skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
What chance of personally deciding the outcome of an election do you need to have before voting is worth your time? 50%?

You need P(affecting outcome) x (value of positive outcome) > cost of voting.

Even assuming the value of a positive outcome is vastly bigger than the size of the world economy (e.g. $10^15, maybe $10^20), P(affecting outcome) is so fantastically low in any state with political leanings that you might as well not bother.

Littering in a public park is a separate issue - the effect of littering is cumulative, whereas the effect of voting is based on a threshold. Your litter makes the park incrementally worse. Donating blood does make a significant measurable difference - one particular person gets your unit of blood, and this helps them avoid death.

A dollar value can be assigned to all the things we've mentioned. Donating blood is worth multiple dollars, littering in a park is probably harmful to the tune of a few pennies. The dollar value of your vote is so small that double precision floats treat it as 0.
I was one of the primary developers on Guitar Hero. It is hard to explain just how weird it was that that game became a massive hit. We had already made a couple of music games that only sold modestly, and expecting people to buy this toy plastic guitar on top of that was borderline ludicrous. I lobbied unsuccessfully to cut multiplayer mode, because what were the chances two people with these guitars were ever going to end up in the same house? We heard stories that retailers loved it when we showed it off to them, but I already worked on multiple games with big buzz and lukewarm sales, so that didn't mean much to me. I was already pleasantly surprised when it became a modest success, much less the monster hit it eventually became.
Because it gives me the best odds. Store-bought: can lose or break the disc, sometimes the DRM won't let it install on my system. Pirate: might be missing some of the data, might be invalidated by an update, always that slight fear of viruses.
If only there was some kind of civil libertarian Democratic tea party movement.
5 Insane Projects You Won't Believe the U.S. Government is Working On
I can believe the first part. When I last installed Ubuntu some years ago it was indeed clunkier than a Windows installation.

But installing software being easy at Windows? The main reason I switched to using Linux as my main system is due to the vastly improved process of installing software. Windows has not improved in this area much in recent years (though many other aspects of it has).
@kisamoto, I understand your trepidation, I'm working on customer discovery (and the target market is startups / entrepreneurs), but posting landing pages with no utility seems a bit obnoxious - are you using Adwords / FB ads, etc to drive your TM to the landing page?
I'm not sure if you've ever been to a bike shop when they are having a sale. The bike shop I was at had some bikes listed for $999 on sale for $739. That's more than $200 off a bike and they're still making money. The guy selling me the bike doesn't lose that $200 difference. They are making higher profit ratio on a bike than a car dealership does on a car.

If you get treated differently if you have issues in the future because you bargained then that's an issue with the business not the price you paid.

Btw, I paid full price for the bike as it wasn't on sale. My guess is they made 30% profit from the $800 purchase.
Dude, you have absolutely NO idea what you're talking about. I actually work in production. I know all about the role that copyright plays in keeping media companies honest (more or less) in their dealings with each other because I deal with that system every day. I promise you, this is not a "blind spot".
I stopped using Dzone ages ago. It has become a mixture of spam and dangerously stupid disinformation. It's being heavily gamed and the owners don't care.
The presence of OtherOS, crippled as it was, prevented enough people from being interested in putting in the effort to get more out. The general consensus at the time seemed to be that this was exactly the sort of effect Sony was going for when they included OtherOS in the first place.
Having received 7.75 million votes in 2012, she can probably afford to burn a few, rather than spend time trying to turn a single voter's opinion. She won by about 3 million votes over her opponent.

I am not stating that the fight isn't a good one, only that her haughty and dismissive attitude is calculable from her election margin of victory.
I started with Dreamweaver back in the day. It was nice because you could switch between code view and design view. Also I created a really crappy music review site and used that project to help me learn html/css.
This is a sad day. Everyone seems to be touched here in Italy.
> My guess is they made 30% profit from the $800 purchase.

No, they made a 30% gross margin. Their profits would likely be substantially less.
I consider 3D printing to be mature technology once a 3D printer can clone itself! I bet at that point von Neumann smiles in his grave for self-replicating systems.
Look, some people get into Princeton, and some don't. LOl.

People are different, and in my experience, some brainy people like twitter and other link finding services, to find things to READ. We watch instructional videos or download all the awesome lectures that universities have posted. We use facebook, but end up posting links to news stories and even longer things like wikipedia articles and actual papers and prose. We like Reddit and even stackexchange. We love wikipedia.

We're a minority. Way more people like to take photos of each other and send them to each other. They like to share photos of the cat, babies, etc. They share inspirational poetry.

Even more people just want videophone of some kind, or something like twitter, but sans too much linking. More photos. t.co for everything.

I know someone who got internet mainly for consuming porn and maybe some video games. He's an adult, has a college degree, and works with people who wish kids would read more, or be more interested in school, or basically be more like the brainy kids. He didn't go to college because he loved knowledge. He went to get a middle class job, and because his parents went to college.

Personally, I was the first to go to college in my family, and went to a good one. I'm a big nerd. My brother and I taught ourselves to program computers. (He's smarter than me, too.) I liked to read. I still mostly read online. I've put up a few left-wing websites, have an almost obligatory anger toward the boss (comes from growing up working class), and still buy books.

I just accept that people are different. Some people are into reading, and others aren't. Some people like to think about things, and others are more about looking at people. Some people go with the flow, and others don't.
Thanks, should have written that in my comment. I did not intend to fool anyone into believing NeXTSTEP or OS X are micro kernels.

And Wikipedia disagrees with you about Mach. It says Mach was the "logical successor to Carnegie Mellon's Accent kernel" and that Mach was based on BSD4.2. Though Wikipedia could obviously be wrong.
Actually, my e-mail contained escaped html tags; I was explaining something. The paste was alright, the problem was how it got rendered.
Well, the reality is that the client has what the freelancer needs: money, so they are always going to be in the position of power in the negotiation.

The only way to take the position of power is to not need (much) money, which leads to the ironic situation where, by not needing work, you end up getting paid more for it. Call it the Paradox of Need, you can see it in many different socio-economic situations.

The fact that living a low cash-burn lifestyle also improves you morally, is environmentally positive and gives you personal freedom are side benefits to this approach.
Dave, it would be more accurate to say that a lot has been written about the relative merits of a college education with respect to startups, but that is not evidence for a claim that "Silicon Valley says that college education is a waste."

It would be accurate to say that the question has come up, and been answered many times. As a simple exercise, scan CrunchBase, take the founders, scrape LinkedIn, and find the ones without college degrees. The bulk of people who are funded have college degrees, and if you assume that 'funding' is a proxy for 'values' then by that simple experiment your claim would be disproved.

It would be accurate to say that certain investment agencies, of which Peter Thiel is perhaps the most visible, have decided to weight the value a college education less than other investors, but Peter doesn't represent the "Silicon Valley" any more than Paul does.

The article you link [1] doesn't say anything about not valuing a college education, rather it says a lot about a college trying to maximize its endowment. Your comment about Harvard wanting to "participate in the success of the next Gates ..." isn't even in the linked text, you called it out of some other unmentioned source.

It is a perfectly reasonable argument to make that the people who advocate that a college degree has no value, are wrong. But "Silicon Valley" is not those people.

[1] http://www.thecrimson.com/article/2012/1/27/experiment-fund-...
> It's also using most of the standard GNU tools - bash, etc. You can open a shell on a rooted android device and use it much like any other distribution.

Nope. Android does not use GNU. It is not just a GNU/Linux distribution, it is a completely different operating system, even more different than other alternates to GNU such as Busybox if you consider the philosophy of the whole thing.
GNU's Not Unix, but a little bit anyway. Android is not Unix, no matter from which angle you view it.
Teacher pay is based on years in the system because it is so difficult to measure individual teacher effectiveness, without incentivizing people to pay more attention to the "good" students and marginalize those who are difficult to teach.

It's politically difficult, not statistically difficult. Statistically VAM does a great job.

Paying attention to the "good" students vs the difficult to teach ones is not enforced by every objective measurement system, it's purely a function of how you compute the teacher's score. There are many choices:

# focus on the best, ignore the rest
student_scores.max()

# focus on the worst, ignore the rest
student_scores.min()

# Focus on the cheapest improvements possible
# independent of whether best or worst
student_scores.mean()

# Somewhere in between mean and max
pow(student_scores,K).mean()
# 1 < K < infinity

#Minimize inequality
student_scores.variance()
"You can open a shell on a rooted android device and use it much like any other distribution."

This is the nub of the matter. It's not a free system because of the ludicrous hoops you have to jump through in order to actually get to the Unix underneath.
It's not googles job to police the Internet. I, and many others, have been subjected to googles safe browsing malware flag without due cause. This is unacceptable and google overstepping its position.

I am beginning to hope that someone takes google to task and reigns in thier power over the Internet community. No company should have the ability to practically shut down websites at will.
The price of some apps is ridiculous though. I'm not defending pirates but look how much Anki costs on the App Store whilst being free on Android.
Selling My Android App on Apptopia.
True. If the freelancer treated the nibbles as a negotiation instead of requests it might go a lot differently.
HN, TC, GigaOm and theRegister
The fact that people are still writing clarifications for what something seemingly as simple as "this" actually means is just another argument for avoiding it entirely.

It's a huge source of sneaky, little errors and you wont find any JS object I've written without the first line being "var self = this;".

Basically "this" considered harmful.
That's really not the Suckless way. It is hard to really describe in a nutshell, you should just check out their philosophy page: http://suckless.org/philosophy

I guess the best way to describe it is they are along similar lines as the 'cat -v' folks.
Indeed, his skill for naming repos may be laughable (ex 'optilamb'), but other 1337 hackers (like some dude named Peter Norvig) are under the impression he qualifies modestly as a hacker.

https://twitter.com/i/#!/RomyOnRuby/media/slideshow?url=pic....
I use Prismatic (http://getprismatic.com) which gives me more than enough to read on a daily basis. I also use Zite on my iPad (because Prismatic doesn't have an iPad app -- yet?).
And just as an anecdote, I built a prototype for a client that laid fallow for a couple of years while he worked on some parallel business ideas that I also built, but when it came time to return to fire up the original idea there had been major language and framework version upgrades in the meantime. I had to almost rebuild the app from scratch due to the lack of tests in the MVP that could tell me what was what. Basic tests would have cut the upgrade time in half. Not that I mind the billings, but this time and effort gets in the way of the bizdev.
Show HN: my new crowdfunding site for Open Source Software
That bothered me too. Any educational value this might have is in the subtle details, and they left all of those out: no audio/video, no numbers, and we don't know what both sides knew before the negotiation started.

It's basically as educational as anyone at a cocktail party talking about the good deal they got on a car. Except in that case, you'd at least get the numbers.
Screen used in xterm (or any other terminal emulator that normally does not reflow) will reflow (though tmux never will).
Show HN: Interesting documentaries from Japan, new content daily
This seems obvious. A generic solution can do everything, but there's no reason to expect it would be the best at anything; a specialised, single-function machine can always beat a 3D printer for performance, for the simple reason that printers have traded away performance for versatility. And in software, abstraction gives you flexibility while degeneralisation gives you efficiency. It's the same old story.
@jacobedawson - No I'm not doing anything active marketing to pull users to the landing page. I definitely agree that it's obnoxious yet I spoke to a few friends of mine (primarily iphone app developers) who said it's good to get a landing page out there to get word spread early but I wanted to see what the community thought.

Thank you very much for taking the time to let me know. I think I'll wait until I've at least got a MVP before I put something there into beta.
While another App store (even used for pirated apps as well) is probably a good thing, and having fewer sources of software (less competition) is bad, I have to say: good riddance.

It wasn't exactly ethical, and even when used for semi-legitimate purposes (obtaining software "not available" in your region) it was slow, cumbersome and unreliable.
Good examples for the discussed techniques.

I am actually surprised though, that the car sales man didn't ask how much he could pay. If the FBI negotiator still stuck with his initial offer, I guess he would have suggested some kind of monthly rate or a similar kind of loan that would "fit his lifestyle better".
Tilaa looks excellent! Thanks for the pointer. Can you please describe your experience with them in some detail?
Unfortunately, NGF seems to be more or less unavailable to the public.
One is a "what" the other is a "how".
"More broadly, I think Valett can provide the foundation for answering other interesting questions in word games, such as how to quantify the difficulty of Boggle boards."

Well, you can already quantify the difficulty of Boggle boards pretty well just by counting up all the points you can make on them (it's a small enough problem that you can do that pretty fast). I think the topology of the board is important enough (whether those I N and G blocks are next to each other or not makes a _big_ difference) that a simple histogram of letters isn't going to be sufficient.
Hard to know in advance what elements might gel to make a great game. Care to add more of your thoughts about this?

Guitar Hero taps into everyone's dream of becoming an overnight rock star, so it has sort of an archetypical experience going for it.
Yes, yes. This is true, and I sure know it, but people are different, and the time for learning is also fairly short. You can learn rapidly from your preteen years until you are around 30. That's it. Beyond that you are losing neurons and building on past knowledge. So while it's important to become socialized and maintain relationships, if someone is inclined to be an intellect, they should pursue that. Great athletes didn't become great by balancing their practice with time spent at the library. They did enough to get by, maybe get into college, often with the help of tutors.
You can opt out of it -- it's not mandatory.
Look at this picture:
http://www.reprap.org/wiki/File:2012-12-15-clone-wars-geneal...

It is about a project that started 1 year ago in Spain making 3d printers and now have more than 100 of them(the graph gets outdated fast).

There is today more new people coming to this technology every single year than the entire population dedicated to them before.

3D printer is not about what could be done with it today, but about what these people is going to do in the future from that.

E.g Inexpensive(1/10 the price of filament) plastic printing from pellets:
http://makibox.com/details/product/makibox_a6_ramen_bundle

PS:I have a 3d printer and love it.
"All right, among us now we that we are all in private just us girls all let our hair down" he didn’t had much hair even then but he let it down "We are not going to prosecute your client Mr Zimmermann he said public key encryption will become available we fought a long loosing battle against it but it was just a delaying tactic" and then he looked around the room and he said "But nobody cares about anonymity do they?"

And a cold chilled went up my spine and I thought alright Stuart and now I know you’re going to spent the next twenty years trying to eliminate anonymity in human society and I am going to try to stop you and let’s see how it goes.

And it’s going badly.

We didn’t built the net with anonymity built in. That was a mistake now we are paying for it.

Our network assumes that you can be tracked everywhere.

And we have taken the Web, and we made facebook out of it.

http://benjamin.sonntag.fr/Moglen-at-Re-Publica-Freedom-of-t...
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Export_of_cryptography_in_the_U...

I was thinking of when the limit of crypto for export was 40 bits SSL, which would have made all e-commerce impossible due to the uselessness of 40 bit crypto. Luckily that was changed.
What benefits ZFS brings on a single drive laptop? I was informed it is mainly designed for high traffic file servers with redundancy and so forth.
I disagree that clients have the position of power. The nibbles in freelancing usually come towards the end of delivery, rather than the start when the project scope and costs are negotiated. This means the freelancer has the power, because the client still has to pay for the services already performed.

A good freelancer will always have power in a negotiation. There are a lot of average freelancers.
I don't really see how that contradicts what I said.
But it's also true that the designer has what the client needs: web design ability. So why would we automatically assume a power imbalance?
Haha, no. Take a look at how the customer service for the Nexus 4 went. You have customer service making shit up to get people off the phone. You have people not having any way to figure out the status of their order (or even if their order actually went through).
That's the developer's choice. Pay the price on the tin, switch to Android where they've chosen to make it free, or find an alternative. The market will sort itself out if it's truly priced too high.
I learned Vim because the internet went out one day and I finally decided to check out `$ vimtutor`.

15 minutes later after learning commands like A, I, o, O, dd, p, and P it was clear to me that I wanted to use Vim seriously.

The hard part was arriving at a workflow, a set of plugins that I actually liked using. I imagine a great deal of people don't get to that point. I almost didn't. Especially since the commonly recommended plugins like NERDTree are awkward and clunky.

I think discovering CtrlP was the turning point for me.

A lot of luck was definitely involved. Sometimes I stay up at night wondering just how many versions of myself had given up on Vim when my wavefunction collapsed and I happened to be the chosen eigenstate that stuck with it.
Reverse Planning for your New Year resolutions
Same comments were made by printshop owners when Apple introduced the first Laserwriter. Sure indication of the big guys well on their way to being referred to as dinosaurs.
To your point, early in my career I made way more money working through a middleman than I did freelancing directly for clients. It was also much less stressful.
The way we bought our last car was much simpler (not sure it was better, but i don't know if i could pull it off). We picked the car we wanted and then emailed every dealership within a hundred miles what we wanted and asked for quotes. Once we had quotes we liked we treated the tradein as a nibble. Best car buying experience ever.
The Terrifying Prospect Of Success
the client has what the freelancer needs: money

And the freelancer has what the client needs: the ability to make a web site.

A transaction happens when both parties believe they're better off with the result: the freelancer wants the money more than the time, and the client wants the web site more than the money.
I'm the founder of https://circleci.com, so I feel I have a little perspective here from talked to dozens of startups about this very question.

You should test a different amount based on your goals. TDD does not deliver value to your customer directly, so the only way its even usable in an MVP is helping you iterate and deliver the MVP faster.

A common mistake, and it feels like you're doing it here, is to think that TDD is a best practice that you have to do, rather than thinking about how to apply it to improve your productivity.

So how will testing help in an MVP? It allows you verify that you haven't broken anything when you write new code, and when you rewrite existing code. But because you'll constantly throw out code, spending a long time doing this will literally be wasted as you throw out the code you're testing.

Avoid writing the sort of massive extensive tests that many associate with TDD. When you unit test a function, test or two cases at most, any more that that is overkill. If it takes you 2 minutes to write a function, a function + tests should take at most an extra 30 seconds. If you can't think how to test it, don't.

So some specific advice:

- when you write a function, you're likely to test it somehow manually (refreshing the browser, at the REPL, etc). Take that manual test and put it into the test framework. It should take 10 seconds more. If it is more effort than this, don't bother.

- write MVP-type tests: "what's the minimum I can write here to viably test this"? 1-2 test cases, at most. A positive test and a negative test ideally. And then you're done, move on.

- avoid full-browser tests. Those things are a massive time sink, and nothing will change more than your front-end.

- use a CI service (self-plug: https://circleci.com). This means you don't have to run tests before you push. Just push and let the server catch it.
There's a reason Mozilla and Apple also use this service, and all the major browsers include something like it. Malware, injected malicious code (susceptible to XSS and social engineering attacks), and drive by downloads are a very real problem. You're going to have to suggest an alternative approach if you want to replace it.
As a customer you could choose to opt out, but from a business standpoint it's not so easy.