skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
For every person making $XXX a day with AdSense there are a thousand making $XXX a year. Or things are humming along smoothly until you wake up one morning and you've been smart priced back to the stone age and aren't making anything per click anymore. The only guaranteed winner with AdSense is Google themselves. The reason AdSense is so successful is because Google takes an unspecified cut of every click and it's an industry built on the back of ringtone scams and click fraud.

Being beholden to a market that consists of a bunch of AdWords account managing hooligans that gnash and claw all day to drive bid prices down and are being governed by Google isn't really the kind of market you want to be counting on long term. Which just goes back to my point that while things might be good one day, by relying on an outside party for revenue, you might wake up tomorrow and be screwed because of decisions made by people totally unrelated to you or your product.
Agreed, I'm always amazed that I order something knowing it's going to take time. I ordered a couple of books, one of which was out of stock and was estimated to arrive in 1-2 weeks, so I was like sure whatever I'll just take the free delivery. I got a dispatch order at 8am the next morning and it arrived by the friday, it took a total of 4 days. This has happened to me multiple times and simply amazes me.
I'm a 3D animator for my day job, I definitely believe in the teapot, I saw it in the Cornell box so I know it exists.
(apologies if this is way too much of an inside joke)
Congrats! How did you go about getting the Telegraph to write about you?
Great post. I wrote a long comment in this thread, where I went off on a bit of a tangent on how the US should institute a moratorium on funding for graduate student training, but I deleted it, because it felt overly negative and conspiratorial. You did a much better job of saying what I was trying to say, and backing it with numbers. Bravo.

Suffice to say that I agree that we're training far too many scientists in this country, and that somehow, we need to find a way to wean Universities (and industry) off the government dole. The problem is, after decades of subsidy for advanced research, the US is addicted to cheap intellectual labor in the form of under-employed graduate students and post-doctoral researchers. If the government were to drastically cut funding for these "training" positions, the university system would collapse.

My opinion is that the only way out of this conundrum, is to force industry to re-invest in R&D over the long term. That means no more licensing patents from university research programs that were developed using federal funding; no more "tech transfer" that allows corporate research to be done on campus for slave wages; and a slow dial-down in agency funding for applied research at universities (as opposed to basic science). Research and development has to be driven by market demand, if science is to be a stable career choice for intelligent students.
It seems that one lesson to take away is that there's more to "public works" than just construction. Technology and science development, for one.

However, having been to Japan, I can say that, along with all the "waste" in rural areas, they have a genuinely better transport infrastructure than the US. Now, with the advent of telecommuting, maybe that looks less important. But extensive high-speed and local rail are fantastic for business; they literally carry customers straight to you in a way that requires less volition on the part of consumers than driving does.

Also briefly mentioned in the article is that the US infrastructure has not been as well-maintained; a lot of this money is hardly "stimulus" but just necessary work that's been put off.
DHH on twitter: "We haven't stored CC numbers on our own for quite some time. We're using Braintree Payment Solutions these days." http://twitter.com/d2h/status/1184653105
$1000 isn't 10/meal/person for a family of 4; it's $8. A meal at McDonalds --- where allegedly lower-middle class people eat because it's cheap --- is $5-$6 in a major metro area.

There are obviously meals we can spec here that cost nowhere close to $8/person. But:

* A plurality of families in America don't cook every night; that doesn't make them clueless crypto-rich people, it makes them normal. If you don't cook, your meal cost goes up.

* A couple contemplating a family life together could reasonably break up over the issue of feeding itself for 5-10 years off bulk dry rice, beans, and corn.
The shyness part is probably when people treat the question of belief in certain supernatural beeings as "special". Nobody is "agnostic" about their belief in the Tooth Fairy. They just plain don't believe in him (her?). Beeings from still living religions are treated differently since the issue is more sensitive.
I'm worried about the expense, so this seems like a good way to go. What sort of specs do you need to run OS X under VMware?
Yes. If you have kids, which I think you just acknowledged you don't, every thought you have about budgeting and your comfort levels are going to change.
Does the company you're involved with do PCI compliance auditing?
I like to check out wordpress themes.
Do you need to actually test on an ipod touch/iphone? The simulator isn't good enough?
I mostly pull colors from images, but http://www.colourlovers.com and http://www.wellstyled.com/tools/colorscheme2/index-en.html are sometimes helpful. FireBug is real helpful for experimentation.

The best advice I know regarding color schemes: spend time up front finding a good 6-8 colors to cover everything from backgrounds to link hovers, and then, stick with that scheme for your first iteration so that you don't get hung up on choosing colors all the time.
I'm surprised that Hastings didn't mention that there's already a "luxury tax" on CEO salaries over $1M.

Ordinarily, salary is a deductible biz expense. However, there's a cap - if Netflix wants to pay Hastings $2M/year, it can only deduct the first $1M.

This cap doesn't apply to performance-based pay or options.

Curiously, options and the like for CEOs and so on didn't become popular until that cap was imposed.

Oh, and he's wrong about tax rates. CA's top rate is over 9% (it hits that at around $50k) and the fed top rate is almost 40% and there's a phase out of deductibility of state taxes. If he's paying around 30%, he's not working for salary.
By that logic, all theories would need to be proven down to the detailed fundamentals before deemed worthy of discussion.
It's like saying you have to determine the make, model and age of a car in the parking lot before you are allowed to assert that (any) car may exist in the parking lot.

But, as I have said before, I agree with you in that I don't feel the real truth of the matter can be proven externally. I choose to believe in God, but I have no 'proof' scientifically speaking.
I can only speak for myself, and this is the way I see it (but this is already Faith):

"God" is defined this way: the only one not caused by anything else.

So, if God is the only one not caused by anything, but simply cause of Himself, nobody can reach God, if He doesn't allow to be reached.

So, the only possibility for us to know something about God is that He deliberately decided to communicate Himself to us.

From this premises, it's clear that there can only be one real Religion, and that all the other ones are simply negations of some parts of the real one...
This is a very useful thing, and it's crucial that programmers learn it.

And though it doesn't specifically say so in the article, this technique really needs to be applied everywhere in a C++ program and its libraries. Maybe your program doesn't throw exceptions, but something else might; if your cleanup isn't automatic, it may not always occur.
This is a natural idiom in Ruby as well, built into most of the standard library classes; resource classes accept blocks for their initializers that invoke "close" when the block completes.

File.open("foo.txt", "w") do |f|
f.write("this is a test\n")
end
It's also a really common code security problem in most C++ code written until ~2005 (meaning: most C++ code).
Enom being on that list doesn't surprise me one bit. When Bulkregister got bought out by enom I switched all our domains over to Moniker, and that was for the second time that we made such a move (previously from godaddy with a bunch of other stuff at network solutions).

What I don't get is this: To become a registrar is a very marginal business at best, the 'take' on a domain is less than a dollar I believe.

This means that you either have to have a lot of extra stuff to sell and use the domain to get people in the door (godaddy goes so far as to sell their domains at a loss if you transfer them in), or that you'll have to do an awful lot of them.

Either of these strategies takes a long time to get going so it would be quite a big problem to have your accreditation pulled.

If that's all true then why do these registrars take the risk of having just that happen to them ?
Ruby’s Most Underused Keyword
Thanks. I don't even read most 37signals posts anymore. They just don't seem very interesting. I think it's because their writing isn't timeless.
One thing I've noticed is that hackers seem to like statistics, and I poll on what language you use would do equally well. I know that personally I like collecting information even if it is completely irrelevant.
(You weren't asking me, but I may have implied it earlier --- we definitely don't do PCI certification work; life's too short to waste on a bunch of checklists.)
Some theists believe in more than one god.

I wonder if a polytheist in anciant Greece which believed in one less god (e.g. didn't belive in Cronos, but did believe in the rest of the pantheon) would be concidered an atheist by his contemporaries?
I just kind of go into it intuitively. I guess you could call it synesthesia, but that's a bit overwrought a description. I pick colors that feel right and jiggle until it comes together perfectly.
Optimal Pricing - Annual Credit Card Billing Subscriptions
While intellectually I'm interested in the results of this poll, I agree with what was said above. It's simply better not to get into this type of stuff as ultimately it will detract from the value of this site. As such, I've flagged this and I encourage others to do the same.
My point was that if you are restricting the comparison to the physical universe then logically you must be implying the brain extends beyond the physical universe somehow -- since there is more than one brain in the physical universe. Your subsequent statements in this thread confirmed you have this opinion.

If true, then it has an undefined and immeasurable complexity. You can't make all these statements about it, you can't measure it, and you have no context to even begin to talk about it. You can't even make assertions about what the measurement of complexity itself would be ("infinitely more" is just as nonsensical as a finite number more because we do not know what the units of a complexity measurement would be -- if "units" even makes sense in the "beyond").
Who Has Time For This?: TED 2009 Wednesday: "Reboot"
Damn straight. Convinced me to sign up.
They are a VISA/MC authorized reseller working together with Paysquare in the netherlands, I'm not going to name them because I would not want to recomend any compay that I'm affiliated with, that's too much like advertising on a site like this.

So, no, they don't do the audits themselves but they have been audited several times over the last 8 years, and so far they have passed their audits with flying colours.

The people running that business take it very seriously, they process about 150M$US annually and they have it set up so that every customer has their own merchant account.

This is contrary to most IPSP's that multiplex a single (or several) merchant account(s) across many merchants, which I personally believe is a recipe for disaster. For more information on what can go wrong have a look at 'IBill' and 'DMR'.

This does mean that it is much more expensive to set up a customer but the good news is that it actually is a lasting relationship instead of 'until we get yanked'.
I grab a camera and take pictures of things that were obviously put together by someone who knows color.

There is a neighborhood full of very well-painted homes that has inspired a few of my designs. One time I pulled a color scheme from macro shots of my backyard. My client said, "Wow, I really like that brown, what is that?"

It was dog poop.
The other evil thing about "~\Library\Preferences\Macromedia\Flash Player\" is that it keeps an entire tree of every host name you've ever been to, even if the directories end up empty.

Things like "private browsing" are misleading because of things like this, because they'll never find everything.
The problem appeared when the /atheism/ subreddit became one of the defaults. Some of the /atheists/ aren't in it for discussion, they're there for blind antireligion. When that turned mainstream it pissed a lot of people off.
For what it's worth I attended a seminar by this guy

http://www.princeton.edu/~rajchak/

the other day and he was talking about using optimal control theory to optimize protein sequences for specific enzyme activity. He had a very sophisticated model for how the amino acid sequence determines the shape of the protein's active area. It was way over my head but he treated it as a solved problem. You may find his papers interesting.

The combinatorial search results on protein folding are theoretically interesting, but I don't think that they are show stoppers for finding, or optimising the folded configuration of a protein. As you mentioned, most of the degrees of freedom which lead to the exponential size of the search space are irrelevant. A detailed understanding of the physics of how amino acids interact in water with ions can allow one to make approximations that vastly reduce the size of the search space.

Plus how much time does it take a protein to find it's native conformation? Let's say the folding time is 10 ms. I think ultrafast pump probe spectroscopy has shown that alpha helices and other secondary structural motifs form on the time scale of 100 ps. Then the protein explores about 10^8 configurations before it finds the native one.
Absolutely. I mean, I was blown away. Blown away. They even called me the week after to make sure everything was OK and to ask how the photo taking went. You expect that sort of personalization and care from a smaller company but it TRULY is something when you see it from one with a $30 Bil market cap.

I haven't done business online with anyone else since (on big ticket items) and probably never will.
I'm not certain that a Creator exists, but in view of the available evidence, it seems like a not-unreasonable bet -- depending of course on what the stakes are. (The degree of confidence you want in any Proposition X will depend in part on what happens if you're wrong.)

And over the long term, following the Summary of the Law that Jesus stressed -- which can be recast as, 1) face the facts, and 2) seek the best for others as you do for yourself -- appears to be adaptive behavior for individuals and cultures.

The Summary of the Law is by no means uniquely Christian, incidentally; it's Jewish (hey, Jesus was nothing if not a good Jew), and also finds expression in other faiths.

Shameless self-promotion: I blog about topics like this at http://www.questioningchristian.org.
yeah, I was thinking EFF.

Might be a good idea as well to flesh out the issue in a blog post in a comprehensible and accessible way. Explaining the importance of the right to organize, why civil disobedience is important, et cetera.

Then spread it around the social news sites and get other bloggers to blog about it.
We Must Look to the Future (and colonize space)
You can also just hit php.net/whatever_you_are_looking_for
and it will either redirect to the docs for the most likely function or suggest functions with similar names.
Drop me an e-mail :)
Fascinating possibilities. Note that for some of the folks who participated it was excitement about the competition not just the money that drove them in the weight-loss bet.

In any case... great innovation: applying old principles (competition & financial incentives) in new ways to new realms. Like with smoking cessations, sometimes you have to just try several different strategies until you find one that works for your mind/body system.

I am reminded of the maxim, "Insanity may be defined as continuing to employ repeatedly the same strategies and expecting to get different results.
Not to put too fine a point on it, you're a theist.
Spreedly seems like a potential option as well.
I think it depends which God you ask if someone believe in.

For example, the Platonic idea of The Good is a pretty abstract philosophical concept which does not exist in the physical world - rather the physical world is some kind of shadow or reflection of this Good. You can't really prove or disprove the "existence" of this interpretation of reality, although some would say you can apply occams razor to it. Plato would argue that you cannot not belive in this, if you just consider the question reationally.

On the other hand, the biblical God Yahweh is a beeing with a physical shape and with intentions and emotions, which walk around in the physical world in historical times and interact with people (and killing them left and right!). The existence of this beeing could easily be proved if you meet him, but cannot strictly speaking be disproved as long as he remains in hiding. But the evidence can be weighed the same way we weigh evidence for the existence of mammuths or unicorns.

The christian notion of God has historically been kind of a mixture of these two ideas (and to a lesser degree many other). Due to this complexity of the concept "God", it is not even clear what it means to believe or don't believe in God.
Hey this is from the abstract of:

Sequence optimization and designability of enzyme active sites - PNAS v. 102 (2005)

Full text is here:

http://www.pnas.org/content/102/34/12035.full

"""
Since it was first observed that all known natural proteins adopt one of only ≈1,000 distinct protein folds (1) [emphasis mine], researchers working in the field of computational protein design have endeavored to understand the basis of this biophysical phenomenon and apply the resultant knowledge to the construction of unnatural proteins. Motivated by the observation that certain folds are associated with more natural sequences than others, the principle of fold designability (the number of unique sequences compatible with the backbone structure of the fold) was introduced (1). To place the problem on a mathematical foundation, an analogy has been drawn between sequence space and phase space in statistical physics, where the backbone structure represents a macroscopic state of the system and distinct sequences are microscopic states whose occupation of the macroscopic state is associated with an energy, the folding free energy of the protein. In this language, a fold's designability is correlated with its sequence entropy (2).
"""
That argument originally came from Bertrand Russell, not Dawkins.
Hire somebody that's good at this stuff; same as dealing with icons and images and such.

Creating good color schemes and good icons is as much a specific skill as creating good code.

If you're serious about a product, it's worth the investment. The first thing folks see with your project is the UI; the colors and the icons and such, after all.
Third that. I used to work at a company that processed a high volume of payments. It's a pretty big pain to be PCI compliant, from restricting access to any server that handles payment information, to managing who can access what information. Like the parent said, unless you're doing multi-million dollar business, it's probably not worth it to handle this on your own.
It's really not that bad if you pay for dental insurance. I do for both of my kids and it's not nearly that expensive.

Plus you make a good point on why people should avoid junk food and exercise better hygiene, and teach they're children to do so as well (I know that's not always the case, but I bet studies show it is a huge majority of the time).
On Windows a while back, I used Sysinternals' (now Microsoft) Autoruns to stop their updater from launching on startup.

I don't remember whether the individual applications reversed this setting. I seem to recall it sticking for at least a while.

http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/sysinternals/bb963902.asp...
Completely agree -- I had written the same thing and removed it after seeing this.
When I was young I was brought up without any conversation whatsoever on religion. I do remember returning home from school one day (Church of England, so we said the lords prayer at assembly) and I asked my mum, "Mum, is dad in heaven?" and she just looked at me and replied "Don't be silly, he's at work." That pretty much resolved my religious beliefs until I was around 14.

At 14 I slowly converted to Christianity and at about 15 I would probably have called myself an Anglican. This, however, went down hill extremely quickly. I remember my youth group got a talk from a parishioner who said we shouldn't listen to sinful music like 'Marilyn Manson' or other rock and roll. Me and a few friends went to our group leader after the guy left and said 'if you bring someone here preaching that bullshit again we're gone', I can't exactly remember how many weeks went past before I never went back.

After leaving, I quickly began realising that a lot of what I was being taught was complete BS, that they were trying to get me to question science. Well I'm a sci-fi writer, that shit doesn't stick with me. I quickly learnt that all the religious phenomena are merely a form of hypnosis.

Today I believe nothing. I am not an atheist, I see it as another bullshit religion just with a non-existent god at the top, because all I hear are people like Richard Dawkins preaching in the belief that there isn't a god... but any form of belief in the absence of evidence (the existence and thus non-existence of god is fundamentally unprovable) is FAITH, they have faith there isn't a god. I mean fundamentally Christians believe in the existence of a hypothetical entity, where as Atheists like Dawkins believe in the non-existence of a hypothetical entity. It's the opposite side of the same coin, where as what I believe most atheists really believe is that the 'coin' doesn't exist.
Well from a business perspective something like this or capped bandwidth/pay for overages is gonna come to fruition!

I have not had Cable TV for a few years and when I watch TV/movie content it's all thru the net. In time more will do the same and advertising will not be able to sustain the losses accrued from fewer & fewer(to zero) cable TV customers!

It will take sometime (10 to 20 years), but it's inevitable!
Police create wanted poster on Nintendo Wii
Adding New Features To MWD Mobile for Twitter | Mwd.com
There's legitimate worry about ageism: too often employers don't offer a non-management ladder. The answer for that is to work at a company that offers such a ladder (there are many) or work in a start-up (where they can't afford to have "pure managers").

There is also shops which are driven by buzzwords rather than actual technology, who are just looking for bunch of kids who match a keyword list. I wouldn't want to work there anyway (whether at my present age, or in ten-fifteen years).

There's also the illegitimate worry: "some 22 year-old will replace me"; this is of the same genre as "my job will get outsourced to India". The answer to that is don't do simple, trivial work. Be something besides a byte pusher (incidentally, great deal of "web development" is indeed simply pushing bytes). Anyone can make a CRUD app with PHP and MySQL: learn something which isn't immediately listed in the craigslist jobs section, perhaps? I'd argue that, for example, no place that is hiring Haskell developers or developers with understanding of machine learning practices age discrimination.