skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
You keep on insisting that "more data" is a bad idea. Economics has a long tradition of learning from Economic History and comparative observation. I can't resist quoting Google here, that "more data" is the way to go, as Norvig argues (slightly out of context; field is machine-learning): http://www.computer.org/portal/cms_docs_intelligent/intellig...

I'm more or less arguing for that the IMF, or any other org. in those waters, has a lot of rich data in their possession. Well, here's an example: I worked for three years on a government-funded survey on "barter networks in Eastern Europe", where I did the number crunching on the data set... regression analysis, multivariate statistics etc. This resulted in one of the first extensive studies on contract theory in barter networks (http://www.amazon.com/Contracts-Trade-Transition-Resurgence-...). Basically in absence of cash to keep trade flowing you barter. Now if the U.S. financial system breaks down to the point where nobody can pay their suppliers and vendors etc. they'll have to pay each other with parts and other barter derivatives, passing around IOUs. Turns out, somebody looked at this and it works on a grand scale and even across borders. Anyway, there are lots of crazy ideas that you can try out and experiment with, looking at a rich data set of failed nations. I remember how expensive it was compiling all that data on barter networks (granted, we did the legwork; data was not from the IMF).

Regarding "abuse through power aggregation in developing nations" I don't have an example right now, on how that directly applies to the U.S. situation.
I thought this was kind of funny:

What does annoy him is people misunderstanding his work - or "the technology", as he puts it. One example he gives is an article about him in which the journalist confuses Java and JavaScript (the former is a stand-alone program which can be accessed online, the latter is a browser-dependent scripting language)

I'd say that distinction between Java and Javascript is pretty wrong too ...
I remember thinking about a service like this but for audio - for example you post a link to youtube video or some similar service and it would match audio in video with a song name. That would be pretty cool and useful.
I hate explaining myself, especially when it shouldn't be necessary. Yes, I know Java et al compiles to bytecode. But in practice you never hit a "compile" button because it compiles continuously.
A nice application of this rule: try to explain a social or economic event/trend.

Theory 1: event occurs as a result of emergent phenomenon.

Theory 2: powerful people that I dislike caused it.
I'm pretty sure that at 18, I wouldn't have "gotten" it.

I'm encouraging my sixteen-year-old to read it often enough to wrap his mind around it.
> 'm not sure how making the argument that blaming regulators who created the incentives and environment for an industry to act against their long term self interest is inconsistent with being libertarian.

Perhaps a metaphor will help you see the contradiction. Who do I blame for my eventual heart attack: The fast food industry, who has created the incentives and environment for my obesity, or my own damn shortsighted self?

Depending on the degree of your libertarianism, you would answer "entirely yourself" or "you bear primary responsibility but the fast food industry certainly helped you on your way." To blame the fast food industry is rather counter to the entire principle of individual responsibility, yet this is exactly what you are doing when you blame regulators for Wall Street's 'heart attack.'

The rest of your response is about "what should (not) be done," not "who should we blame" so I'll just leave it at that.
Disney, Hulu restart talks over ABC shows
Mostly just people rotting their brains on TV ..
How trapped dolphins were saved by agile group rather than bureaucracy
The above sounds like a religious statement. What difference does it make that it's a \ over a .? It does what it needs to do.
Does insulting TV-watchers expand your mind?
The answer, of course, is that your parental duties require you to be a disinterested observer at times. Tough love is real love.

This is very good advice for all the young hackers here who will grow up to be parents. If you'd like your children to be able to cope with running a start up business (as I do), then you sometimes have to stop being mom or dad and be someone looking at what they do as a would-be partner or customer would.
Working Out at the 'Brain Gym'
There is some insight in this article for how comment rating could work in a social bookmarking site, as for example Hacker News.

And this article is a must read if you operate a site that sells products and your site includes user-submitted product reviews.
I can think of one: all US debt is printed in US dollars and there is only one source of us dollars.

I'm not sure how big of a deal that is.
Which city are you moving to in Canada? I'm building an app for electricians and I'm always looking for feedback from people with domain experience (also if you hack that's a plus too). We're in Toronto and moving to Vancouver soon.
I think most people have internalised the notion of backslash being the escape operator. That's the way it's used in a lot of languages. Using it for something different not only feels dirty, it may also make it harder to get the "feel" (i.e. to quickly recognize and use) of the namespace operator.

Maybe that concern is invalid and we'll quickly adjust. Since this is what the PHP folks have decided, we'll soon get the chance to find out.
It's a different post...
Unfortunately I think it works in the reverse. Cultures that have arranged marriages tend to have fewer women's rights (how easily can the wife initiate the divorce?), social stigmas against divorced women (who would want you?), lack of feasible opportunities (how will you support yourself?), and familial pressure (what would the community say about our family?). It's a bit like how North Korea has a 99% (or is it 101%) landslide win for their leader every election -- lack of visible disagreements don't mean the participants are happy with the outcome.
Yeah, computers in high school were only for nerds. Nobody wants to hang with the calculator crowd. Later on that changed.
Open-source Flash Game Engine Now In Open Beta
Brilliant! Now all we have to do is infect everyone with cancer and AIDS and these problems will cease to exist! Next, we should take away everyone's money and food, and poverty and famine will disappear as well. You sir have just solved all the world's problems. My hat is off to you.
The 10 Women Who Are Saving Local News
"Was this review helpful to you?"

It's a nice discussion of the design and evolution of the helpfulness question, which I find very useful. At a deeper level it shows how a seemingly small improvement in user engagement can have dramatic impact on a site. Read it. It should trigger a re-examination of your own site.

HN thought: would the helpfulness question be better for articles than the simple upvote? Seems to me that it would?
How to Defend Earth Against an Asteroid Strike
On a similar note:

If you want an average successful life, it doesn’t take much planning. Just stay out of trouble, go to school, and apply for jobs you might like. But if you want something extraordinary, you have two paths:

1. Become the best at one specific thing.

2. Become very good (top 25%) at two or more things.

The first strategy is difficult to the point of near impossibility. Few people will ever play in the NBA or make a platinum album. I don’t recommend anyone even try.

The second strategy is fairly easy. Everyone has at least a few areas in which they could be in the top 25% with some effort. In my case, I can draw better than most people, but I’m hardly an artist. And I’m not any funnier than the average standup comedian who never makes it big, but I’m funnier than most people. The magic is that few people can draw well and write jokes. It’s the combination of the two that makes what I do so rare. And when you add in my business background, suddenly I had a topic that few cartoonists could hope to understand without living it.

http://dilbertblog.typepad.com/the_dilbert_blog/2007/07/care...
It isn't that hard if you approach it right. Start with a white screen and add a small logo at the top that looks OK. Use a font that you like and embellish it a bit with Photoshop. Otherwise, keep yourself to a handful of colors, maybe as few as two or three. Use variants of gray instead of pure black. Follow web conventions.

In most situations a clean design with useful content and functionality beats a pretty design that doesn't work. You can always pretty things UP later.
Sony unveils Indie developer initiative
more links:

http://www.gamesindustry.biz/articles/sony-to-match-dev-budg...

http://cuernavacajoven.com/phyreengine/index.php?option=com_...
It doesn't discuss the differences in such things as environmental impact, quality of the construction, or worker: welfare: pay, safety, and the like. Or to be cynical, a sign saying 500 workers died to bring you this subway.

And it doesnt discuss how unnecessary waste and corruption increased the cost of the NY subway. It is a very lightweight article
In the past week I've been handed two cool looking business cards. One, from a guy that hasn't produced results; one from a guy that has. It's obvious who I'll choose to do business with.

The soft/branding stuff gets on my nerves. Way too overhyped..
A more low tech way:

http://graffletopia.com/stencils/437
That if you want to get laid, it helps to major in liberal arts?
Vast Spy System Loots Computers in 103 Countries
Yes, it can made data parallel, but not nearly as easily as ray-tracing. Ray tracing is easily parallelized by dividing the screen into sub renders. Each box renders a different NxM segment of the final image. This approach doesn't work for radiosity because each patch is dependant on the computations of other patches.

The primary trick used to parallelize radiosity is to partition the scene spatially. Treat the virtual polygons which separate the rooms as light absorbers. When the room is finished with all of the available light, send the light absorber across the bus as light emitters to the other processes rendering the other rooms. Iterate back and forth until the light absorbers absorb under a threshold of light.
Changing timezones have caused some of the most complicated things in the coding I've done. It seems so simple, but its never right. Look at how many different libraries are in the standard Java library to handle time.
IANAL, but you don't have to worry about US taxes. You have to collect sales taxes for a particular state only if you have a store or the like in that state. I think, but do not know for sure, but I think activities such as R&D dont count as a "presence." In the US, your best source of advice is probably a CPA, rather than a lawyer. Cheaper too.
Man, I expected a much more interesting article based on the title.
Because of the power-law distribution, on sites with substantially lower traffic than Amazon, it's very possible that the helpfulness question won't be answered enough to be useful.

How do you incentivise someone to answer the "Is this helpful?" question?

How did Amazon manage it, even? The article talks about how subtly placed the question is. Yet I know I've answered it - to thank the author of the review, or to passive-aggressively express my displeasure at the wasted ten seconds I spent reading it. I also get annoyed if people downvote reviews I spent a lot of time on because they disagree with me.

Could you assume a review was helpful because you saw that a user had read it and then purchased the item? Maybe that would help populate the rankings, albeit crudely, for sites with lower traffic.
I'd say both.
I've had a couple of women tell me this on separate occasions: "if the guys is not willing to get married after a year, then it's probably not going to happen." These women don't know each other. One of them learned it from her mother.

Sometimes a woman's drive to bear children is very strong, and her biological clock is telling her that she doesn't have the option to wait.

Finally, an ex-girlfriend told me this: "Women get married when they feel it's the right guy. Men get married when they feel it's the right time." I don't know about the women's side, but the men's side seems to hold, and the right time is about 30 years old, as most of my friends got married within a few years of each other.
Had to go into the database for this one: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=58424
Meh. Every point below 4 is a trait phrased as a positive, then twisted to be a negative in the text.
Yeah, on the surface. But some people are making decent living that way, so you may get into the business if you really like it, you pimp ;)
The List: Look Who's Censoring the Internet Now
Motorola A810 Excellent Black Unlocked
Motorola A810 Excellent Black Smartphone even further, Motorola adds smart looks to a phone that has great processing power. The Motorola A810 takes on the smorgasbord of Windows Mobile phones that are currently on the market.
I'm not an Indian, and I felt this video series was illuminating.

"First comes marriage, then comes love"

"Liz Tuccillo, writer for Sex and the City and co-author of He's Just Not That Into You, asks why is the divorce rate so low in India? She finds out that Indians are taught that happiness is a state of mind. And if you've had an arranged marriage you wed first, and learn to love your husband over time, as you get to know him."

http://www.yourtango.com/20086547/first-comes-marriage-then-...
It is also about lowering the barrier to engaging with the product as well, right?

Facebook has done this amazingly well with first the 'comment on this story' interface, and now the like/unlike buttons.

Simple AJAXy elements like these examples seem to drive up engagement and result in positive feedback for both the receiver and the provider, resulting in driving even further interaction. Facebook probably doesn't make money but it does enhance stickiness for them.
I think uni labs should just focus on providing great hub access - big monitors, ethernet, wifi, disk. Students should be issued or be assumed to have laptops and there ought to be a tech support center. Why do colleges continue to overbuy hardware when it's clear from the outset every year how many machines and licenses are needed?
Sun got it wrong the first time and again the second time. I haven't looked at the Java 7 api, but they'll probably get it wrong the third time.

OK, I took a quick look. It's better, but still not what I would consider an easily usable system. I will still have to write a parser that will take unconstrained user input. There are 8 or 10 formats that are unambiguous and easy to recognize. Do it. Joda-Time has too many classes. Will it work seamlessly with SQL Date?
Consumers Still Signaling Recovery
So, the village decided to use the tools and expertise already at their disposal to perform (at their own expense) a task they wanted to see completed in their community.

What's the problem with that? Why did these people prefer to wait and have The Government to solve the problem for them by having other people work and pay for it?

There are times when one requires federal assistance, and I don't think this (freeing dolphins whose disposition to hang about and get trapped in ice will now be passed to another generation) was one of them.
I grew up at a time when unix computers were UNIX computers, SUNs and HPUXs. The HPUXs were student run. They all had interfaces similar to fvwm2, and I don't recall having many problems learning how to use it. In fact, the reason that I can navigate so well in linux is because of the things I learned from doing stuff on the unix machines back in college.
Risk Aversion And The Perils Of Selling Too Early
There is an interesting article in this month's Skeptic magazine that discusses the detrimental effects the self-esteem movement has had in the educational system and it's failure to produce high achieving students. Here's a paragraph talking about the link to NPD:

"Twenge, who is also a psychologist at San Diego State University, examined the responses of 16,475 college students who'd completed the NPI (Narcissistic Personality Inventory) between 1982 and 2006. She found a 30-percent jump in students who scored 'above average' for narcissism between those two end dates - a period of intense self-esteem building activity throughout American culture".
Even better might be multiple foils along the hull at different depths. When the speed is low, you get lots of extra lift to help pull the hull out of the water. As you pick up speed, the extra foils come out of the water and don't create extra drag.
"In a report to be issued this weekend, the researchers said that the system was being controlled from computers based almost exclusively in China, but that they could not say conclusively that the Chinese government was involved."

Control of the botnet from one particular country would be persuasive evidence of some involvement by persons in that country. The article does note that more follow-up investigation is needed.
Is Facebook Growing Up Too Fast?
19,000 UK credit card details posted on the Net ... and accessible on Google
Dmitry Orlov thinks so. Google him.

Post-Soviet Lessons for a Post-American Century
http://www.fromthewilderness.com/free/ww3/060105_soviet_less...

If hyperinflation takes place then it will be possible, but we aren't there (yet).

http://www.shadowstats.com/article/hyperinflation
Its hard to imagine a large group of CS majors managing to maintain a Unix desktop suitable for development when pre-class discussions in senior-level classes involve people complaining about the difficulties involved in compiling from source.

I'm pretty sure most of the money saved by ditching the CS labs would go towards Unix classes and a 24/7 support hotline.
At least you know that the compilation process isn't I/O bound!
"'It’s not a democracy,' Mr. Cox says of his company’s relationship with users. 'We are here to build an Internet medium for communicating and we think we have enough perspective to do that and be caretakers of that vision.'"
There have been multi-headed drives is the past when seek times were in the hundreds of miliseconds. It's not done now because it greatly increases cost and the complexity of the software, and doesn't work very well. A dual-headed drive would probably cost more than two single headed drives.
I don't know... if one is great at, say, 3D programming, VM implementation and parsing theory is that being great at 3 things or at 1 thing (a subset of computing)?
There's a question in the article if he has spent more than 10.000 hours - - I think he has. First, he holds a masters in CS (5 years at Aarhus Uni at minimum). He got his MSc in 1988 and has worked with VM's since then - that's 21 years of experience in implementing VM's. So really, there isn't an easy way to become really, really good at something ;-)
Basically all desks and tables at Amazon are still door desks, based on the company's origins:

* http://glinden.blogspot.com/2006/01/early-amazon-door-desks....

* http://www.fastcompany.com/magazine/85/bezos_2.html

It is questionable whether in the age of IKEA, the door desk is still truly frugal, but it is a very tangible reminder of the principle. Very tangible, very sturdy.
The cheaper option would be to run a compile and open any of the many different programs in Windows that tells you whether you're using lots of CPU, RAM or IO-waiting.

Then you go AHA! I'll spend money on CPUs or making my compiler/build parallel.
I hear this often, and I'd love for this to be true, but python needs it's GIL to be removed for this to be the case. In particular, doing this with reasonable performance in a multi-threaded app (which is most of them these days), is basically impossible.

At the level of one-shot scripts calling C code, or event driven apps where there is an entirely separate C component running in parallel -- it works for the most part. But with the most well-supported versions of python, you cannot have various python/C mixtures running in parallel without a lot of annoying (inefficient) legwork.

It's not a generally suitable solution, unfortunately.
My mother is now addicted to Sudoku, possibly for similar reasons.

I don't think it hurts, but when I hear about these kinds of things that are supposedly good for the brain, I can't help but feel that their fans are seriously missing something.

If you want a brain workout, why don't you do something that will teach you something AND stimulate your neocortex?

Instead of doing pointless math, why not learn some algebra or physics? Instead of pointless memorization exercises, why not read a good non-fiction book about a topic you don't know much about?

Seems like a big wasted opportunity.
s/University of Texas at Austin/University of Cambridge/

All true, up to the point about package management, which didn't quite take a week.

But as a result I use fvwm2 as my coding WM of choice. It's distraction-free!
That's really sad. I'm in Russia, I thought that worst computer labs are here (CRT monitors, Windows 98/2000, 100Mb quotas, no running overnight jobs, etc).

IMHO what you're describing is a clear manifestation of oldskool 'computers are complex systems and are to be used by professionals' ideology (as opposed to 'computers are easy tools for everyone').
I assume you have a student union at your university? Some CS professors? Other people who know what's going on?

Get together, schedule a meeting with whoever has the power do put a stamp on whatever draft you can write before the meeting. Make sure there are some admins and the head CS department in the meeting too. I bet it's a nice feeling to write here about the situation, but HN can't do much to help you. If you see the problem - go now - book a meeting room if you have them. If it's that bad, do you have anything to lose?
A pencil and some sheets of paper are all I need to do my mock-ups... Still don't get these services :/
And you can tell who's who based on how much time they spend on it?
I think it is time we got back to articles about Erlang internals again.
var in C# is only allowed for local variables, which means you can easily infer the type by analysing the assigment expression, which will always depend on known types. For example method parameters are always explicitly typed.

Haskell style type inference is more tricky, since it also tries to infer the type of function signatures from the different contexts where the function is called. This can lead to circular type dependencies.
Hi, I'm a UI designer -- and my girlfriend is a graphic designer.

Drop me an email [in my profile] and we'll sort this out.
This is an interesting post. It reminded me of a post by Jonathan Schwartz from 2005 about how Sun reduced their quality programs to use single questions: http://blogs.sun.com/jonathan/entry/defining_quality
I'm at a university right now in a program that involves some 3D modeling and rendering. Our 'render farm' was purchased about 4 years ago, and is now barely capable of rendering the scenes the students create in less than a few weeks. So the IT guys had to come up with a solution...

They installed some sort of batch render daemon on the lab computers (windows) causing them to take, and I kid you not, 1 hour to log in. We essentially don't have a lab anymore. Your experience might make the computers seem unusable, but mine truly are for a while.
How the Nation’s Only State-Owned Bank Became the Envy of Wall Street