skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
> Unfortunately, Facebook has played fast and loose with their user's trust

I just did an informal (ie verbal) poll over four non-technical, but intelligent friends. I said "Have you guys heard of Facebook Promoted Posts" 3 yeses and 1 no. Then I said to the yeses "Has it changed your Facebook experience in any way?" One friend said "Not that I know of" and the other two agreed.

The only people who are upset about this change are advertisers and geeks. Facebook isn't burning any bridges tweaking feed rankings in the exact same way Google doesn't burn any bridges when they tweak search result rankings. Advertisers aren't going to flee Facebook for the same reasons they haven't fled Google: Facebook and Google own the eyeballs. Advertisers go where the eyeballs are. Full stop.

This seems like a brilliant move for Facebook. Users see fewer posts by Pages. Facebook receives additional revenue. And the big spenders in advertising are so delighted with their increased impressions, that they are willing to spend even more. Seems strategically sound to me...
I wrote a tutorial on this a while ago: http://www.dirktheman.com/tutorial/setting-up-your-lamp-stac...
"a full read and comprehension is required"

Exactly! Not only that but sometimes the original author does a poor job of writing the article and a rewrite of the content is needed just to make the story coherent.

Natural language is interesting and SEO guys are also working on rewriting tools so they could repackage articles as OC.
Why do we tolerate the middle men at all? There are actually a number of easy ways to sell digital books online without an Amazon or anyone else.

For example, http://pulleyapp.com/ is $6 a month. That's it. You can price your ebook whatever you want. You don't have to give another company a cut of each purchase.

There's also http://www.shopify.com/

There are open source solutions like http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/easy-digital-downloads/

The architecture of the internet is actually outdated. I mean, it may take a few years for people to realize this, but the fact that we have to go to a specific web domain, which is tied to specific hardware or private network, in order to search for things like Kindle books (or Google for practically everything else), is creating monopolies that aren't beneficial to consumers or retailers.

What we want is a content-centric internet that works more like peer-to-peer networking. Wikipedia has one variation of the idea http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Content-centric_networking

Usually people dismiss that idea out of hand in the context of e-commerce because they don't understand how peer-to-peer networking can be secure or private. But in fact it can be, it has to be, and it will be. Its going to take everyone a little while to figure that out though.
Why not use the speeding hydrogen in a nuclear reaction that fuels the ship, thereby killing 2 atoms with one stone?
See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bussard_ramjet
I think because it's the one that feels the least like a compromise. With most electric cars, you need to compromise on things like performance and range. From all of the reviews I've read, the Tesla Model S a great car, that just happens to be electric.

For instance, the Nissan Leaf has a range of 73 miles on a charge, then you have to spend several hours charging it. You can generally do 400 or more miles on a single tank of gas in a reasonably efficient car; and then you can refill in a minute or two and be on your way. The Tesla has a range of 260 miles; much closer to a tank of gas, and a lot less likely to leave you worried that you'll run out of charge.

From the reviews I've read, Tesla is also a great car for people who love cars. It can do 0-60 in 4 seconds. It is well put together, with innovative electronics. It makes electric cars sexy, not just something that makes you feel good for saving gas while being kind of a pain to drive.

On the other hand, it is considerably more expensive than its competition, and still somewhat limited compared to a gas powered car. While you do get greater range, if you're going on a long road trip, you will need to stop for long recharges.

I think part of the excitement is that Elon Musk, and Tesla Motors, are quite committed to pushing for electric cars. They don't make anything else. It's not an electric car from a manufacturer who makes traditional cars, and can fall back on them. They need it to succeed. So they are introducing solar charging stations where you can recharge for free. They are really coming up with an innovative car; I think that of anyone, they do have the best chance to make an electric car that will really take off, but they do have some tough obstacles ahead of them.
Espresso: Scalable Ruby framework for speed and simplicity
Because (some) tablets actually are good computers. They achieve extremely high quality (speed, good UX) at the tasks they do by simply not doing most of the tasks a desktop PC does. If you only want to do email and some web browsing, a tablet is actually a higher-quality, faster, easier-to-use machine than a PC.
Do Intelligent People Drink More Alcohol? (2010)
I have to agree with this sentiment.

My personal anecdote is more that I have a handful of better computers in the house, but the laptop I spend the most time working and programming with is my crappy 8-year old gateway running Ubuntu. I'm not entirely sure why I'm drawn to it over the others, even if it's the slowest and oldest machine in the house (excluding my netbook). But I type faster on this keyboard than any other keyboard I've ever used.

There's just something about it that I prefer, and I'm perfectly willing to deal with its warts, as it's used almost exclusively for programming (vim and ssh don't exactly use a lot of resources). Chrome does have some memory issues on it (and I'm considering switching back to Firefox for that laptop), and sometimes compilation times get annoying, but overall, this system has been tweaked and configured to be my ultimate programming machine.

Plus, testing server software on slower machines can be helpful to find bottlenecks that might not present themselves as obviously on blazing fast machines.

All that said, I'd say we've gotten to the point where a casual user will do just fine with 4-year-old technology. Most Core2 machines are fast enough for just about anything. And Casual PC users typically aren't PC Gamers, which is its own segment, and even then, my Core2 PC for gaming is "fast enough" to play the games I play.
It'd probably be obnoxious for me to mention here that the word you're looking for is "paralipsis," so I won't.
Because, if I am reading the article correctly, some hydrogen (which has become radiation) will go through you anyway. This kills you. Somehow gathering up all of the radiation and trying to use it to fuel a ramjet is the same thing as trying to make some sort of shield, which the article says would be very difficult.
Try reading the Citizen's United court opinion. I had your stance on the issue before I read their reasoning (it is absolutely worth the read), and I'm come to realize:

1. corporate campaign spending will likely not corrupt the political process

2. as we can see since the ruling, very very little independent expenditures are coming from corporations. it's still mostly rich people paying for the commercials, which is what it was like before

3. the FEC and the idea of these regulations are completely flawed

4. there is no way that these laws will scale passed TV and broadcasting, even though they purport to regulate speech online as well.

5. people should be exposed to as much speech as possible, and it should be assumed they can come to conclusions that fit within their interests. Especially in a world where it becomes increasingly difficult for campaigns to sway voters even with billions of dollars of speech.

> Today, 30-second television ads may be the most effective way to convey a political message. [...] Soon, however, it may be that Internet sources, such as blogs and social networking Web sites, will provide citizens with significant information about political candidates and issues. Yet, §441b would seem to ban a blog post expressly advocating the election or defeat of a candidate if that blog were created with corporate funds.

> Yet, the FEC has created a regime that allows it to select what political speech is safe for public consumption by applying ambiguous tests. If parties want to avoid litigation and the possibility of civil and criminal penalties, they must either refrain from speaking or ask the FEC to issue an advisory opinion approving of the political speech in question. Government officials pore over each word of a text to see if, in their judgment, it accords with the 11-factor test they have promulgated. This is an unprecedented governmental intervention into the realm of speech.

http://www.supremecourt.gov/opinions/09pdf/08-205.pdf
The article points out some reasons why it might be difficult (not impossible!) to construct the electromagnetic field required for such a ramjet, but yes this point seems to be completely lost on the author. A Bussard ramjet specifically exploits the presence of interstellar hydrogen as a valuable energy resource.
If your success depends on impacting peoples life through your work, then intelligence isn't even relevant to the discussion of success.
Tips for Android Developers to Achieve Success in the Google Play Store
Not so much thinking inside or outside "the" box, but being able to think inside somebody else's.
Surviving retailers stagger on after the high street's day of the dead
Other car companies need to sink a relatively huge sum of money into R&D to get into the electric car field, and are left with a product that will probably for the most part cannibalize their own sales. They seem to think "hey, some hippies want electric cars, and we might lose their business if we can't offer them one. So let's make sure we get that checkmark." The result is often a half-ass attempt to keep up and show progress rather than true innovation.

Tesla is trying to disrupt the market as a new player. To do so, they are trying to redefine the industry every step of the way (made-to-order cars, direct sales, etc). They also need true innovation to generate sales, because they're a dark horse. But unlike electric offerings from other companies, Tesla's end goal isn't to offer the best electric car. That would disrupt a very small industry. Their goal is to offer the best car, period. And so they're coming out with electric cars that hands-down beat same-class cars in some traditional factors like performance, and are comparable in other factors (like range)
Hand waving and made up numbers. It's kind of annoying when someone uses precise numbers that they pulled out of the air with no empirical basis as the foundation of an argument.

At the end he asks about the organizations where 60% of value is produced by 40% of employees. Which organizations? How is value measured? No telling because the numbers are just made up.
Because nobody knows how to make a Bussard Ramjet actually work. From the abstract: "Stopping or diverting this flux, either with material or electromagnetic shields, is a daunting problem."

And assuming that you can divert the protons, ironically enough, you'd have a serious problem cooling them down sufficiently to achieve fusion (because if you don't, the plasma will not be sufficiently dense to cause a high probability of fusion events, despite the high temperature); and slowing their passage through the ship so they stick around long enough to fuse would create significant drag. And after you have solved the problems of collecting, matching velocity with, and cooling/compressing the plasma, a Bussard Ramjet is only worthwhile if you have an extremely efficient system for capturing all of the waste heat from those processes and injecting it back into the exhaust. Otherwise, at any speed above about .12c, you lose more energy to drag while collecting protons than you gain back from fusing them.

Now, there's no particular physical reason why all of those problems couldn't be solved. But if you've already got some way of accelerating to >.5c, and you just need to worry about radiation shielding, building a whole Bussard Ramjet rather than just trying to push protons out of the way with minimal effort or absorb them in some very massive physical shield, is not the way to go.
I think the idea is that it doesn't ever touch your ship--you just funnel it into your reactor directly. (You have to ionize it somehow...) So it's not equivalent to shielding--it's designed to avoid shielding.
Odd this post keeps coming up, syndicated from 2010.

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4715943
You should stop thinking about it and do it. I cancelled mine June of 2010.
I think once we are advanced enough to figure out how to propel anything that fast or able to pack the needed energy, this part might be easy to solve.

Remember per special relativity mass increases as we approach C.
Also I think there will be other physiological problems while accelerating to C. It would take like 34 days at 10g acceleration to get to C. I wonder how our bodies would handle 34 days at that kind of g limits. At 2g it will take like 173 days to reach C.

Lastly, we don't really have a good physical understanding of matter at near C speed limits. With mass increasing as we approach C, I don't know we can assume the same physical properties of any material in classical models.
Video showing the leg in action: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5foYR--3EiA
Since this doesn't seem to be common knowledge (and it isn't easily referenced from abebooks.com alone), they were acquired by Amazon in 2008 along with a minority (40%) stake in LibraryThing. See here: http://techcrunch.com/2008/08/01/amazon-to-acquire-abebooks/
It's true that there are more varieties in technology these days but on the other hand, the rise of some of the medium-size SaaS players (Salesforce.com, Dropbox.com, Box.net) and some of the "cookie-cutters" technology (wordpress, blogger.com, any CMS system out there) do change the game of consulting.

I'm guessing that in the past, one can run a successful and profitable "web-design" business easily as there aren't too many software like Drupal, Wordpress, phpBB, and the customers aren't necessarily "educated" in the sense that they could google these software and learn or hire some high-school kids cheaply out there.

Ditto with custom software like PoS, accounting software, CRM, etc. These days people would go with Salesforce, NetSuite, MS Dynamics, and the like.

Consultants have to become more specialized and there is a lifespan for those niches as the companies behind those software would like to increase their profits as "agile" as possible. This is definitely tougher on the consultants.
Oh man, the math behind this stuff must be fascinating -- designing a system to shuttle money around while minimizing latency and tax rates would be so much fun.

The economic/ethical implications of what Apple and others are doing according to this article are considerable and worrying, but all I can think of right now is some kind of sim-tax-evasion game.
I do a fair bit of tutoring on Skype, at $80 an hour. Often 5-10 minutes of an hour long lesson is spend watching my student deal with technical difficulties on their computer.

Their system fails them at very simple tasks: displaying a website (often the solution is use chrome or firefox rather then IE 8), opening a picture file, bandwidth for Skype video, audio/microphone output, RAM for running Skype + a browser, etc.

They waste money with me, and they're surely wasting time with almost everything they do. It's bafflingly inefficient, when you consider the marginal cost of buying a better computer at purchase time.
Anecdotal and unscientific in terms of not comparing apples to apples.

You would need to show your friends the posts they missed at best, or at least show a competing service, over the same set of messages, which isn't possible.

The fact that people aren't upset doesn't mean that the user experience is the same. Perhaps it's a bit shitier now, but they just don't know it, like a frog slowly boiling.

re: comparing to google, google can tweak algorithms, then users use bing _to search over the same data set_. That is competition, and Google must constantly be on top of things, so users who are happy with google, tend to know way more than users who are supposedly happy with facebook.

What this means is Facebook could very well be slowly boiling their users in order to get more cash, or you may be right and users really don't mind. If there were real competition to facebook, we would find out. Unfortunately, facebook doesn't want you to export your data so you can find out.
"To be considered seriously, you will also have:
- A relevant B.Sc./B.A. degree."

No thanks. Should say that upfront. Plus you mention PHP, but none of your job postings do.
Evan Williams: What I Learned Building Medium (So Far)
I'm guessing HTML5 + JS is the in-demand niche you mentioned in the parent post?

I find it surprising that the technology is gaining more traction for consultants (as opposed for the hot up-n-coming silicon valley startups).

Mind to share the type of clients that are looking for your services in this area?
typingweb.com
10fastfingers.com

Basically, you just have to go through and do the simple letter exercises without looking at the keys. At first you'll be painfully slow, but if you stick with it and go through everything, you'll get your speed back. I went from typing about 60 wpm using all of my fingers and staring at the keyboard to doing 80-100 typing properly in just a few months of 20 minute a day sessions.

I highly recommend making the effort. My personal level of productivity has skyrocketed.
A tale of two execs: Microsoft's Sinofsky and Apple's Forstall
The cheat sheet's groupings can make finding things easier.

http://clojure.org/cheatsheet
Another point for using warp drive (=
Why do we as a society let them get away with this?

They are benefiting from all the social services regular citizens are (police, roads, water, public schools, etc.) without paying for them.

This is robbery. They are robbing America's future.
Future world problems.
its despicable that companies like Apple reap enormous rewards and take advantage of American infrastructure and consumers, but don't have the decency to pay their fair share of taxes. I'm not a lover of taxes or the American government, but I think that successful corporations (and people) need to give back to the countries in which they operate.
Meh. We just need radiation shields.
Planet Money's Fake Presidential Candidate
> So it's not equivalent to shielding--it's designed to avoid shielding.

Not quite. Electromagnetic shielding is a potentially viable thing, and can be much less massive than material shielding; a Bussard Ramjet doesn't avoid shielding so much as repurposes the electromagnetic shielding you already needed anyway.

Ionizing is not that big of a problem. If you're going fast enough, hydrogen atoms will be ionized by the interaction with your electromagnetic field. If you're not going fast enough, you can shine a maser ahead of you to ionize things in your path (which cuts in to the efficiency of the ramjet).
Ahhh overly-precise HN. Gets me every time. People find meaning in big events, and I think the world is a better place as a result.
Because they don't know what will make them most effective at getting their work done.
Open Source: The Biggest Risk to SDN
Didn't everyone hate clippy?

Someone do a test and tell us the effect on bounce rate/time on site. For science.
Also most people even though hit a career grand never get recognized for it.

Gandhi never won the Nobel prize for peace, Just imagine- Gandhi!!! Although there is hardly anyone in the past century who did explicitly more for peace than he did. He not just preached, but demonstrated an entire moment for independence of India and even succeeded all on non violence.

Not that he complained about it. But the world never recognized it at the time.
Did Hurricane Sandy Cause $36.5 Trillion In Damage?
I would argue that most of these issues are software problems. Advising casual users to buy better hardware might help the symptoms somewhat, but the real solution would be better-adapted software or non-lazy developers. (Better-adapted: software that runs well on entry-level machines rather than just on state-of-the-art machines. Lazy: write poorly-performing code and rely on state-of-the-art hardware to run it.)
I... I don't understand. What's this mentality of offering free non-nutritious food for all employees, by the bucketload, for free? Why would you snack in the first place?

Either eat solid, whole meals on assigned lunch breaks, or drink something that isn't bad for you - tea, coffee come to mind - or why not, water?

In all frankness I find the whole concept of offering free crap for everyone harmful and eventually counterproductive - I can only imagine what copious amounts of free sugary soft drinks will do to people after a while.
As an owner of a Nissan Leaf, I'll take a stab at it. First, Tesla makes nothing but electric cars. Contrast this to Nissan who also makes the gas-guzzling Armada ("like an entire fleet of SUVs coming at you!"). Tesla has an incentive to make them not suck, all the way from the experience of the car itself to the sales process to keeping it charged (the Supercharger infrastructure).

The Leaf buying experience, OTOH, was one of the worst I've ever experienced. I'll spare the details for another time, but if I weren't a hard-core early adopter Nissan would have had an extra Leaf lying around. I love our Leaf, but Nissan did little to endear me to the company itself. From what I hear of Tesla, though, it sounds like their start-to-finish-to-living-with-it experience could turn me into a fanboy.

Second, though I'm really happy with our Leaf it falls a bit short in some respects compared to the Jaguar we got rid of to make room for the Leaf. The Leaf is a really nice compact car, but it's still a gussied up Nissan Versa. The Tesla, OTOH, is a nice car, electric or not. If they hadn't already sold out with a miles-long waiting list, I probably would have put money down on a Model S. I can see one in the car-owning future of my wife and me.

Last, with the range of the top models it could be an only car for a lot of folks. Our Leaf can do a day of driving around town or further, but then it's back home to get plugged in. I can't think of a lot of places I'd go that a Tesla couldn't take me there.

In summary, the Tesla Model S is the car that could take the industry forward. Nissan Leafs with a 100 mile range sold through a traditional dealer network probably aren't.
Incredibly coincidental that you did this. I was talking to a friend today and brought up forgotten Clippy. Glad to see it reborn and given the JS plugin treatment!
NY Times infographic here: http://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2012/04/28/business/Doubl...

Sadly, this is the 'norm' for many, many corporations - including Google.
What's in a story?
There's one thing I never quite got about these speculations. When you consider a ship leaving a solar system and accelerating, and the speed gained turning the "ambient hydrogen" into deadly radiation, why does it always seem to assume that hydrogen atoms are just kind of hanging out at low velocities relative to the home solar system and only turn into a problem when the bald captain says "engage"?

Its a big universe, might the hydrogen atoms already be traveling at these deadly speeds relative to the ship once it leaves Sol? Might there be a "galactic current" so that the ship can go with the flow?

I know its just for fun but its still silly to think that anyone who could propel a canned ape at .8c wouldn't be able fend off a few rouge hydrogen atoms.
Lean tubes/Lean pipes
Very nice: tasteful and performs great (GPU-accelerated in Gecko and others) due to the use of CSS transforms.
Oddly enough, I'm very compelled to believe Clippy may be a very useful on-boarding tool for new users to websites.