skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
If you do this, you have to be very aware of when your gut will let you down, namely when "all available information" does not constitute much information at all. It's very easy for your gut to give you a false sense of expertise when you really don't know much about the topic at all. If this is your situation, you really need to do more research to "prime" your gut into reacting based on a more complete set of information.

Blink described this as the "Warren G. Harding" paradox, where many people voted for him because he seemed tall, confident, and commanding, while he really was an idiot. A more modern version might be George W. Bush: half of America voted for him because their gut instinct said he was a friendly, down-to-earth guy who cared about the common man, but that's only because his PR people carefully crafted his public persona to give off that impression.
Plug in hybrids are not far away. Will they be less expensive in the long run?
Agreed. Including several Drupal and Joomla projects.

Summer of Code is pretty much indescriminant about the projects it'll fund. If it's a reasonably popular OSS project, and there's a core team developer willing to mentor the recipient of the award, it'll get the nod. (It's awesome, of course, but having a SoC supported project is really saying, "we had an intern work on the project this summer, and Google was nice enough to pay him/her", rather than "supported by Google".)
Why exactly is that sad?
Killing deal from Jason Potash
I'm a little disappointed in Mossberg with this. He's right about some things - it is too much trouble to get DVDs, Flash, etc. working with Ubuntu, especially when so many things work so well.

I've been strongly recommending Ubuntu or OS X to the cloud of relatives, friends, relatives of friends, and friends of relatives who seem to think that just because I do something with computers that I'm a resource for desktop support. I would much prefer to try to fix problems with Ubuntu than those with Windows. Mossberg should have asked his resident hackers which they'd rather fix.
While all his complaints are fair, other systems have their share of rough edges. I have yet to find an OS that doesn't require tracking down some "enabling software" to perform common tasks. Just a couple days ago, I had to help a friend figure out how to get divx videos embedded in a web page to play on Safari for OS X. The problem isn't fully solved after installing the official divx player because it crashes Safari instead of playing the video about about 1/4 of the time.

Windows is simply high-maintenance. I have never seen a novice user obtain a Windows machine and keep it in good working order without help. Help can be a simple set of instructions for routine maintenance, but most people don't find out that any maintenance is require until the machine breaks in some way.

I can't make a general recommendation for the author's target audience. I've recommended Mac, Linux and Windows systems to people who fit this description, and most people have been happy with their OS. What I recommend varies based on exactly how the person is using the computer.
SCO Files For Chapter 11 Bankruptcy
A bone tossed to the writers in the crowd :)

"Switching back to writing has confirmed something I've always suspected: writing is harder than hacking. They're both hard to do well, but writing has an additional element of panic that isn't there in hacking."
Thank you! I completely agree. It is especially obnoxious when self-ascribed by very young (<25) entrepreneurs.
They're just around the corner from me. I walk past their office pretty often. Don't know what they do, though. I don't sign of for invitation only betas, so I'll have to wait to find out.
Sometimes, I wonder if the best thing anti-smoking advocates could do would be to buy up all the Phillip Morris stock and then use their dividend checks to run lots of gritty anti-smoking ads. Heck, if they bought enough, they could gain control of the company, publish all the incriminating smoking memos, forever tarnish the brand image of all cigarette manufacturers, and liquidate the company.
Wired's 101 Ways to Save Apple (from 1997, via FSJ)
It's not for everyone though...I'm there every now and then, and to me the whole city feels like one big theme park. If you're looking for a city that has any sort of 'organic' feel, this is very much not it.
Cool.

>The team has been working on today's Winamp 5.5 release for about a year, with iTunes firmly in its crosshairs.

As long as they don't mess with the Winamp 2.0 look-n-feel, I'm happy. I've been using that, with the same skin, for a really, really long time.
This is rather expensive, and for human studies, would require both extremely fine control of bias (very, very difficult in meta-analyses due to publication bias) as well as extremely well-established investigators who could get a hugely negative study published in a highly visible journal.

Most academics know better than to challenge the norms. Corporate control of scholarly journals (in terms of the actual distribution and management of the content rights) has not served the actual practice of science very well.

In any event, this massive meta-replication study you speak of is done, very slowly and piecemeal, every day in every reasonable field. As new studies fail to replicate old studies, the conclusions of the irreproducible are deprecated, while those that consistently bear fruit are entrenched. Given complex models and expensive studies (eg. massive multi-year cohort studies of genetic, environmental, and gene*environment interaction effects on cancer risk), that's about all you can hope for.

Science is simultaneously practiced in a manner worse than anyone's fears (on the level of individual studies) and better than anyone's hopes (on the level of accretion of knowledge over time vs. budgetary constraints). The fraudsters burn out quickly in most rigorous fields.
Simply putting up some ads in your app is unlikely to do much for you. A few months ago, Valleywag reported on a group that found 0.04% clickthrough rates to be common for ads on Facebook. That's 400 clicks for every million impressions. Not good.

Your best bet is finding some highly effective way to target your ads (maybe by letting a third-party company serve them), or use your FB app as a loss leader for something else.
From the piece:

> "The correction isn't the ultimate truth either," Prof. Kevles said.

No kidding! Folks, this is an iterative process. If you get as excited as the P.I. about their findings, stop for a second, look at the methods & materials, and ask if a different analysis would support their findings. In a 'hot' field, look very carefully at the figures and tables, for these fields are the most prone to shenanigans (cough stem cells cough). At the same time, when you have a critical mass of smart, motivated people in a field that's ripe for discovery, real advances can and do happen. What biologist would have taken you seriously in 1990 if you told them that, not only would we have a map of significant functional landmarks in the human genome by 2000, but by 2010, we'd have them broken down base-by-base into their patterns of variation among sub-populations? And the same thing is happening for everything from nematode worms to wine grapes.

Don't throw the baby out with the bathwater. But do expect more heavy-handed anti-intellectual undertones from the WSJ as Murdoch begins to insert his control into the editorial staff.
> If you're still in school as you read this, take a stats course!

If you're not, you can consult with a decent statistician at most institutions. Might save your career, in fact...
This is sort of what Warren Buffett suggests is happening with taxes: he argues (in one of the letters to shareholders in the 80's) that there's a "Class G" stock entitled to 35% of a company's annual profits, and that sometimes that money is used to reduce those profits.

It would be great to make that explicit: put together a foundation that buys cigarette stocks, reinvests most of the dividends, and uses the rest for ads. It's a built-in hedge, because the stocks only go down if the ads are working, and if the ads fail (or, per "Thank You For Smoking," make smoking cooler) the ad budget goes up.
>In any event, this massive meta-replication study you speak of is done, very slowly and piecemeal, every day in every reasonable field. As new studies fail to replicate old studies, the conclusions of the irreproducible are deprecated, while those that consistently bear fruit are entrenched. Given complex models and expensive studies (eg. massive multi-year cohort studies of genetic, environmental, and gene*environment interaction effects on cancer risk), that's about all you can hope for.

Sure, but in a very ad hoc way. It's not a study if you're just sucking up data when you find it -- there isn't a control group, and you haven't standardized it.
Bin Laden for president?
Willingness to do good with ones own money isn't a common trait.

Heck - there are a number of "good vs evil" issues where the "good" folks would actually make serious money if they walked their talk, and were actually correct about the "evil". Interestingly enough, "good" folks make "they'd make more money if" arguments on many of these issues. I don't know why they're unwilling to act on their own advice since it would also put the "bad" folks out of biz, making it doubly good.
For those interested I would highly recommend "Godel Escher Bach : An Eternal Golden Braid (By Douglas Hofstadter)"
Stunning CS theory result:  Polynomial Hierarchy Collapses [pdf]
In case anyone's interested, Aaron and I are now working on a new startup called Qubescape. If you want us to let you know when we go live, just give us your email address at http://www.qubescape.com (and if you're looking to join a cool new startup, send us an email!)
A Vegas for EMEA then? Cost of flights to Dubai are constantly dropping too which is only helping it as a tourist destination.
My gut says that I shouldn't always trust it.
Canning Spam: Why is it so difficult to prevent junk e-mail?
$59 a month? Are you kidding me? If people want a product like this that badly, its no wonder free competitors like PlentyOfFish have done so well. I am simply shocked the monthly fees are so ridiculous. People actually pay that?

In light of this, date matching with mobile devices (bluetooth or GPS enabled) could be a tremendous opportunity.
The two or three times I've used Macports, the version of the program Macports installed was out-of-date to the point of not working at all on my machine. I just end up recompiling from source. (The last example of this was with FreeImage.)

Now just yesterday I had a problem with apt-get on Ubuntu installing a bogus version of (I think it was) Ruby Gems.
And Turing's "insanity" has a lot more to do with the diabolical treatment he received at the hands of the British authorities; indeed, his suicide was arguably the rational act of a rational man.

(I'd hoped the BBC were above such sensationalism; I guess the memory of that old fascist Reith has now been thoroughly pissed upon.)
I'll be seeing YOU in pink-sheet related spam real soon.
Great design sense and a knack for sales won't save you (if your best friend is a penny-stock tout)
It is unfortunate because it seems that those that succeed (especially in the computer industry) are the biggest jerks.

The article does mention Gates, who was involved in some pretty shady stuff when it comes to establishing Windows. You learn about Steve Jobs and his early times at Apple and it is apparent he treated a lot of people like complete shit. Steve used Woz quite a bit, too.

And then there's Zuckerberg...he might end up being a billionaire but it seems that he had to step on a lot of people to do it.

What's that quote from the Bible? 'What good is it to gain the whole world but forfeit your soul?' There's a lot of smart people here at news.yc - I hope if any of you hit it big you won't let money and fame consume you.
I always like the NYMag articles about business/criminal business. This is my favorite one.

http://nymag.com/news/features/16653/
Strategic Tool: How to use the 'Scarcity Illusion' to boost your launch
Everyone seems to be grabbing at the Facebook spotlight.
yeah I've had the same problem with stuff that isn't that popular (to me that is) - though the good part about macports and fink is that they pretty much run in a sandbox (not a true one but at least in file location) that you can reset or wipe out... not to mention it's a lot easier to find where stuff is installed
He's full of BS with regard to Facebook, and I explained why, based on his own book account, when the NYT article was previously posted here:

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49122
You also know when code "works".

It's much more difficult to know if writing works.

Though both are never bug-free.
Yes indeed...those poor VCs and their private jets...
I'd vote for him... Islam mandates a flat tax of 2.5%.
Medicine is not science!
All of the issues he mentioned are Dell's fault, not Ubuntu's.

If you take a "naked-iron" laptop, regardless of the manufacturer, and install a boxed version of Windows on it, it will be the same thing (if not worse): you will have to hunt down latest drivers, OS patches, BIOS updates and so on. Just look at the list in "drivers/software" category on Lenovo web site: yes, you have to install them all, and some of them are patches (!) for XP specific to Lenovo laptops, and touchpad configuration utility is made by Lenovo, not Microsoft.

If Dell wanted to make end user experience flawless, they could have provided the same level of "OS-tweaking" to make sure their hardware is well-supported.

In fact, barebone version of Ubuntu probably beats Windows by the number of hardware supported out of the box.
If SVG had taken off in all browsers by now, PowerPoint would be toast.
Genius didn't drive Turing insane, society did.
You can actually get a much cheaper monthly rate if you commit to several months. I don't remember exactly but it's something like $35/mo for 3 months and $25/mo for 6 months (the article quotes a $21/mo figure for a whole year), and when that time is up they continue billing at the reduced rate. They also offer ex-members lots of deals (which seems like blatant price discrimination to me)

Also, the membership fee and the sign-up process is designed to weed people out as much as it is designed to attract people.
Basic JS/CSS to for iPhone orientation detection
SCO is still in business? ...and I thought their MyPhone pet project was taking off.
My startup is similar to eharmony and chemistry. We have more than 800 users in Mexico. But we still don't know how to make money. The trick is that advertisement is expensive and people are secretive about their use of the service and they don't tell their friends.
I recall having read this piece before, and it is well written; but for a non-statistician, there's really just one thing you need to remember:

Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence.

If you're testing 500,000 hypotheses and you find that one of them is significant, it better be extremely significant, and it had better survive independent replication. Otherwise... well, let's not belabor the point.

Just keep in mind that a wild and wacky theory needs some heavy-duty experimental evidence (i.e. replication) before you, or the PI, or the referees for Ye Olde Journal, have any reason to believe it. If everyone involved would keep this in mind, it would cut down hugely on publication bias and popular confirmation bias as well.
Ahh, it feels great to see Erlang getting press. It's a, "funny little language" that has a whole lot to offer and even more to teach!

Joe Armstrong's book is brilliant because it seems to be the only one not written in boring-professor-speak.
Algorithms: Business by the Numbers
There are 2 cases to look at:
1) Personal email IDs: Most people used some form of web-based email. For those of us that use Gmail for example, I dont know if spam is that big of a problem anymore. Some spam (at least for me) makes its way through the gmail filters -- but its at a level where I can live with it. I would imagine that Google's recent Postini acquisition will end up making the Gmail anti-spam solution better.
2) So that leaves us with enterprises. The solutions proposed in the article will not work for enterprises. DKIM for example, will not work in the botnet case. CAPTCHA based solutions have usability constraints -- they cannot be mandated upon customers and others who frequently mail people within the organization. So most enterprises are forced to rely on gateway based antispam solution thats basically a cat and mouse game.
how do you trust a startup with your finance information ... this one will be interesting....
even if things go badly for Madden I wouldn't be surprised if he can pull off a James Cash Penney (founder of JC Penneys).
I think Penney lost most of his money at around the same age as Madden and somehow he managed to earn it all back and then some...
Am I the only one who thought of the chess automaton and was disappointed?
You know how us Canadians are. If something affects one person negatively, it can't be allowed.
One of my first successful start-ups was software that helps make sense of the 35,000+ medical studies that are published each year. (The software helps find design flaws, does cohort analysis, helps summarize results, etc.) During that experience, I became very interested in nutrition research as a hobby. I basically learned that things I grew up eating were unbelievably bad for me. (I grew up drinking milk, eating meals centered around meat, with lots of refined, fried and sugary ingredients. Good old Southern cooking and Standard American Diet.) I also learned that much of what we are taught ("Milk for strong bones") is complete bullshit when you actually read the studies. Milk is really for osteoporosis and breast cancer.

We sold that company, and I stopped seriously reading on the subject. Recently, illnesses in my family (cancer and autoimmune diseases) have caused me to get into the subject again to an even greater degree. I've also experimented with my own diet for the last several years and I've arrived at a very different conclusion than this fellow.

There are tons of people that have an almost religious agenda about pushing specific diets. They are usually well-intentioned...they just really want to believe they are right. They publish pseudo-scientific articles like this one that have just enough logic in them to seduce people into believing them. The media is also horrible about publishing sensational (but poorly analyzed) nutrition research. They flip-flop their headlines so much ("Coffee Can Cure X", then "Coffee Causes X Cancer") that people finally just give up on trying to understand nutrition and they just continue eating the crap that they have always eaten. Which is amazingly sad, because proper nutrition is really the best medicine on earth.

I LOOOOOOOVE steak and ice cream, but a vegetarian/vegan diet has been shown in almost every study to be a more healthful diet in every respect. And the studies that fail to show that are usually flawed and/or underwritten by industry trade groups. There is no "perfect diet" for everyone...there will always be corner cases. Some people with specific genetic predispositions SHOULD avoid grains altogether. Apart from gluten sensitivity, there is the issue of molecular mimicry and genetic autoimmune issues, etc.

Modern people are dying of heart disease, cancer and strokes, though. Those illnesses are linked to higher consumption of meat (Paleo-coronary, anyone?), dairy, sugar, cooking oil, and refined foods. We are NOT dying of starvation, hypothermia, or tooth loss - which were probably some of the more pressing concerns in the paleolithic era. We are also living 2-4 times longer than our ancestors, on average, so we have entirely different concerns.

This is really a fascinating area of research...I've noticed that tons of computer hackers are also very interested in nutrition and body/diet hacks.
The way I usually describe it to friends and family:

Mac OS X if you want a nice prepackaged experience.
Linux if you like to tinker and completely personalize your machine.
Windows if you have to (but don't call me when it breaks ;).
A Business Idea for Anyone Who Wants It
Steen Levitt, co-author of Freakonomics, provides the algorithms he used to detect cheating on standardized tests by teachers at public schools. He suggests that with the No Child Left Behind act there might be a solid business idea in developing software that looks for statistical anomalies in test scores in order to detect cheating.
Teachers might cheat by inflating the scores of their students in order to secure more funding for their school.
Scaling Twitter: Making Twitter 10000 Percent Faster
China emerges as leader in cyberwarfare
I can only be happy about this after the FUD they tried to pull with patents regarding Linux
Invites to Yahoo's new social network, Mash
I want to make a video demo for my website. What are good programs/services/compani... to use?
I don't get those stories that span > 5 pages. Who has the time to read that stuff? They should at least provide a short summary somehow.
Me again. Elaborating on my question:

I'm thinking about 2 video types: 1) purely screen capture video demo to showcase software OR 2) a full-featured video with people, dialogue, transitions, etc--basically a full production demo.

I'm leaning towards option 2. In that case, if I were to do it myself, what are some high-quality software programs that I could use? If I'm looking for professional help, what companies or services would you be able to recommend.

In terms of quality, I'm looking to do something pro like Salesforce.com's video demos: http://www.salesforce.com/products/democ...
I don't get those novels that span > 200 pages. Who has the time to read that stuff?
Both suggestions fail, because spam is usually sent from hijacked computers. Nothing to prevent the hijacker from hijacking the "credit card" and the authentication, too.

Also, I don't think it is true that the "undeliverable" type of spam had it's origin on the recipients computer. Spammers just put the email address into the sender field, it doesn't imply a compromised PC.
That is not a very good idea. If money given by government is tied to test scores, schools have more incentive to let students cheat than otherwise, for the high scores. You'd be trying to sell them something that at the very least, lowers overall test score averages.
I actually read a lot, but those newspaper stories annoy me, because the blow up a short message into so many lines. Why don't they just tell you on page one what his friends did to screw him over? Instead they describe the blue sky and the birds chirping and what the guy had for lunch.
I'm not sure what your website is providing but I would imagine that a screen capture video demo works best most of the time as it allows you to showcase your products nicely. For this on the Mac you can use things like SnapzPro and MousePose (take a look at the Firebug screencast).

I'm not aware of any companies to use for a full production video. As far as tools go you can probably use any decent camcorder, a tripod (handheld video doesn't look very professional) and some video capture software. There are plenty of options depending on your platform. Once you shoot your video however it should be very easy to outsource the editing if you're not comfortable with it. You can usually find talented individuals in other countries willing to do this cheaply (ask for samples, etc).