between them, me, and the computer, I win the vote. They're the strange one dammit.
Except for the anonymous super free-for-all sites, like that one where you can write over images and video. I recall reading an article about a lady celebrity there who was trying to identify people smearing her online, to sue them. (Hadn't succeeded at time of writing.)
If a comment gets modded in the forest...
Nope, it is the stories that make it to #1.
This is actually true. Bad/mediocre VC's only make money on management fees and not on actual returns. So in order to maximize profit, they raise large funds (the bigger the better), and then pump valuations up.

They're only interested in 10x home runs so valuations are almost irrelevant. Since a finite number of partners can only sit on a finite number of boards, they can't have 50 or 100 investments at lower valuation / smaller sums.

High valuations also pump up expectations on the startup -- which is bad for the entrepreneur because if you fail to hit your goals, it means a down round and a ton more dilution.
As long as any human needs or wants are unfilled, there's infinite potential for people to do work. We can always be healthier, have lower infant mortality, make knowledge easier to diffuse, and make products cheaper. Nowdays, we can eat peanut sauce made in Thailand, tea from China, beef from Nebraska, chocolate from Belgium, coffee from Brazil almost anywhere in the world.

Philosophically, how much of this is "important"? I think overall, looking at the world in big chunks of time, things have been and will continue to get better. I talked with a PhD Physicist friend of mine recently for a while, and he sold me on how awesome the world is going to be when the cost of electricity approaches zero - without getting into a ton of details, it's going to be a massive party. Battery and transistor advancements meaning running a 1 pound, high powered laptop for weeks without charging it, free internet throughout the entire globe even in the most remote places, and a hell of a lot of human knowledge freely available to everyone in all of the major languages.

I'm pretty psyched for humanity, and think there's a hell of a lot to be done. We're not perfect, but we're generally trending upwards with a few blips here and there.
Click fraud: a larger Ponzi scheme than Madoff?
[I can't find an e-mail address in your profile or the blog that it mentions.]

I was going with 4x file size and assumed that bandwidth for images is linear in file size, aka no bulk discounts.

One of my points is that IOs have a cost too, a cost that is largely independent of file size.

To first approximation, disk IO capacity is proportional to the number of disks. (Yes, some disks, especially the flash ones, support a lot more IOs/sec than others.) If you're IOs bound, you either have spare disk space or can probably increase the amount of disk space at a sublinear price. (1.5TB drives are <3x as expensive as 500GB.)

For some data transfers, AWS has a "per operation" charge in addition to a bandwidth charge. The latter is proportional to file size but the former is not.

My application has a lot of processing costs. Most of them are on metadata, not the images, so they don't grow with image size. I also do a lot of stuff with "thumbed" images - producing them is a function of file size but storing them and moving them around isn't.

My model is different from yours in at least two ways.

(1) I'm estimating some things.

(2) I'm using AWS and GAE prices. (I'm assuming the highest prices because if my app is getting enough use that I'm getting bulk discounts, I've got other problems.)

If I had a model that tracked my actual experience, I wouldn't listen to some bozo on a website....

FWIW, data in a db is significantly larger than the actual data.
350-page Internet market research report from JP Morgan
Problems of Recommender Systems
Thanks for your first hand experience input.

Your first two points I can agree with, but it's the 3rd that troubles me.

Shouldn't a company that means to stay in business want to have slow but steady growth, a gradual climb, giving the them time to adapt.

Doesn't a company want to put its money making plan in action before it goes big time?

I know justin.tv has major bandwidth requirements, and from what I can see there is no revenue model apart from adverts in place, which probably can't cover the cost of the bandwidth alone let alone everything else.

Please take no offence but if a company has a cash gap it's usually a bad sign, and throwing money at the problem will only work for so long.
I don't think the article was implying there was anything wrong with it. Just a curious tidbit that one of the first big companies to use production code in Python was Microsoft.

Also, programs written in Python are not subject to Python's licensing terms so there's no violation there. That would only happen if they modified the interpreter itself.
Hey, your email isn't listed in your profile -- if you want people to be able to see it, you need to relist it in the about me section.
I believed this when I was younger, but now I've amended my position. Paper money isn't worthless - it has no inherent value, which is true. But if we all agree upon it as a means of exchange and set fair rules on how it's made and spread, then we're good.

The issue isn't with paper money, it's with making the rules excessively complicated or unfair, or just outright breaking the money rules. Paper money is conducive to that though - any currency specialists have an idea for creating a better way?

I've always wondered about a private (non-government) diversified commodities-backed currency floating against international currencies, with liquid electronic and paper notes - and simple yet rigid rules and governance on how to absorb new purchases into the system and buy assets with it, and what reserves to keep for people cashing out. This is one of those things I sit and think about, but I reckon it'd be hard to do. Thoughts?
I welcome all suggestions. I get the feeling that cheating does not get reported very often, and I have become increasingly intolerant as every new scandal gets reported on TV.

I'm always shocked at the lack of repercussions for people who cheat, even when it is obvious.
Also, you see a vastly different picture if you click the "values" link rather than the "percent" link. Not sure why.
done! thanks for the tip. i welcome any input.
His criticism rings true?

He claims that she came out of nowhere because she was a prostitute at O'Reilly conferences. A literal prostitute, not a metaphorical one.

That's beyond ridiculous.

How can you brush off something that bizarro and believe the rest of his rant has merit?