skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Another factor to consider in the price of a physical book is space. The median home price is roughly $200,000 and the median home size is just above 2000 square feet. This gives a cost of ~ $100 per sq. ft.

I just measured some books I had and 10 books per foot by 4 shelves high yields a minimum cost of $2.50 per book to store. This does not factor in moving costs of the lifetime of the book nor energy costs to heat/cool the books.

It is surprisingly expensive to keep 'stuff'.
For the first part of your math, YC has spent at least 1.5 million (~300 founders * 5000). Team sizes vary, but if we hold them at 3 members, we get another half mil. So by my very back of the envelope calculations they've invested about $2 million.
Here is to whatever retards down voted this comment. If you do not happen to get a literary reference do not cause others to suffer from your ignorance. You parasites are not worthy to be on the same f*in planet as John Galt.
I think Stallman's $1M grant from the MacArthur Foundation has given him a rather skewed idea about how economics works for most people even in the US, let alone the rest of the world.
Mindfuck Movies
Say it loud: automation is exponential leverage. Without it, you are a slave to linear improvements in productivity. Happily, startups are particularly unsaddled with the intransigent obstacles to automation. Apply to all areas of the business.
ECJ - an evolutionary computation framework written in Java
Computer model says Iran won't build nuclear bombs
I usually feel like I've been productive if I spent most of the day in the zone - but the truth is, that doesn't always move things in the right direction. For instance, I might suddenly obsess over some little visual detail that I want to get just perfect and end up spending an entire day on it. At the time it feels right - but looking back later when the project is behind schedule and everyone's in crunch mode, I have to wonder if that was really a productive day or not...
Bionic Body Armor: IBM Patents Bionic Armor That Gives Humans Ability To Dodge Bullets
I remember reading a book about de-cluttering once and the author made a really interesting point. She said "if 20% of your apartment or house is clutter, you're paying 20% of your rent or mortgage towards storing it."
They aren't notified about it, but they can see if anyone has replied by going to their past comments list (linked from their profile) and looking for any changes.
Actually, a mention of a programming language on an Internet forum also degenerates into a religious argument. And, sadly, too many people feel they don't need any particular expertise to argue Javascript, either.
Visions of Practicality
Actually, books should lower the cost of heating/cooling a house. They'll act to keep the temperature level in the house at a static level, though they would cost more if you often cycled your house between warm and cold.

It's like keeping jugs of water in the refrigerator: the system works by cooling the air, which falls out when you open the door. The space taken up by the water means there's less air to fall out.

In any case, your analysis of square footage is clever, I hadn't thought to consider that cost.
Already posted:

Here: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=479699

Here: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=479709
Without his initiative would the sight have ever launched? It looked like he was the driver of the whole thing. Sometimes software developers can be the drivers, sometimes they go off to tour Europe with their band instead. Neither is a bad choice, but if you want your product launched in this lifetime, someone has got to be the manager and evangelist.
"I originally omitted Donnie Darko from this list but then I realized I would get hate mail if I omitted Donnie Darko from this list so I put Donnie Darko on this list."
Lessons from Japan's Lost Decade: the U.S. is making familiar mistakes
The only advantage the Kindle has is wireless access to the Amazon store. There are other cheaper readers.
Navigation: Left is Best
I believe he was hired for the job because of his Camino experience.
this is getting beyond belief, so I'm going to have to support the flaky weird rendering quirks of IE6 (since so many people still use it), IE7, IE7 Compatibility Mode (which seemingly isn't actually compaitible) AND IE8!? And that's hoping that IE8 'standards' mode is reliable enough to lump in with all the real browsers (mozilla,webkit,opera,etc).

Here's a fucking idea to help booster the economy - how about MAKING people upgrade from IE6. BOOM! Hundreds of thousands of web developer (wo)man-hours saved, increasing efficiency across the whole web-based IT sector.
> I wouldn’t even use one if you offered it to me for free.

So if I offered you a Kindle for free, you wouldn't even use it to read non-DRM-protected books in open formats?

You used to hear the same argument about the iPod -- that because the iTunes Store sold DRM-protected music, the device was somehow intrinsically flawed, even though it's also perfectly happy playing non-DRM-protected music. It's a weird argument. If you don't want to pay for DRM-protected content, don't pay for it. The device itself might still be useful, especially if you're offered one for free.
> when businesses have too much power is that they corrupt those watchdogs

It's called Regulatory Capture:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Regulatory_capture

It happens all the time. The vast majority of regulation ends up doing nothing more than giving the existing large competitors in a space a tool to keep out new entrants and smaller, scrappier competitors.

One of the reasons that the software industry is do dynamic is because it's not regulated.
There are few recent popular flicks that I think are worthy of consideration -- or at least honorable mention.

I'd add The Matrix. Although it's not great, it did have the most impact on the most people.

I'd add The Sixth Sense for the same reason. When you "get it" then you are almost forced to rewatch the movie to make sure it still all adds up. It does. It was a great work by M. Night, who (to me) is really not doing as well as he used to.
Wow, my brain totally garbled your post.
I was blinded by my own prejudices!
That's a good effort.

A vertical bar chart with the two measures next to each other is a better representation because you are trying to compare them.

If you were to show something cumulative, say contribution of sales of groceries, electronics and clothes towards your daily sales, then, the chart you used is appropriate.
Actually I never heard that argument against the iPod. I heard the DRM argument against iTunes often enough but I've never heard anyone complain about the iPod being a DRM-laden monster.
If the cost of using Linux is less than the cost of using Windows, but the cost of ripping out existing Windows and re-training users is large enough to overwhelm the gain, then a population that uses neither but could learn Linux is at an advantage.
> Here's a fucking idea to help booster the economy - how about MAKING people upgrade from IE6. BOOM! Hundreds of thousands of web developer (wo)man-hours saved, increasing efficiency across the whole web-based IT sector.

Under normal circumstances that might be a good idea. But given the output gap in the economy, the last thing we need would be less work for web developers. If the government wants to stimulate the web-design sector, it should introduce a hundred new rendering engines, each with a slightly different interpretation of the CSS specs, and then give out grants to businesses to make their sites compatible.
Is totally secure software possible?
I thought it was a surprisingly good interview until I got to that bit. The unnecessary 4 Freedoms rant should have tipped me off I suppose.
From the application:

We will sell plans that offer version control hosting, testing environments, and easy web hosting tied into the IDE.

Similar to what github is doing, now that I think of it, but with more integration into the online IDE.
Yes, strange. The communists had more appeal to the intellectuals.
Charge for private accounts.
They won't make it cheaper than if you had less house.

If the square footage would otherwise be empty my whole point falls apart.
Yeah, but if you de-clutter, unless you can then downsize to something else, what do you gain? Now you're just paying that 20% towards storing air.

I guess you could replace the clutter with something else (another comfy chair?) but I'd rather have the books.
TopRank SEO Consulting
Depends on what he means by business issues.

A very good argument can be easily made that a fiat currency is a necessary but not sufficient element in modern well-being.

Prior to fiat currencies there was a fixed amount of gold, and every coin in your pocket was a coin out of someone else's pocket.

Imagine a fixed number of software copies, a gold based currency is a lot like DRM for money.

Further more you can easily argue that making health care part of employer compensation (as is common in the US) leads to less well-being then making it a separate (in Europe often nationalized) good.

Those are two business issues with a direct impact on general well-being, and that's just off the top of my head.
And books are heavy. I'm in the middle of moving and books are second in weight only to heavy furniture. I do have a lot of them though.
This assumes that I don't enjoy the physical objects themselves and being able to wander around and pick a book off a shelf. I do. I'm willing to pay for the pleasure.
Will the stimulus actually stimulate? Economists say no
maybe for him but i know people that exclusively read hardcover bestsellers when they travel. these are a huge pain to carry around. plus you hardly ever to re-read them so it doesn't matter if the kindle breaks or goes out of business.
when we're measuring productivity, what are we trying to measure? i mean, really? ultimately its how much value is created, in what span of time. relevant to this example, the questions to be asked are:

1) how much does joe's paintjob increase the value of the home for the HGTV-obsessed house-flipper?

2) how much will the value of jim's watercolor appreciate after he kills himself following a week-long binge of heroin?

put another way: how efficiently is value being created? the important answers lie more often in the decision process, and less often in the implementation schedule.

for example, a web developer working on a brochureware site: the right question may be along the lines of 'how will the work you're doing affect the conversion rate?'. in reality, those decisions aren't up to him -- the might lie in the internet strategy department or some such. they push the order, the developer implements. a real measure of results is closer to 'did the designer make the right decisions to yield results?' rather than 'did the developer get the code done more or less quickly than last time?' in my experience, when someone who is a non-developer is trying to quantify developer 'productivity', what they're really doing is dodging the question of whether or not their decision-making was good or bad, usually when they know it's bad and are looking for something to roll downhill.

more interesting to me, as a developer and sometimes manager, is whether or not a developer can deliver when they say they can? if clay says it'll be done in a week, and then it is, he's been sufficiently productive. 'sufficiently productive' is maybe the best thing we can do. the race analogy is an apt one -- if developer 1 can produce a set of functionality with the same defect level faster than developer 2, we can say that d1 is 'more productive', but it's a difficult thing to quantify absolutely. take the number of hours a developer spends working on a given project point, multiply it by their hourly rate, and you get a development cost for that project point. then consider the value that project will add to the product, over time. if you have 30,000 customers who haven't bought the product yet because it doesn't have Feature X, and adding feature X costs dollars Y, then your value-add is something line Z= customers * product price. your efficiency is something like Z/Y.

clearly you want to minimize cost, and therefore keep your efficiency as high as possible, but the ways to manipulate that, and a lot of points to consider:

a simple example -- if you can hire a developer that will take twice as long, but work at 1/3 of the rate, would the revenue lost during the extended development period negatively affect the profit efficiency?

the important questions are somewhat higher up.
I'd say not much. But it depends on your definitions. They are very 'pragmatic' nowadays.
I preemptively apologize for this attempt to hijack the discussion, but does $200,000 seem high for a median?

I'm a reasonably well compensated developer in the Boston area and it still seems high.
We all knew Facebook wasn't worth $15B -- turns out Facebook knew it too
ah yes, I see what you mean, didn't fully think it through did I? - I was kind of hoping that all those suddenly free programmer hours would be funnelled into creative programming and start-up ventures, boosting the economy sans government spending...
A very good list. For me I was disappointed because I'd seen virtually all of them already.
Legal ruckus over Kindle 2's text-to-speech feature
I can see both sides of this argument. Certainly, authors don't want to be done out of the profits for separate audio book sales, on the other hand, if you're visually impaired, having a built-in audio feature comes in very handy.
The Changing Value of Knowledge and Skills
NYT Personals
Check domain availability without leaving your shell...
How to Build a Search Engine
This is a textbook on information retrieval co-authored by the head of Yahoo Research and the authors of 'Foundations of Statistical NLP' (another great textbook).

Kind of like a more up to data edition of 'Managing Gigabytes', and it's just as good if not better.
Complete Rand interview with Mike Wallace
No, totally secure software is not possible (aside from trivial applications). However, it is possible to write software which, given our current knowledge and technology, would take all of the computing capacity of the world longer than the predicted lifetime of the earth to successfully attack.

DJB is a deadline-be-damned-I'm-all-about-the-security type of guy. He'd be great for security, but terrible for the overall product. It would take DJB's team (assuming he would even relax control long enough to have a team) more time to make the product than customers would be willing to wait, or it would be more expensive to build than customers could afford. Another vendor's product would steal all the market share, and no one would be left to use his now ultra-secure product.

I'm a deadline-be-damned-I'm-all-about-the-security type of guy too, but oddly enough I still have people paying to use tarsnap. (Maybe this is because I wrote tarsnap myself rather than assembling a team?)

While I hate to disagree with such a credentialed author (I mean, gosh, he's a CPA, CISSP, CEH, CHFI, TICSA, and MCSE:Security -- he must know what he's talking about, right?) I think he's getting cause and effect backwards here. Yes, there is very little secure code available; but that's not because vendors have decided that writing secure code is too hard. It's simply because their customers don't hold software companies accountable for severe product flaws.
ASCAP v. Lessig Continues; Kay Challenges Copyleft...
Already posted:

Here: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=476584

Here: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=477216
The dude who tests that is going to have the worst case of whiplash.

Or die from gunshot wounds.
I am not sure that we can't quantify it.

Who's really tried?

There's been a few research papers here and there, measuring the things that are easy to measure in a corporate environment.

But who has both the incentive and the skills to measure a very difficult to quantify subjective experience?

It is absolutely a very complex subjective experience, but it ain't magic.

It IS very had to measure but it's not impossible just because no one's really tried yet.
German team maps part of Neanderthal genome
Already posted:

Here: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=478358

Here: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=478115

... and probably more. Do a search for ConnectU and Facebook to see others:

http://searchyc.com/facebook+connectu?sort=by_date
Are you kidding?! $200k in Boston would be a freaking steal. People would almost literally kill for that. I'm in cambridge and all the 2 bedroom condos on the blocks around me are $450k and up. And that's a CONDO with shared walls.
U-Turn belongs there too.
"We haven’t really studied the business cases that much. We’re 25 people, and 75 percent are focused on the product and engineering and operations. And we literally have no business people in the company, so this isn’t an area we’re really focusing on."

I think they may do well to get a business person in there to help them figure out how to make money.
> Now it turns out that it isn't even that.

There were a lot of almost convincing articles about how the Dubai building boom had a lot to do with laundering global organized crime money.
http://www.kdnuggets.com/datasets/index.html
There is always going to be a security hole, even if it's human.
Just another reminder that success is not transitive - e.g. he was arguably involved in RSS 1.0/Reddit's formative days (though he was fired), it does not translate to being successful at confidently meeting women.

A classic blog post of his from his Stanford days.

"Although I have not even seen her face nor had time to recognize her, somehow my body knows she is The Girl In Question (hereafter TGIQ). She turns back for just a moment to make sure her friend his behind her and while I don’t even have time to recognize her face, my heart explodes again. I later realize it must be her by going over the image in my mind and seeing her trademark stylish brown coat."

http://www.aaronsw.com/weblog/001448

http://www.aaronsw.com/weblog/001449

I also think that liberating government documents is not really a 'bad boy/alpha male' action the type and quality of woman I assume (maybe) he is seeking is seeking..

"It’s not even about a $200 dinner,Ms. Petrus said. It’s that he’s an alpha male, he’s aggressive, he’s a go-getter, he doesn’t take no for an answer, he’s confident, people respect him and that creates the whole mystique of who he is."

http://www.nytimes.com/2009/01/28/nyregion/28daba.html
Aside from RDB and key-value, one other model I haven't heard mentioned much is Terracotta (currently the only example of its kind, AFAIK). That gives you basically all the advantages of a database, including replicated ACID transactions, but with data that behaves like live objects. Better than live objects, in fact, because of lazy loading and unloading, which let objects grow beyond the limits of RAM. Better than a database, too, in that it only moves diffs, and it knows exactly where they're needed. If you are the only one currently touching a data structure, the only traffic is "may I?" "carry on until I say otherwise".
exactly what non-DRM protected books in open format are you suggesting? The ones in the public domain? I honestly wouldn't. I can think of maybe one I've wanted to read in the past 10 years. As for your iPod argument, it's flawed too because none of the books i have legally purchased can be put on a kindle. Well, maybe 2 could, but they're PDF and formatted for a different paper size than the kindle and would thus look like crap on it. So, what non-drm protected content exactly are you suggesting that I would have to put on this hypothetically free Kindle that would make it worth bothering with?
Gear: The RED Canon
200+ Portable Apps for USB
200+ Portable Apps for USB
No. This is by a team in Mozilla Labs - including Ben and Dion (founders of Ajaxian.com), Kevin Dangoor (creator of TurboGears), and Joe Walker (creator of DWR).
Optimising Assembly Like an 80's Hacker
DB2 is free up to something like eight gig of memory usage. I don't understand why people are so wedded to MySQL and Postgres now that DB2 and Oracle have free and very cheap versions.
>> The rise of functional programming might not be accelerated by the pain of impedance matching to RDBMSs.

Arrrgh! I meant that it might be accelerated by the pain of impedance matching to RDBMSs. Sorry, it was late at night.
requiem for a dream?
Google Print & Google Radio Closures Are Unfortunate »  RyanSpoon.com
http://www.acmqueue.com/modules.php?name=Content&pa=show...
Contract work fuels rise in tech job postings
&pi
I imagine that the vast majority of bankers who saw this chart realized this error very quickly.

Are you sure?

In my own entirely subjective and unscientific experience, a minority of people on wall street are very good at math.

And they are usually not in positions of authority, some times, but not in general.
Yeah, this already exists. You might have heard of it, it's called Bermuda.
I don't think it'll make much difference now, but I wouldn't be surprised if a program like this is the catalyst that sparks the recovery a couple years down the line.

Most hacks take a few years to really show their impact, but somebody's gotta do it, or we'll be in a depression forever.
Only for closers? Or are you referring to whether they are ultimately not the types of investors you would want anyway?

If the latter, (a) anybody willing to give you money now is someone you should consider, (b) if you look at people who are considered sophisticated now, they all were considered unsophisticated at some point.
Already been submitted:

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=479191

And it's not the most important advancement in SEO practices. A lot more things are more important, like fixing your site's URL structure so that it's more easily crawlable and doesn't have duplicate content. You know, the problems this "advancement" is meant to solve.
This won't be a problem for most people, since they read stuff written by Dan Brown that really doesn't require a rereading 20 years down the line. But I understand the sentiment.

Nonetheless my understanding is you can fairly easily get any pdf onto the Kindle, meaning if you get a non-DRMed version of the books you're fine. Is that not correct? I own a number of digital music player's that support one DRM scheme or another, and use them frequently, yet have never actually purchased a DRM'ed file.
Online integration with the amazon store isn't just another feature point though, it's the company's primary direction with the product.

The content acquisition problem is just as important, or even more so, then the hardware problems for any electronic media device. Someone using a competing e-reader has to navigate a number of competing e-book stores, download and keep track of their copies on their own storage media, and then sync books over to their device via USB or storage device; that's a lot of work when you just want to read a book.

I remember reading about someone who described how he'd walk into airport book stores, lazily browse through their books, and then remotely download his favorites onto his kindle; that's powerful.
Include "X-UA-Compatible: IE=edge" in your responses and you will never have to worry about this issue. It is easier than complaining about it.
Recession Over By July?
Right now, it's naive about getting the k-nearest neighbors for any one chicken O(n^2). For my 1GHz computer, I can only run it up to around 50 chickens.

Anyone have good leads on algorithms to cull the number of comparison down to find the k-nearest neighbors? I've been looking at variants of the R-tree, but if there are other techniques, it'd help to know. Thanks ya'll.
Very few people borrow money with the expectation of not being able to pay it back.