skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
> We could save a tremendous amount of energy by quitting the race-to-the-top phenomena of escalating car size due to the (largely false) perception of safety.

Actually, we can't because:
(1) Personal transportation isn't that big a fraction of total energy use.
(2) Cars are getting smaller and have been for some time.

The most useful vehicle for fuel savings purposes costs less than $2,000 and gets around 50mpg. Higher mileage doesn't help much and higher price is a killer.

Do the arithmetic using $4/gallon gasoline and a "main car" that gets 20-25mpg. And no, you don't get to replace the main car. Folks have it because they need what it does "often enough" and renting doesn't work.
I used to use Aardvark a lot, but I've found that Firebug basically completely supersedes it now. There used to be room for both, but I haven't used Aardvark in more than a year now.
And not understanding how economics work. If everyone has a degree, having a degree is less valuable and won't be a differentiating point for being paid more.
Lord of the REPLs
What impact did Twitter really have? I'm annoyed with all of the constant Twitter hype -- I think it's overblown and that there's not much behind the fad. It seems like a case of everyone jumping on the bandwagon to me, especially in the cases of MSM; they're just desperate to be on the brink of the next big thing, and so everyone jumps all over Twitter not because they appreciate Twitter but because they're all trying to be cooler than each other. Twitter is pretty lame, and it's pretentious, and I don't like it, and I don't think that many other people do either. So, is Twitter really significant here or is this just another case of wannabe hipsters attempting to appear clairvoyant so that everyone will complement their impeccable fashion sense?
Look at the "mafia" genre of social network games. In order to play them, you basically just select options from a menu. The more you play, the higher you score. The more friends you invite, the higher you score. The game is set up to reward playing the game more often, not playing the game with more skill.

I'm not sure this is the sort of game you want to make. But it definitely gets around the problem of people feeling stupid.
That's quite interesting - tiered storage for Memcache - but I already hate them for not open-sourcing it. Facebook made some amazing performance changes to Memcache and had no qualms about open-sourcing it.

I'm not that convinced about the whole tiered-storage thing. Memcache is a simple LRU cache. The moment it stops being a simple cache is the moment you've started doing it wrong. This is the golden rule which has been worked out over several years of Memcache development.
Libel and Slander are well-established legal concepts that have been around for ages.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Defamation
By all accounts Windows 7 is uncharacteristically polished and apparently already out-performs XP while being more stable than Vista.

I think Windows 7 will be a success, and Vista will be remembered much as Windows ME has been, as a short lived inferior product that nobody wanted.
I think it's pretty clear that all of the images on the source site are community created design concepts.
If you are interested in this class, it is online:

http://cs193h.stevesouders.com/
For 48-72 hours, some books appeared fewer places on Amazon's site.

Many of those same books got lots of extra attention from elsewhere, as examples of affected titles.

So some authors probably lost a little, others gained a little (by either being examples, or simply filling the slots emptied by affected titles).

If the loss to specific titles was significant, Amazon could easily restore the previous balance with a few days' enhanced promotion. So the amount of 'victimization' here is pretty small.
Total Recall: The Woman Who Can't Forget
Sure, but how? And why not both encourage our citizens to pursue advanced degrees and poach smart people from other countries? What's the downside?
you subsume anything that might be considered valuable into the catch-all category of 'utility,'

Sort of. There's two issues:

1. Can you draw a distinction between things you "need" and things that are useful to you? "Needs" is just a rough quantification of utility. The problem is that it isn't as useful. What's the opposite of needs? The opposite of utility is disutility. Labour is disutility.

2. It's key when thinking about this kind of stuff to distinguish "employment" or "producing value" from labour. Labour is something you don't want to do. It's disutility. If you want to do it then it isn't labour. Even if you're getting paid. So it clears things up to just say "disutility" instead.

and then suggest that the present arrangement maximizes 'utility.'

I didn't do that.

does our economy properly value leisure?

That question is completely meaningless to me. First you have to explain to me how something can have a "proper" value (there's no such concept in my understanding). Second you have to explain how an "economy" can value things and what that means. I only know what it means for people to value things.

EDIT: note that my critique is only for the blogger's interpretation of Marx/Keynes. I didn't read the linked Keynes essay but I suspect I doesn't have this kind of error.

"Needs" can't rise because they are infinite. They have always been infinite and they will always be infinite.
Well, at least if you're a US citizen, it doesn't matter. You have to pay tax regardless of where you generate the income, or where you're living.
5. Putting "." before finishing quote. Like this: "fucking shit."

Should be: "fucking shit".

It is an archaism and Americanism and the reason it exists is nothing but technical limitations of printing presses. It screws up with language's goal -- to transfer information effectively.

To reach that goal, we must break any rules and evolve our language instead of religiously following whatever we were taught.
I reckon people who buy SUN hardware will never-ever run their app on GAE for too many reason.

I do agree however there is nothing wrong in omitting core classes, I think SUN started it with idea of lightweight client java a while ago :) And such an initiative should really have come from SUN many years ago, giving java developers cheap hosting.
To summarize: life usually doesn't offer a succession of quantified wagers like one would ideally like. Nothing to do with friction, you just don't know the expected value of anything other than lotteries or other chance games where a trustworthy entity backs them up. You simply can't assume that you will always be able to pick "real life" wagers with positive expected values. The closest you can get are "traditional investments" for which you can look at past returns and hope for the future to repeat the past. For new situations, there simply isn't enough data.

If you decide to start a startup today, what's your expected value? Do you have access to data about all startups ever started, costs involved and payouts? How does that change if you segment it by startup type, decade, etc? Can you say for sure that starting it has a positive expected value in terms of utility to you as opposed to the probabilistic certainty of the expected value of the 9k wager?
http://mschannel9.vo.msecnd.net/o9/mix/09/wmv-hq/c17f.wmv
>The author of the article in The Independent defends his position and says that critics of his article are suffering from 'what-aboutery'. It's not a bad rebuttal, but I'm not sure the article was really intended to try to make things better for those oppressed workers, but rather just to piss on Dubai some more along with everyone else.

No, the article was written with the intent of self-defense from fallacious criticism.

>I don't want to sound too defensive about Dubai or the Middle East in general, but one thing I've learned from my still brief time is that it's much more complicated than it appears. Just calling Muslim law and governance "medieval" and writing it off is ignorant.

It's not ignorant at all. Most of the people I've heard say that have a very thorough understanding of Sharia.

There are many other such examples that I can't really be bothered to list. Simply, this article is not objective.
The only time you're ever allowed to start music on a home page
MySpace does not count!
The Challenges And Rewards Of Being a Travel Nurse
That's hardly a fair comparison.

You're comparing the valuations of software startups with the entire operating budget of the military? You first need to discount salary, equipment, maintenance, etc, all costs not relating directly to software.

A more realistic comparison would be comparing the defense budget to the entire economic output of the bay area. Even then it's apples and oranges.
Here's a link to the original story on businessweek (the link is msnbc, but the original story was on businessweek)

http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/17048048/

The quote from Ron Hira was on an NPR dicussion program...

http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=1424156...
Most significant paragraph from the whole piece:

Though YUI performs ably, it’s my opinion that the numbers seen in TaskSpeed should be taken with a hefty grain of salt. The tests are designed to exercise library abstraction logic against DOM-intensive operations. The issue here is twofold:

1. Not all libraries (YUI included) have abstraction logic for all of the specific tasks, which breaks the apples-to-apples comparison.

2. And in order to get meaningful numbers, the test operations are iterated up to 500 times or performed against excessive numbers of nodes. In real-world cases, these conditions are not the norm, meaning the differences are exaggerated, perhaps even grossly.
Can anyone point out the "report as inappropriate" he claims to have used? I can't find it on either current Amazon pages or Google Cached ones.

If it indeed points to an unsecured GET statement, that supports the claim. If it doesn't, that opposes. If it did and has been fixed in the past day, that's nearly proof.
I keep hearing Twitter bashing on this site and it's starting to bother me. Twitter is what you make it. It all depends on who you choose to follow. It's perfectly fine if you haven't found a way to make use of Twitter, but for an increasing number of people, Twitter is starting to play a pretty important role.

I dropped my cable subscription when I moved to my new apartment last August and outside of HN I've been relying mainly on Twitter to hear about what's happening in the world at large. I've used it to communicate with friends and coworkers, to see what interesting people in the open source community are doing, to communicate with people during conferences such as at PyCon, to ask for help and to help others, and for entertainment.

Yes, there's plenty of hipsters and social media experts that do nothing more than add noise, but the asymmetrical follow model and the ease to start and stop following people means that you shouldn't care. Choose the people you find interesting and it will make all the difference.
> As for me, I'm considering looking for a new default myself. Powells, here I come?

Why? You know it was nothing more than a CSRF by a troll. That's like saying you're not going back to a store because it got tagged by some punk kids one night. As long as they clean up, what's the problem?
Is there a changelog or something similar anywhere? Or better yet a summary, "Here's what developers need to know."
a) It's OK to burn all the coal we can extract and sod the pollution -> build more coal power plants now to use for electric cars. Burn through the coal more quickly.

b) It's not OK to burn all the coal we can extract -> "200 years worth" is a meaningless statment as we have to stop using it, and the sooner the better.
And he's not afraid to publicly admit his fault and accept blame for those mistakes. Rather refreshing, compared to the CEO comments in most of the other annual reports I've read.

I don't like that BYD seems to be dependent on cheap labor to be competitive; hopefully that will be a short term situation.
Perhaps we are forgetting that Amazon is a victim as well. If Amazon is unable to seek punishment against malicious users of its site, it is forced to spend its time and money patching security holes and preventing future attacks, in addition to repairing lost good will from customers and authors.

It always surprises me how quick people are to jump to the conclusion that the website operator is at fault for these sorts of malicious uses. It flies in the face of simple economics. The burden on Amazon to protect its site probably ranges in the thousands or millions of dollars; the benefit to the malicious user is a couple of laughs and a funny blog post. It would seem economically inefficient to say that the burden lies on Amazon, in this situation, to protect itself.

(Indeed, I don't believe anyone would analogously say that a thief is not responsible for acts of theft, because they provide a "free lesson in home security" to the victim. Why the difference when we move to the online realm?)
What impact did Twitter really have?

Twitter's impact was negative, getting a lot of people righteously worked-up over an error that Amazon is generally fixing in less than one business day.
I think Firebug replaces half the plugins he lists. Aside from it, the only other useful ones are color picker, web developer and yslow.
I like Twitter, but a Twitter mob is no more attractive than any other group of angry villagers with pitchforks.
It's not for going from 8 -> 1 box. It's for going from 64 -> 8 boxes.
Agreed. When I was writing the TaskSpeed test-case for YUI; I definitely gather these same views a Luke. While working on the YUI test-case, Luke and I had some good discussions around our thoughts about the test. He did a great job bringing them together cohesively in this write-up.
Character decompositions while practicing are planned, so when you write each radical or component it'll identify it and give you info on how the character is constructed. That'll take a while, though. We have a radical vocab list, but it's not that great.

We don't have a way of linking related characters together. Haven't thought of any good ideas for it, yet.
Hey gyeh, thanks for the marketing idea. It's definitely going to be hard to sell to institutions and every bit helps. Plus, I'm taking Chinese 1 right now, and since the page is all in Chinese, I can practice translating what I'm able (and letting Google translate maul the rest).

Right at the moment we don't support any other dialects due mostly to development resource constraints, but Cantonese is on the radar. One thing I didn't mention in my opening comment was that we are going to expand it to Japanese in the near future, which should widen the number of people interested.
Three obvious bad arguments in so few lines!

I don't have time for trolls that aren't even fun, bye.

1) You are claiming to be more insightful than e.g. most every atheist, then claim I think highly of myself. (And demonstrated your great mind by failing to do correct quoting twice...)

2) You've had two chances to give examples of the deep insights you claim, but nothing. You misquoted me first time and ignored the second time.

3) You wrote that I changed the goal post -- with a second bad quote that changed the meaning of what I wrote. I wrote a question, not a statement of position (and followed with an irony in the next paragraph). My full paragraph:

"... and we should respect that people believe X because they feel good by believing X, even without serious reasons to think X is true?"
I run the 7 beta now. Its quite usable, faster than vista, and as stable as XP. The extra features work fine but they're just gravy on a decent windows OS.

The difference here is that when I got some new PC's with vista, it was so quirky that we had to bust them all back to XP to get them to be usable. (It should not take 25 minutes to copy 12 meg onto a thumb drive).

If new PC's came with the current windows 7, I'd shrug and say "good enough" and not think about it again. At mircosoft's market share, that's a win.
My "tween sister" worked her ass off and paid for her own damn iphone, thank you.
Most electric cars, hooked to even a coal fired power plant, have a substantially smaller carbon footprint than the best conventional vehicles.

c.f.
http://www.stanford.edu/group/greendorm/participate/cee124/T...
Congrats guys, that's a great sign that 2/4 comments on Techcrunch are people spamming their codes for your game.
Thanks for the comments bdr. I designed the entire page, but as you may have noticed, I've never designed a website before, all my previous design experience has been in posters and print material. Could you elaborate on your suggestions? For instance, we didn't spend a terribly long time coming up with the logo, and if now that you brought it up, I'd rather like a more compact version. Do you think eliminating the text would help?

Regarding the UI clutteri-ness, are you referring to the flash interface or the webpage surrounding it?
This is good stuff!

I have some similar stuff on my website:
http://base.google.com/base/a/wiseguy/1361797/D7472106773329...
To add to code_devils list, I don't think you are allowed to earn any money in the US other than from your employer. I am not cent percent sure on this, but I think this might even prevent you from something simple as putting advertisements on your blog.
Since a lot of our current users are young and in school it's really important that we keep the price affordable.

I remember being poor and in college once, where "poor" means I was never in danger of starvation but I did routinely decline invitations to the movies for want of $5.

I also remember a collection of someones (parents, university, scholarship providers, government, self) feeling it was worth $80 per hour of instruction to get me Japanese classes. Please do not use the "Oh noes, our customers are poor!" factoid as a mental excuse to undercharge for your product. ($80. An. Hour.)

I'd also like to note that a significant portion of the American collegiate population has a significant amount of discretionary spending capability. Half of my Japanese class had parents who were paying full freight for that $80 an hour. Do you really need to sell to the other half?
I just use digital color meter (mac) or colorpix (windows) instead of colorpix. Less browser overhead :-)
The relevant Wired article: http://www.wired.com/medtech/health/magazine/16-05/ff_woznia...
Nihao! Good application, however I would like to see more instruction/tutorial how it works, since it's asking me to draw, but I am not sure what to draw, since I don't know that symbol and I would like to learn it.

ps/ I am interested in learning Chinese, however I am not sure I would pay at that point... Need to see incentives/success stories.

Good luck guys!
Yes, yes, but the question assumed that the poster had told the truth. With a criminal complaint there is an assumption of innocence such that you have significant legal protections even if you fail to show up. With a civil suit no such evidence is required to file and if you fail to show up you the default is you lose without any party trying to defend you.

I would suggest that a reasonable demonstration of evidence supporting the claim should be required before the other party is even notified and such a requirement have no impact on the actual case. Also a public defendant should be provided to defend you etc. Basically, a presumption of innocence until demonstrated otherwise.
I think they can charge 1 cent and still for ads instead of 5 cents, or maybe go the google way and just auction them.

I did advertise with them with not good results but for 1 cent instead of 5 cents I think they would sell a lot of ads.
Ahh, yes, I see. I found an article about the guy who the images give credit to - Isamu Sanada: Famous predictor of mac products before they come out- I guess while not a "leak" this could be the appearance of the new iPhone after all judging from Sanada's track record.

http://www.wired.com/gadgets/mac/commentary/cultofmac/2002/0...
While one can fold this type of difficulty into expected utility theory, this is not (apparently) true of all situations. People still overweight loss, overweight certainty, and overweight extremely low probabilities.

The classic paper by Daniel Kahneman and Amos Tversky presents a pretty thorough critique of expected utility theory as a model for decision making, as an empirical question. c.f.
www.hss.caltech.edu/~camerer/Ec101/ProspectTheory.pdf
Don't underestimate the easy, quick, instantaneous, and always present nature of the mobile platform.

The "new thing" / the impact is there is now a global communications medium that is mobile(hence "always on") which interrelates (generally without restriction/permission/barriers) disparate peoples through a dense tree of connections. [Not sure how much relevance to the speed and distance at which memes spread is due to forcing short communications. But, my gut feeling is quite a bit.]

Nearly instantaneous broadcast from almost anywhere to a large group of strangers where ever they are who are in turn incentivised and empowered to easily rebroadcast is altogether new.

That it's called Twitter is an unimportant accident of history.
Why You've Never Heard of the Great Depression of 1920 (video)
How far beneath the Kelly criterion depends on the game. In gambling scenarios you can estimate the risk relatively easily. In investment scenarios, it's much harder, so there's an additional 'risk model uncertainty,' representing whether your risk model is off. In fact most investors famous for using the Kelly Criterion (Warren Buffett, Bill Gross - on Bonds) stick to the domains that they know.
There's no reason you couldn't have Haskell-style operators in a Python-like language, where the definition of each operator is given by a method of its first argument.

That's how Scala does it. Scala also lets you define new operators and use infix notation for methods, which gives programmers no excuse for violating conventional operator semantics. (In C++, the limited choice of operators tempts people to commit such atrocities as using + and * to denote non-commutative operations.)

Operators like + and * seem to cry out for generic treatment a la Common Lisp, but I don't know how well that technique scales to large codebases. Java's single-dispatch model is limited, but it seems to scale acceptably.
The post I was referring to said: "But I can't think of a single reason he shouldn't be sued. There's no way he didn't forsee loss of revenue for Amazon."

I never said what he did was ethical, but I'm trying to say that just because an event reduces revenue doesn't mean its something that can be sued over. IANAL but it would have to be on the grounds of libel. (Which is likely, but parent never brought that up)
Oh come on. They'd lose way more money if it were widely trumpeted that they're making a buck off what I'm assuming is literary homo smut.
Jokes like this make me viscerally angry.

1) There are groups of customers out there who are not the technically adept 15 to 34 year old males who are in the comfort zone of the vast majority of startups.

2) Their needs, wants, and, yes, trivial whims create legitimate markets to satisfy, no less than World of Warcraft, the latest $1 iPhone sensation, AWS, or any random CRUD app.

3) It is profitable to satisfy them, because they pay money for our products.

4) Mockery of these segments functions as a perverse sort of social discipline, which hurts diversity in our industry (which I could, frankly, not care less about) and costs us money and profitable opportunities (which I care about quite keenly).
Why should they spend time training? Isn't increasing the money on the table enough motivation for people to train themselves on whatever skillset is required and apply for the position?
Part, if not whole, of the truth is that the learn-unlearn-learn cycle in itself is a skill. People who posses that skill acquire new skillsets and stay relevant; people who don't have to wait to be trained.
Amazon Rights Error After Tweet-Rage on Twitter