skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
To the liberal arts majors/masters/Ph.D.s don't say nobody told you it would be like this. My engineering/math/science friends would tell them the truth when asked and they wouldn't hear it. All they needed was +1 level (major to master, master to doctor) and THEN they would get that amazing job that would pay them for knowing the first year red dye paint was imported to Scandinavia.

No. That isn't how the world works. You get paid for knowing useful things, like the coefficient of friction of various materials, the modulus of elasticity of building members, the viscosity of fluids, how circuits work, how to program. Useful things.
Also somewhat impractical - when did the USA last build a nuclear power plant? Where are they going to magic up the people with skills to build and run one? What about the fact that nuclear fuel sources are just as much a limited resource as coal or oil? What about nobody wanting one built near them?
Where's the discussion for this? This is the story I was waiting for ... except there is little hard #'s in the article. So maybe insightful members can share data + numbers.

Thanks!
Does it? Think about it this way, why does this make right-wing nuts or technically inept parents go bonkers? A.) They a moral nut and they're reacting to the confluence of information and media as an invasion of privacy. B.) They fear that the exposure to such material at a young age will corrupt their kid, screw some other kid, and get pregnant in high school.

Either way, I think this is a cash cow and fertile conditions for any startup whose primary function is a sort of opt-in form of censorship, more or less the startup would act as a proxy for each IP. For the most part, I think their rage is fairly valid since this demographic is probably just old, confused, and sick of scouring the internet for web-sites to block.
I didn't know Buffett invested in BYD. Also, I didn't know BYD makes electric cars.

BYD produces tin-can cars. They are made of crap and have no safety. Technologies and design used by Chinese car manufacturers are stolen from other manufacturers (except for some engines, which are licensed from Japanese car makers).
There are no more throw away resources. A lot of the shortened urls are going to twitter, of course, but those tweets are copy/pasted into blogs and those are copy pasted...

Those blogs could be around for ever and ever. Do you think Google will just stop hosting blogger and all the companies with blogs will stop hosting the content? The companies may be around forever too. The web archive catches as much as it can.

I don't really know if anything on the internet will ever go away anymore forever.
This, though, raises a question. Why is it that the rise in productivity hasn’t had the effects predicted by Marx and Keynes? Why have our “needs” risen as our productive powers have, with the result that the hours we devote to employment haven’t fallen as much as Marx or Keynes forecast? Why is it that so many of us - I count myself fortunate to be a partial exception - haven’t used wealth to free ourselves from alienating labour?

There's no deep question here. Only a language game. Like "does a tree falling in the forest make a sound if there's no one around to hear it?"

Step one: replace loaded words like "needs", "wants", "labour", and "employment" with just "utility".

EDIT: side note. I used to participate in an alternative money forum and the funny thing about it was the neat division between 2 kinds of people:

1. Those who had a fear/loathing/suspicion of productivity growth. (left)

2. Those who had a fear/loathing/suspicion of macro-economics and the fed. (right)

This post is a typical #1 post.
No, I understand that point perfectly. My point was that in order for you to be able to evaluate whether a gamble makes sense repeatedly, you have to be sure that each instance has a positive EV.

Say that you planned to do the 9k with %1 chance of a million payout enough times to take advantage of probabilities. You could have found out much later that the gamble had a negative EV. This is my point: the parent made it sound like you can evaluate all decisions as if the EV was easy to establish. In reality that's a rare case.
But you did make the analogy of lions to innovators. I confess I prefer the notion of hunter-gatherers and "traveling light" as opposed to Greek Phalanxes requiring entire cities to eat at night. So I give you that analogy.

But the biggest obstacle to me in becoming a startup founder is health care. The difference between a W-2 job with benefits and self-insurance medical is huge. Like I-could-lease-a-Laborghini-with-the-difference huge. That's not all. Medical self-insurance goes up a lot: The costs went up double-digits-percent every year when I was a contractor. And I have no medical problems! PG, you should write about this as a barrier to startups.
How Bad Was Google’s Quarter?
"He's like the kid dropping rocks off the overpass for shits and giggles - pathetic."

Yeah man. Except for the overpass, and the kid, and the rocks, that is a very good analogy.
Amazon Apologizes For 'Embarrassing And Ham-Fisted' Gay Book Blacklist
And I've always thought of the Victorians as overly mannered and reactionary. But I respect our differences of opinion.
I've been wanting to say the same thing for a while now: "In a few years, people won’t just talk about the PayPal mafia, they will talk about the YC mafia. This is a phenomenon and you want to be part of it!"
Taxes were just an example. My issue is when you say:

Life will present you with many different wagers with positive expectations

and then you give the example of a startup. The problem is that you make it sound as if it's always easy to identify the wagers with positive expectation. Of course if you pick enough wagers with positive expectation you will come out ahead, but other than for chance games you simply don't know the expected value of your gamble. The closest you can get is by looking at past returns for certain well-known investments and hope that the future returns will be similar. For most "wagers" there isn't enough data.
In reality, there are no point masses or frictionless surfaces, either. Maybe you perfectly understand the point and you're moving on to various niggling contingencies. That's fine. The article is trying to explain something more basic than what you're talking about. You're doing the equivalent of butting into a freshman physics lecture and pointing out everything they've oversimplified, which is just plain obnoxious.
I think the more interesting story might be the role Twitter played in all of this.
A few years ago I saw a company selling rather servers that, instead of using hard disks or SSDs, used massive striped arrays of RAM (~128GB per server) to provide absurd throughput and latency for database operations. It had an automated system that backed up the data to hard disks in real-time, so if the system lost power, it would be able to fully back up before the UPS ran out.

You can imagine the ungodly throughput and latency of such a system.
Exactly, you just say "He is taking himself too seriously" and that can justify any horrible action and feel superior.
Windows 7 could follow Vista to an early grave
Makes sense. I've been telling a competing startup about value-added open stack appliances. OTOH, the comparison numbers are completely BS. Nothing prevent people buying a similar Dell for less than half the price (I just configured a dual 5560, 64GB RAM, 512GB Intel SSD R710 for about $18K which is a lot less than $45K)
Look at URLConnection for example. Ignoring the Factory Factory Factory aspect, note that the object starts off as a request object, and then magically becomes a response object when you magically happen to call certain magical methods. Magic sucks, you should start with two objects, a user agent and a request. Tell the user agent to execute the request, and you get a response back. This is easier to implement, easier to use, and easier to reuse... but Java instead decided to go with a non-OO API encapsulated in 150 different objects.

Not good design.
You're right. Replace "steal" with "deface"
Bill Perry & ESL created early Silicon Valley culture
Ask HN: Feedback on Skritter, Learning Chinese with Spaced Repetition on App Engine
This looks to be exactly what I needed, thanks. I've signed up for a demo account, had some hiccups getting going but generally so far so good.
Even if it were correct, you'd have to be a very emotion-based thinker to worry about the effects of a lousy 409 cars on the planet.
This totally misses the point of Memcache. Firstly, why do you need a disk at all, let alone 512GB of flash?

Secondly, the whole point of Memcache is that you can distribute it across multiple boxes. Facebook, the largest Memcache user in the world, does fine with that.

We could easily buy 640GB of memcache capacity for the price they're asking for 64GB.
Welcome To Nebraska
Everything you need to know about Nebraska! View the famous Hotels, Cities, Travel Guides, things to do in Nebraska, Shopping Malls, Restaurants, History, Sports, and Geography.
Inspire HN: Solve the Internet Bystander Problem
RamSan: http://www.superssd.com/

Nice machines if you need absolutely the best (persistent) IO performance. I believe EVE Online uses a ton of them to store their game state on.
We founded Skritter just about 9 months ago. We got two grants to fund development and as the front page attests, we're just three right out of undergrad living in an apartment and developing full time.

When we were first getting started, App Engine was just becoming available, and we thought that would be a great platform mainly because of its scalable architecture and Python backend, which both Nick and Scott liked. We incorporated the Spaced Repetition after we read about Supermemo in Wired Magazine shortly after launching.

The idea is to charge users small monthly subscriptions with big discounts for semester-signups. Since a lot of our current users are young and in school it's really important that we keep the price affordable. We've also attended 2 trade conferences in language learning software, and will be going to one more in about a month at which we'll be trying to sell Skritter as a site license to institutions.

If you'd like to check it out in more detail, we've set up a demo account for everyone on HN:

UN: hackernews
pass: hackernews

Thanks a lot for your time.
He may have hurt the reputation of Amazon, but not through his crime. Publicizing vulnerabilities in Amazon's ranking system is what may hurt Amazon's reputation. The "crime" of messing with Amazon's system didn't hurt Amazon's reputation let alone their website much at all.
What exactly is being said on slide #45? Initially I thought it said that perceived rendering time is less when as much content is presented prior to the javascript executing (which is my experience, anyway). But does it then say that this was not the case with IE?
The original rationale for using @import for including a CSS file in HTML was that Netscape Navigator 4 did not understand the command and thus was an easy, effective and compliant way to exclude that browser, since it had atrocious support for stylesheets. Now that NN is no longer a factor it makes sense to relegate the use of @import to only within a CSS file.
BWT, the screen flicker of IE is eliminated if LINK is used first (say to load a reset.css file) and any subsequent stylesheet loaded via @import behaves as it should.
I'm not commenting on the article. I agree with the article, which in fact talks only about wagers with quantifiable EV. My comment was a reply to mattmaroon's observation that over the course of a lifetime someone can find enough wagers with a positive value to eventually come out ahead. Please read the entire thread.

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=560109
However the important distinction in your case is that you were doing it for internal beauracracy reasons. If you were doing it to get a work visa for someone the practices you describe would potentially be illegal.
Build a plant, good question. Run a plant, you get those people from the Navy (which runs nuclear plants on every submarine and aircraft carrier). What about fuel sources? We've hardly begun to explore for uranium—nuclear is a stopgap for 100-200 years that doesn't have the drawbacks of fossil fuel.

I don't have an answer for NIMBY, because I don't know politics.
Firefox add-ons for Web developers
That approach -- making paying more convenient than not -- only works for adults, ie people who have an surfeit of money and a lack of time. High school students are the opposite.
It does give new wings to the old saying about "A lie can travel around the world before the truth can get it's boots on."

I suspect this leads to several niche brand watch agencies that specialise in twitter quick response.

I would be interested to see the coalescence around the #amazonfail tag; I'd also like to know whose realtime analytics would have caught it earliest.
I disagree. I think that stumbleupon (assuming long term popularity) has the potential to be a great place to advertise but... it's not that simple.

Google adwords is pretty straightforward. But it still took advertisers years to figure out how to use it properly. We basically build sites & even site building tools & other tools, with the ultimate goal of making Adwords work well. The fact that there are millions of consultants & employees & blog posts & ebooks that know how to make adwords pay is a big part of why adwords works.

It works for a lot of things. But it also doesn't work for a lot of things. It's terrible at selling Coca Cola.

Scale is a secret sauce in reaching this kind of maturity.

Stumbleupon probably has a lot of opportunities hidden in it for advertisers. But finding them & letting the right advertisers about them is the key.
Many modern games have taken the trend of just dumbing down the gameplay so that what the player actually has is not at all about challenge, but just an experience, with some gameplay mechanics as added-value.

The puzzle-genre version of this might be otherwise known to you as "casual gaming." Bejeweled, Peggle, etc. take almost no conscious effort to play, even though skill elements exist.
On reddit, they are considering that the poster might be 'meta trolling' by taking credit for what was actually a glitch created by a French Amazon Programmer: http://www.reddit.com/r/reddit.com/comments/8c50o/troll_week...
Apparently this guy is just taking the credit for this, He didn't really do it..
Or so say the interwebs.
Well, that's simply not true. If it was he wouldn't have done it.

While I admire the guile and technical reasoning required to pull this off, it's high time the community at large stop admiring this type of crap.

Authors of the books in question lost real money. It doesn't matter how much. Amazon lost credibility from all sides.

There is a difference between screaming that the Emperor has no clothes and stealing his wallet.
This Steve Blank guy is absolutely amazing. His blog is really one of those rare gems on the 'net that you'd wish were more common. His insight into the intelligence community, entrepreneurship, and the beginnings of sillicon valley are invaluable. Steve, thank you for blogging.
And?

The intent is the same whether or not you walk through the open door or break the window.
If I'm correctly interpreting your rather elliptical response, it begs the question (in the proper sense): you subsume anything that might be considered valuable into the catch-all category of 'utility,' and then suggest that the present arrangement maximizes 'utility.'

The question raised by the original author -- does our economy properly value leisure? -- remains. You can answer 'Yes it does, and the problems you're pointing to aren't problems at all,' but that doesn't make the question a language game.
Probably A history of computing and technology from flight upwards.
Then give them a low down on wars and show them how ruthless we are..
Then before they go to bed i'd read them the bible as a short fictional story.
It shouldn't be illegal and he shouldn't be able to be sued.

If I was an author of those books, who would compensate me for my lost income? You?
This box is $45K for 512GB, so I don't know where you're getting 64GB. It's an appliance, so what's inside it doesn't matter; they're using flash because it's (supposed to be) cheaper and denser than DRAM (see related discussion http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=558820 ). There is a difference between a cluster with N boxes and a cluster with N/8 boxes; if they're similar total cost almost everyone would choose to have fewer servers.
so easy to try it now: i love it!
> If you weren't full of it, you'd have links etc.

Links to conversations that I had in person, most "pre-web"? Some of us have off-line lives, don't blog/tweet everything, and are amused by the assumption that everything worthwhile is on-line. Feel free to do otherwise.

> If you want credibility here

You certainly do think highly of yourself. (What color is your horn?) However, it's no skin off of my nose of you don't believe me.

I will note that you've moved the goal posts. We started from "we should respect that people believe X because they feel good by believing X, even without serious reasons to think X is true." with me writing that we should because (my claim) everyone has such positions. At best your "test" isn't the only way to address that claim.
Not sold on the performance increases. Facebook was able to get 200k req/s out memcache just by reworking the code. http://www.facebook.com/note.php?note_id=39391378919. Compared to the claimed 300k req/s for this I don't really see a big value add.
This is yet another in a long string of articles that are getting the question exactly backwards. The wrong question: what do I do with Twitter (or "a blog" or "e-mail" or ...")? The right question: I have something to say; what is the best medium to say it in?

Thus, the successful media tap into an unfulfilled need, and meet that need well.

So, should you use Twitter? Yes, if you have something to accomplish that Twitter helps you accomplish. Otherwise, no.

(And the real answer to all those hordes of people asking, "I have a blog; what should I write about?" is "If you have nothing to say, then you don't need a blog.")
Joi Ito: Dubai bashing and 'what-aboutery'
I was really only drawn to twitter following Guy Kawasaki's talk on Jelly about how important it is for companies to have a twitter account to answer random inquiries about their products and services.

Other than that, I've been rather reluctant......it seems like a great way to prevent companies or public figures from writing 'TLDR' posts - but why would you want to TLDR your own friends?
Adding features does not help you sell software. It could make existing users happier and more likely to write a good review, but that's it. You can't even sell the upgrades to them.
I have read the entire thread and I just don't understand the point of your comment. Of course people have to pay taxes and spend time on investments. That doesn't make diversified investing a fool's errand. It's like we're trying to build a go-kart and you're saying "it'll never work because there's friction." Maybe there's friction, and we'll work out what that friction is, just as we'll calculate the post-tax EV of our investments.
Um, what?

If nytimes.com was to remove the email/share box, people would say the NYTimes was messing things up and didn't 'get' it anymore and were messing up.

If they were to remove links to other content to navigate through the site, be lost at how to navigate the site people and would say they're messing up.

If they remove ads, they lose a decent chunk of money, amounting to between 90 and 100 Million dollars. Then the business people would say they're messing up.
It's $45k for 512GB of disk and 64GB of RAM. And however fast flash is, it's not as fast as RAM by a fair margin. Memcache is all about RAM.

And if I had a choice of 640GB of Memcache in one box, or in 8 boxes, I'd chose the 8 boxes. You need redundancy, and you need parallelism.
Bad: the logo, the blue "next" arrow", the buttons on the front page, overall UI is busy and confusing.

Good: Everything that happens inside that beautiful white square. Stroke recognition, hinting, etc. The demo video is also good.
I have a two year old that has 2 heart abnormalities. We thought she would need heart surgery, but the cardiologists don't feel this is necessary. The "leaks" in her heart are getting smaller each month. She looks like any healthy 2 year old. I have family members that are health insurance experts and they tell me I basically have to be a part of a group policy. The last 2 companies I have worked for have had minor increases to their 100+ employee group policy. The health company cited my daughter as one of the reasons for the increase. Luckily my coworkers don't know this.
also, from the same poster, to the actual source (slate). I flagged this one.
Tabs might be rendered as 2, 4, or 8 spaces, depending on local configuration. So if you'd like the source to render the same without requiring local reconfiguration, spaces are better.
It doesn't matter which you choose. Trivial. Unless you choose to use a mix of both, and then you have a catastrophe. Once everyone agrees vehemently to avoid mixing them, it begs the question "Which to use then?" That this question be answered is extremely significant, though which answer you get is meaningless. This is like the question, "What's the meaning of life?" Doesn't matter, as long as you can eventually put it aside.

Trouble is, every single person with access to a keyboard has absolute veto power over that, leaving us with a volatile problem.
Not true. They explicitly planned for integration in much the way GP describes.
Why Do Most Entrepreneurs Fail to Scale?
> "I think it's ok to use the up and down arrows to express agreement." -- PG

I don't.

Up & down votes affect what people see on the site. Do we want HN to be full of ideas that reflect majority opinions, or do we want it to be full of interesting, useful, thought-provoking things? I would much rather it is the latter. (More to the point, if it ever stops being the latter, then I'm out of here.)
Leaked images of the new Apple iPhone?
Very nice job! One potential customer/institution to cater to: western-based Chinese schools:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chinese_schools,
http://www.ncacls.org/ncacls_frm_intro.htm

These community based organizations often rely on eastern teaching methods (often rote) to instruct large numbers of young children. Your app would definitely introduce a different mindset (and fun!), when learning Chinese.

Btw, will you guys support different dialects (ie. cantonese)?
thanks jlees for the info!

i'll add some details to what breaking/gossip etc.. all define

basically - breaking - is the latest news from the top x many twitters for given tag

each tag - ie. news/gossip/etc.. is the top x twitters for given tag

re lens on twitter
- thats my main goal - just need to refine to display the best news to attract a userbase

cheers

justin
That's incredible. Do you have some good articles that describe the problem? I've actually never heard the opposing viewpoints.
That is amazing, I spent a year in China and the characters were so hard. I would have to try this over a long time to see if it is better than hand drawings, but it seems pretty good.

How do you deal with radicals and learning related characters?
The problem with sites like Digg, Stumbleupon, and now Twitter is that for one second they are super hot and useful, until online marketers find out about them at some conference and destroy them.
> What about the fact that nuclear fuel sources are just as much a limited resource as coal or oil?

We have 200 years worth of coal....
Yup, that's the one I was thinking of--knew about it from CCP as well.
YAML ain’t Markup Language
Bill Buxton MIX09 Keynote
Awesome engaging talk by one of HCI's greatest.