skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
But I am equally sure that EC2 does not oversell CPU/RAM resources and does not move VMs around. I don't think Xen even supports memory overcommit.
I think he meant last 5 - 10 years?
Do you need a lot of wealth to do this? Why not start on these goals today?
I don't agree that his research is for the betterment of humanity. What ever happened to quality instead of quantity?
What's it Mean When A Facebook App is Sold?
Guild Cafe, A Social Network For Gamers (based in Cambridge)
wait... is he a girl?
Yes, you need a lot of wealth to do serious research on your own topics and not have to do what the grant-granters want.
I'd expect this to be particularly true for Asian and European countries. As had been said before on this forum, an international focus (or at least awareness) in our business plans (in the general sense), would seems like an increasingly important component.

I agree it seems less likely founders will get money for quick hits based on marginal ideas. I'd bet (and hope ;) that start-ups with more substance to their core ideas, and a revenue model focused first on profitability (and second on exit strategy) would be more likely to get funding.

The ability to control costs while launching a product/service seems like a crutial characteristic that VCs will look for. Somehow I'm thinking this may turn the tide back towards more experienced founders getting funding over smart techies that haven't proven they can wisely spend lots of money.
Oh, I find really annoying when people call it OS when they want to mean, at much, desktop. In this case I would call it web-media-player.
Oh sorry, didn't mean to imply Brooks wrote Code Complete. I just accidentally left the author out of the sentence...
So true.

It actually does matter, though.

I know it matters when I see a 10-year-old kid sleeping on the floor of an office because his mom has to work until 1am because some awful enterprise software doesn't work right.

I know it matters when I see two friends and partners a small business split up and start suing each other because poor accounting software led them to think they were cheating each other.

It's too important to ignore.

It's too important to leave to the second-rate programmers who don't care enough to do something important like real science.
i can't believe i've gotten to the bottom of this thread, and no one has mentioned this.

first of all, you can't look at kiva.org and tell me that software can't make a difference in the world.

second of all...

- measured in dollars, the bill+melinda gates foundation is the biggest charitable organization in the country, by an order of magnitude. they give more to fight aids in africa than any country does, i believe.

- this is, in part, thanks to warren buffett, who gave away 85% of his fortune to charity.

- pierre omidyar, the founder of ebay, now runs omidyar network, an investment firm which specifically funds opportunities based on their potential for social good. portfolio: http://www.omidyar.net/portfolio.php

- jeff skoll, the original president of ebay, founded participant productions, which aims to educate through entertainment. it's the company that produced syriana, good night, and good luck, and an inconvenient truth, among other films. http://www.participantproductions.com/

- speaking of ebay, that site has enabled over a million people to quit their jobs and make a living pursuing their passions.

- someone in the comments mentioned aubrey de grey, who's doing research to cure aging. guess who's funding it? peter thiel, founder of paypal. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peter_Thiel

there are probably hundreds of other examples of people who did well by society and then gave back. (in fact, i'd love to hear these stories if you know any offhand.)

Shooter, if you've already gotten past the first part -- doing well by society -- there are plenty of ways to give back to society that would be far more effective than going to med school. PG's doing it in his own way, but if you've got something else in mind, maybe you should talk to some of those other folks for inspiration. my understanding is that bill gates assembled a small group of really smart people and asked them to make a short list of major problems in the world that could be solved with money.
Thanks for your input. Add to cart buttons are definitely easier and are used in other built-in designs. The drag and drop interface is only on one of the built-in designs, and was added mostly to illustrate the flexibility the templating system.
web app guy in lakeview...
An interesting question, but you seem to be assuming that AJAX development skills directly port over to other "Save The World (c) (tm)" functions, when in reality they don't.

A mildly proficient and motivated 15 year-old can create an application worth $400M with little more than a case of [caffeine drink], a computer of some sort, and a handful of Google queries to self-learn various required bits of knowledge.

That same person can't just apply the same net amount of effort, from the same location, and make any lasting impact on improving society or the world in general.

You could also argue that many of the "best and brightest" minds are already doing things in various ways to improve the global standard of living. The rest of us are writing Javascript and begging for $5MMUSD :)
How about the service of giving back 4/5ths of that 25% and providing the same services the government did when tax rates where in that range? (courts, policy, legislation and defensive military)
From what I understand, currencies tend to reflect purchasing power parities. Something as arbitrary as the currency used in oil sales won't change US productivity, which is the most important component of wealth.

So I'm not too worried about this kind of thing.

I can imagine some disruption caused by reaction to this though, especially if congress tried to solve the problem.

Either way, I have a mortgage. Nothing would make me happier than to have my debt mean less which a falling dollar :-P
One country that has a lot of gain from maintaining the peg is China and it happens to have the resources to do so if it comes to it.
Breaking News : Sun Microsystems (JAVA) to change stock ticker symbol to RUBY

"The Ruby brand and technology have evolved to be among the most pervasive on the internet, yielding extraordinary awareness for Sun and opportunity for the community that leverages it," said Jonathan Schwartz, president and CEO of Sun. "More than a billion people across the globe, representing nearly every demographic, market and industry, rely upon Ruby's security, innovation and value to connect them with opportunity. That awareness positions Sun, and now our investor base, for the future."

:)
Mobile web usage nearly equal PC web in Japan
He wouldn't trade fulfilling his dreams for anything either.
Should designers optimize for page views or user experience?
Do You Have Time to Run a $100,000 Internet Business?
What, do you get paid in Euros?
OK, agreed. Stupid comment on my part. How would I know how good a hacker is unless I worked with him or used his output?

But I definitely stand by my "too old" observation. That's just silly.

Oh, and don't call me dude, shirley.
Look up "hugely satisfying" in the dictionary...
While I'm too young to say, I think at the time you are old, your brain would have changed (or degraded) sufficiently enough to handle it with relative ease. That's the only way it makes sense to me when I read about ailing people talking about seeing the exit, the final candle, or whatever.

Even if true, not everyone would die after their brain has degraded in this way.

Sleep disorders are quite common in the elderly and I would guess that this is mostly due to a fear of death while asleep.
i am sure even with the 20% less as the research sais, now thanks to the Web they have more than they did before using it
synthetic biology.

here's a fascinating TED talk from craig venter. (if you haven't heard of him, he was instrumental in the human genome project.)
http://www.ted.com/index.php/talks/view/id/6

the part that was new to me was the idea of synthetic bio solving our energy problems.
Not surprised. They have to defend their trademark.
Nothing would make me happier than to have my debt mean less which a falling dollar

Unless you get paid in Euros or Yen (or even Canadian dollars), that doesn't make sense.
Not sure if I'm the exception to the rule, but I definitely highlight random crap while I read a page (just something for my mouse hand to do)... so I'd ruin your stats in a mean way.
This is true also for their desktop apps user interface. This trend started with Mac OS 9, when QuickTime started to use that stupid brushed metal theme. Currently there few themes in Apple apps; Aqua (Mail), brushed metal (Safari), iApps (iTunes) and pro (Final Cut).

This make it tricky for 3rd party apps - you have to ask yourself which group your app belongs to. If you want to create iApp or Pro interface, you have to simulate the design because there are no ready made interface elements using those styles.
Are you a MT practitioner? Email me (email in profile).
Aristotle: The Knowledge Web (Essay on the Semantic Web)
I knew Randy when he was a rising star at UVa and doing work with us on neurosurgical planning using VR. When we played recreational football, Randy was one of the guys to watch. Great guy who cares about his students. I'm really sad this happened to him. People that know him wouldn't be surprised of his attitude. And we owe it to people like Randy to not waste the time we've been given.
Economics in One Lesson is not right wing, it's libertarian. Today, right wing means big government and religion.
Site down?

Dotcache version of the site:

http://dotcache.com/http://ilovetypography.com/2007/09/19/15...

While we're at it, CacheView plugin for Firefox:

https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/2323
The link above is the original; there's also a more recent addendum here: http://edge.org/3rd_culture/hillis04/hillis04_index.html
The Comscore report goes on to say hours used per month for mobile is much less than PC however. 8 vs. 19 hrs per month avg. I guess thats to be expected though given that people are on the go when using their mobile phone.

Additional data:
"The most popular mobile internet usage was for e-mail (75 percent) followed by News/Information (52 percent), Search/Navigation (51 percent), Games (39 percent) and Blogs (38 percent)."
Google Gadget Ads
Anything by Richard Feynman. I recently read 'Perfectly reasonable deviations from the beaten path' and really enjoyed it. It gave good insight into how Feynman lived his life (eg, asking not to be a member of the National Academy of Sciences), and how he treated others. I think the most beneficial thing I learned from this was how he let 'unimportant' things slide to make time for his life's work.
10 things to know before you pitch a VC, at STIRR or anywhere else
The problem inevitably becomes what do you do once the community has become larger? How do you keep the topics and the level of discussion from sliding downward? This is an issue that Lambda the Ultimate's been facing for the last couple of years as less academic, more industry people join the community, and they've been handling it fairly well but it's taken a lot of work on everyone's part. Reddit's facing the same issue as well. If there are more dumb people than smart ones in a community, they can dictate what articles make it to the front page and overwhelm the good discussion with drivel.
I agree that option 3 is a great thing to go, but the problem is that most people won't pay to have these tests done unless their insurance covers it. I doubt an insurance company will pay for it because it costs them more money to have regular screenings done if the individual is at higher risk, or the insurance company could drop coverage all together. It's unfortunate that the US health care system works this way. Also, I doubt people will decide to go get tested for increased risks for diseases unless their doctor recommends it; for most, ignorance is bliss, and they would rather not know. It's illogical, but that seems to be how a lot of people think.

I think it's a good idea to pursue both options 1 and 3; option 1 will allow you to get a steady income to allow you to expand to other more "useful" tests in option 3 and to pay for their FDA approval. Once more tests are developed, a package option could be offered which tested for all mutations, both the "feel good" ones and the increased risk ones.
I do the same. Mostly as a way to quickly find where I was reading after a distraction.
Having "happy" children is the best afterlife. Or, as people such as Alan Kay and Seymour Papert (who I believe are childless) have done, do something for everybody's children.
Perhaps he's talking about inflation in general which would mean his income goes up but his mortgage stays fixed. Which is certainly good for him.

How is inflation related to a falling dollar? I figured they were basically the same thing, but perhaps not.
According to reddit this means we're all going to fucking die.
What's going to be REALLY inconsistent is when Leopard comes out. No one has a clue as to how to deal with it on the continuity because Steve wants it to be black and silver, to match the iMac.
Why TD Ameritrade's Data Breach Is So Worrying
He is talking about the last 5-10 years... Personal fabrication has been available in a limited form for a few years ago, and Human Genome Project started in... 1990 iirc.
Randy Pausch's Building Virtual Worlds...go 5:15 in to see a world grow that doesn't want to die.
"Mandatory" Spam Emails by Digg
Subject: New Digg Profiles and Updated Site Policies

End Text: This is a system message from Digg.com, which we are required to send to all account holders. Control what other emails you receive from Digg.

----------

They claim to be required to spam me. What crap. I don't want to hear about their updates, and it's completely unreasonable not to allow that. I get similar spam from some other places with no unsubscribe option because it's "mandatory". I don't think I've even logged in to Digg for months, and they send this anyway. Ugh.
My favorite typography design book is "Advertising Design and Typography" by Alex White (http://www.amazon.com/Advertising-Design-Typography-Alex-Whi...).

Has good visual examples and step by step thought processes for designing the type, layout, and visual effects that we place on text to convey an overall design message.
Almost everything will have a great impact. Alone those small achievements don't have great effect, but together all of this is driving us to singularity (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Technological_singularity).
Ray Kurzweil had a talk about this on TED (and his books are interesting too).
I'm giving away free ad space for early startups
Real-time fMRI isn't that different - you just analyze the data on-line rather than after the scan. The most promise for me is millimeter and millisecond resolution with new scanning and analytic techniques. And that keeps getting better and better.

As for EROS (from your link): "Its biggest downside is the inability to detect activity more than a few centimeters deep, but it is a new, relatively inexpensive technique that is not invasive to the test subject."

That's a big problem it will need to overcome to compete.
Are educational requirements for the patent bar out of date?
I've been thinking about the problems the patent office is having with software patents lately, and it lead me to reconsider the educational requirements for sitting for the patent bar.

Right now, you typically need a degree in a physical science, biological science, or engineering to take the exam and become a patent agent.

Interestingly, Mathematics is specifically excluded as an acceptable background in the "non-acceptable coursework" section.

Now obviously I'm biased because I was a pure mathematics major, but it seems to me that this rule excludes a huge number of people who would be most capable of reviewing a massive new area of patents - namely, algorithms.

Technically, algorithms aren't patentable, which is probably why mathematics was excluded from the acceptable academic background list - Paul mentioned this when he wrote his "Are Software Patents Evil" essay...

"Unfortunately, patent law is inconsistent on this point. Patent law in most countries says that algorithms aren't patentable. This rule is left over from a time when "algorithm" meant something like the Sieve of Eratosthenes. In 1800, people could not see as readily as we can that a great many patents on mechanical objects were really patents on the algorithms they embodied..."

The patent bar has decided (for all practical purposes) that mathematics is patentable, but they continute to exclude people with a mathematics background.

I truly do not want to become a patent agent - but it does disturb me that the people who are licensed to "prosecute" (ie., file for) patents and/or "review" (ie., grant) patents on algorithms are specifically not supposed to have a math background.

Anyone care to comment or leave your thoughts on this?

(here's a link to the requirements doc:
http://www.uspto.gov/web/offices/dcom/olia/oed/grb0403.pdf)
Brilliant. Someone should have spoken out on this after all.

The flip side is development of this kind of software. Is "enterprise software" so useless that it attracts only second-rate developers? What first-rate hackers would have done given such a task to automate bureaucracy?
"does worse than fat local client"

Are you talking about the average Denny's customer? <ba bing!>
We're off to see the Wizard, the wonderful Wizard of Oz!
I hear all the 'web dev taking over the world' arguments, but no one has addressed the major issue - latency.

Anyways, I don't think the future will be 100% web app or 100% client app. Probably a mix of both (ie, imagine a 3d renderer running locally, but having smooth access to millions of geometrical models stored on the web).
Is email the ultimate social environment?
Google launches JavaScript API that allows you to write back
What if it led to being as healthy as a 20 yr old for 85 years.... then we just kill ourselves off! Quality is greater than quantity in that light.
Japan is kind of quirky. When other academics adopted Lisp, they adopted Prolog. When the rest of the world adopted Perl or Python, they embraced Ruby. Just because Japan does something doesn't mean the rest of the world will follow.
The concept of SENS and the "engineering" approach to ageing. http://www.sens.org
Maybe it's by design - if something is consistent across all pages, you're less likely to notice it, and less likely to click on it. Error boxes have consistent interfaces - "OK" and "Cancel" - and even when they're important, most of us just click OK. By changing it up, by making it different, they're making you look at it.
I Want a New Platform
While RT-fMRI is an incremental technological advance (it's just faster data collection with some spiffy signal processing) it hugely broadens the scope of fMRI's usability. The hemodynamic delays of traditional fMRI are atrocious. For the first time fMRI is giving us access to when brain activity happens, which is nearly as importnat as knowing where. If you look at the biofeedback work being done with RT-fMRI you'll see it's extremely exciting.

Also, I don't view the depth restriction of EROS as a very big problem. There are enough mysteries lurking in the top 3 centimeters of your brain to keep academia busy for a hundred years.
To whoever modded me down: there are HUGE fixed costs that are required to do truly cutting edge research in biochem. Perhaps in physics you can sit around and figure out quantum gravity by yourself but that affordable path to success seems unlikely.
are they giving out invite codes?
I researched a patent examiner who was examining the software (algorithm) patent I was managing and not to my surprise had a pure bio/life science background!!!

He dismissed all the claims quoting basic statutes that it was not novel and cannot be patented. So the patent attorneys had to rebut the office action and ultimately ended up costing more (almost twice).

I understand you cannot have experts for all the technology specialties. For Ex. Even if you masters in EE, there are so many different fields in EE. For instance, if I am a MSEE and I focussed on IC processing, I might know the intricacies ( and innovative elements) of MEMS processing or wireless communication algorithms.

Having said that, most (of late some) patents have elements of novelty in it. So I wish the examiners have the basic background in reviewing the patents. This would ultimately reduce patent cost IMHO.

End of my Thursday rant.
My Demo: batBack (flash)
Here's a product I was working on two years ago. Back then, it was a great time to develop, create a company, and get into the market. Right now it looks like the market has caught up to the idea, but I was wondering if people thought there still was some value in it?

I was going to add drag-and-drop and a lot of other toys to the UI. User response was good for the few months we were live, although since I didn't have a partner and lived in a rural area, I ran out of funding before I could grow it enough to break even. So -- is it still valuable? Should I look into finding partners for it now, funding, or perhaps licensing the technology? What's the verdict?
Japan is an interesting case. From what I understand mobile email has largly replaced SMS usage in Japan

Using e-mail rather than SMS as the messaging medium for mobile phones has made mobile Internet services in Japan more successful than in the West, says an industry expert -- a claim supported by recently discovered mathematical properties of networks.

http://www.thefeaturearchives.com/topic/Networks/Email__Scal...
Now all someone needs to do is establish themselves as the Google Gadget Ads production company.
Mobile Email drives mobile web adoption in Japan
Food Ideas for Startup Guys
Share your food hax.

Stay happier programming by eating good. When you're not in the mood for Cup Ramen and the Dollar Menu at MickyD's.

My favorite relaxer when under stress is Basil Tomato Soup. It really helps me clear my head for more programming. Takes 5-10 minutes to prepare and put in pot. Then forget about it for 40 minutes while it cooks (don't even have to stir).

When I only have 1 minute to microwave something, I make a 1337 Haxor Boca (my own concoqtion). Recipes below.

1) 1337 Haxor Boca

Buy Spicy Chicken Boca Burger at Safeway, some Spicy Hummus, and Pita Bread. Microwave the spicey chicken boca burger for 1 minute. Toast the pita bread if u want to. Cut the pita in half. Cut the boca in half. Put one half of the boca into each pita half. Use a knife and wedge some Spicy Hummus in. Done. Tastes great. Fills you up for 6 hrs. Nothing to clean.

Needs:
Box of Spicy Chicken Boca Burger, Pita Bread, Hummus, Microwave

2) Basil Tomato Soup (is this a tuscan thing?):

(Best when you have stale hard bread laying around that you don't want to waste)

Chop 4 garlic cloves into chunks (like the size of rice or bigger). In a saucepot, heat 2 tbsp olive oil on medium. Throw in the garlic. Put a layer of the stale (hopefully not moldy) bread on the bottom. Toast the bread a little in the pot. If you don't have stale bread, throw a handful of rice in instead (abt 2 tbsp). Then put 1 can of whole tomatoes in ($1 from safeway). Canned tomatoes are better than produce section tomatoes because they are easier to use and canned when they're the freshest (food hack!). Put half a can of water in. When it boils. Turn the heat to the low setting. Chop a handful of basil. Throw it in. Come back in 40 minutes for something great. Add salt to taste.

Needs:
Can of whole tomatoes, Basil, Garlic, Stale Bread, Olive Oil, a Stove.