skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Don't Blow the Biggest Deal of Your Life
I think he’s wrong in attributing the tendency to overestimate success to the software industry or the app store alone. The author makes the perfect comparison when he compares it to the Gold Rush. No one was walking around New York circa 1850 screaming "There’s Gold in California." What did happen is a few people got rich quick and word of that spread fast (because everyone is looking for a way to get rich quick).

So whatever app store hype exists was largely inevitable. I don't recall Apple ever promising riches to developers.

There have always been people who jump on the "get rich" bandwagon. If there are more of them in the software industry it’s only because there are virtually no "cost of materials" in software development (particularly with digital delivery)
The patent system as implemented may be idiotic. In principle, I don't see a problem with granting someone a temporary monopoly for monetizing discoveries that came about as the result of long and difficult work. Society is almost certainly better off if the patent system causes discoveries to be made sooner than when the patent was granted plus the length of the patent term. I'm torn on the gene patent though.One the one hand, a gene is a non-obvious mathematical formalism that offers an explanatory account of heredity. So we don't really have genes in our bodies and any arguments relying on such a claim are dubious. Furthermore, patents do have research exemptions. Now, my intuitions tell me such a patent is wrong but I'd really like to see a solid supportive argument.
Along with increment/decrement operators, fall-through cases in switch statements, foo['bar'] style property access/assignment, bitwise operators, and a number of other things.

His book ("JavaScript: The Good Parts") contains a lot of good information, but roughly half is what I would consider "style" preferences.
COGNITIVE HAZARD: This link may feed your biases.

Though it does at least earn some points coming from a biologist suggesting they need more engineering sensibility, rather than an engineering suggesting biologists need more engineering sensibility.
Why don't all whales have cancer?
patents give people an incentive to invent. The particular implementation of patent law may be idiotic, but the general idea of patents most certainly is not.

And yes, capitalism worked before patents in the same sense that medicine worked before the discovery of bacteria and germs.

The whole point, whether it concerns patents or property rights, is to give people an incentive to make the world better.
As a venture becomes more successful, the number of stakeholders grows, and the ability to "just do it" declines.
I'd just like to point out that I also am a man and I don't have your problem. I have the capability of keeping my professional work environment professional.
the reliance on the Kelly criterion doesn't make any sense. the Kelly criterion is based on a game you can play over and over. it calculates an exponential expected growth rate based on how much you're favored.

favorable lotteries don't show up very often. if a favorable lottery that you could play existed every day, then the Kelly criterion makes sense (it sort of makes sense in its original context, the stock market).
I wonder why the crime rate is falling so pronouncedly there. I also wonder how (if at all) it's related to the ethnic/religious tensions surrounding the immigrant population. That's a subject we were hearing about for a while, but evidently it hasn't translated into much violence, at least not of the prison-filling type.
that's ridiculous.
the whole point of the article is that there is an optimal percentage of your wealth you should spend on the lottery.

that's exactly the opposite of your argument, that if spending $X is good, then you should spend $2*X.
> Hey, if buying one ticket makes sense, then surely buying more than one ticket makes more sense.

No he answered that in the article. See Kelly Criterion link.
But if you have a large enough bankroll to do so, you should buy as many tickets as you can get your hands on - assuming #1.) the expected value is positive and #2.) your total investment falls below your Kelly criterion. I believe a city in Texas did this once when the lotto odds were in their favor but my google-fu escapes me.

So, according to your theory, you should buy ONE ticket or ALL the tickets, but nothing in between?
Prissy social correctors are no less annoying than boors.
I enjoyed reading your thoughts.

My take is: Of course religion is a motivating factor -- it's been the favorite method of getting the masses to do one's bidding for thousands of years.

So _of course_ any serious war effort will have a significant "good vs evil" component to it -- the people have been listening to clergy preach about good and evil since they were children, and so all it takes is a simple hijacking of this meme and you have a grand effort for the cause of good.

Framed another way, religion weakens the citizens' defenses against war propaganda.

I think we're actually saying the same thing... When George W. Bush would get on TV and read a speech about evildoers, he would make the hearts of the faithful flutter with devout feeling. He said those words because he knew what effect they would have -- people, trained to idealize an abstract fight between good and evil, would support his policies.
this is a very popular view. Are you serious?
Has Apple hyped any of the developer outcomes? My impression is that they released the iPhone and were then begged from all sides for a dev kit that would take advantage of the platform. I haven't seen "here's how you'll get rich quick" numbers from Apple.
Hah. Not really. I think most American people believe that stuff. Why else do people visit all the monuments, etc.?
Awesome icon, did you make it yourself or get it made?
nltk has been around for some time now and provides much richer functionality for this sort of thing.
Argentina has a land area of 2,736 thousand sq km. The US has a land area of 9,161 thousand sq km. So Argentina is only has about 1/3rd the land mass that the US does.

However, the extent of the U.S. land mass is bounded in the west by the Rockies and the deserts of the Great Basin, so in reality, the amount of arable land that both countries started out with is comparable. The arable Argentinian Pampas is closer to the coast than are the plains of the U.S. Just as importantly, the rivers in Argentina flow East-West, whereas the U.S. have the Appalachians between the East coast starting point and the breadbasket. This gives Argentina a STRONG head start in terms of being able to easily populate and exploit the arable interior.

In this light, Argentina should have had a higher initial population than the U.S. did. Argentinian farmers didn't have to clear fields for rocks as did the farmers of New England. They didn't have to cross the Cumberland gap or clear trees for farms in NY.
So what happened to people's savings in Argentina during 2001, 2002?
Um, since when are any of the Insider properties even considered journalistic organs anyways?

Gawker Media lies and an Insider property publishes single-sourced rumors as fact. Shocking. sigh
The worst violator of silence ever invented was the 4 way split screen of simultaneous talking heads.

The only one of these I ever want to see again:

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i think it depends on age. if you are in your twenties your testosterone does it for you. (if you are 25 and under, you are basically a walking hormone).

Added the fact that in most tech companies guys outnumber girls 2 to 1 or worse (i am including marketing, sales, hr also), if you are a single and decent looking girl you will probably be hit on a lot.

Not sure if there is a solution to this.

As a counterpoint, i worked in a company of about 80 people, where 60 were female, and i got hit on a lot. I actually enjoyed it when girls were flirting with me. But that's the main difference i guess, women are more likeley to be more annoyed from non-wanted advanced than men are, call it evolution or social, i don't care.

The fact is that being the one differnt from your collegues, might make you feel a little bit like a fish out of water.
And in this case is being female, where you are probably outnumbered 4 to 1 or worse.
There have been syndicates put together to do this: to buy hundreds of thousands of tickets in lotteries were the expected value is positive.

There are a few problems with this approach, though. One is that there is a real risk of split pots, where multiple winners drive the ex post probabilistic payoffs negative.

The larger issue is operational hurdles: it is tough to buy a million tickets, even if one has the coin. The retailers simply aren't setup to handle that sort of flow, and the state lottery officials have setup measures to prevent this sort of things (mostly as a result of being picked off in the past). To them, it is a business, they expect to make money, and they just change the rules relating to ticket sale mechanics to limit/punish outlets that collaborate with the syndicates.
And don't forget to factor split winnings into the calculations. Here in Qld (Australia) the media coverage of lottery prizes starts well before the Kelly criterion tips in your favour, which means prizes are almost always split - there was one case where $20-odd million was split so many ways that the first division prize was less than $750K.

In that situation, even buying ALL the tickets wouldn't help ... you'd need to buy MULTIPLE copies of ALL the tickets, so you would have several shares in the split. I'd like to see the math for that!
As far as the faked page goes, an open reliable identification system could make impersonation more difficult. There needs to be responsibility on the provider to be able to investigate harassment cases, but as the cases grow in number, I could imagine the costs becoming prohibitive. Maybe we need the equivalent of smart spam prevention tools to help identify potential harassment pages before the person targeted even realizes they are being impersonated or attacked? It comes back to software understanding intent or meaning, a hard problem by today's standards. On the social media sites I frequent (twitter, facebook and friendfeed) there are tools in place to identify abusers of the system.
Maybe I'm misreading your post, but the Kelly Criterion says nothing about a single bet. What it tries to maximize is your overall return over a series of bets. The charts in the OP are with regards to buying only a single ticket/draw. Re-running the numbers for more than one ticket would result in an even larger necessary bankroll.
Not according to another article on here recently that put Apple's take from the AppStore at 45 million.
"If the apps on the category charts are doing those sorts of numbers, what do you think the rest of them are doing?"

What if Board Games and Social Networking aren't popular categories? Just because an app makes it on the chart of an un-popular sub-category of games (board games) doesn't mean the apps charting in more popular categories are doing equally as bad.
7. Maintain constant buzz with bumper stickers on which people routinely erase the "B" and the "r".
Indesign Vs. QuarkXPress 
The debate about which layout program is better, InDesign or Quark, is not quite as old as the PC vs. Mac debate, but often just as heated and polarizing.
IANAL, but intent is explicitly required: "...with the intent to coerce, intimidate, harass, or cause substantial emotional distress to a person..."

To a lay person, it seems no small thing to prove such an intent in writing critical material on web (or elsewhere).
No real war on drugs, a very strong public service ethic (they have by far the most polite police I've encountered anywhere), and they have high expectations of themselves as a society. They are quite conformist but more in the sense of liking to be like each other, not punishment oriented towards people who are different.

Anecdotal impressions of course, and superficial ones at that - I lived there for a few years but I'd need pages to write about them. If you ever have a chance to work/study/live there for a year, I'd say jump at the chance. It's not heaven on earth by any means, but Dutch people and society are worth getting to know.
"The human mind is highly parallel. Anything that approaches it in intelligence will also be highly parallel."

Birds fly by flapping their wings. Any man-made object that approaches the flying ability of a bird will also flap its wings.
I don't think you are right to connect AIG financial derivatives trades with this, buyer purchased PMI is very different from CDS. Most of the major providers don't seem to be bankrupt (MGIC, Genworth, RMIC, etc.). It would seem that this should have protected the banks, unless they were buying coverage for less than the loan amount.
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/03/01/realestate/01Mort.html

I think a key problem is that people were avoiding paying the PMI by getting piggyback loans, since the interest was deductible. However, the piggyback loans had greatly increased risk, particularly as they were subordinated to the 80% loans.
I do recall reading somewhere that the netherlands is the happiest country in the world (at least in terms of depression rates). I do also recall mention that the netherlands has a low income disparity. Whatever your stance on that subject is, it's true that less poverty = less crime.
Time travel is popular among hackers - Wikipedia Links are not. By their definition (information must have been published elsewhere first) Wikipedia adds nothing new to a discussion.

Certainly, bringing data together is useful, and wikipedia is a great tool for starting research. But not here.
if you want to do something like

if (foo)

bar();

you might as well write

if(foo) bar();

i personally prefer

if(foo){bar();}

the reason to be explicit, is incase you are modifying your script via a compressor, sometimes you can not predict what line your code is going to be on, and its always best to be as explicit as possible.

if you go to one of Crawford's talks, he mentions how he used to love writing switch case statements with fall through, until he spent hours debugging something because of it. most of the stuff he has in there is a really good start to having fairly readable and reliable code. i recommend following the pattern.
low income disparity != low poverty

Poverty in the US is above the median wage in Portugal.
Wolfram|Alpha: statistical, linguistic analysis... now with computational racism!
The Loongson-2 MIPS Lemote Yeeloong Netbook
Doing the calculations is a major pain, but I really don't think that's true.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paleoclimatology#Earliest_atmos...

Wikipedia says that the earth's earliest atmosphere was a stunning 10% C02.

Total coal reserves are 930 billion (non-metric?) tons:
http://www.eia.doe.gov/oiaf/ieo/coal.html

But the earth's atmosphere is 5 quadrillion metric tons:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Atmosphere_of_Earth#Density_and...

So getting to 10% is impossible. Adding in oil, bitumen, and natural gas probably won't get you past 1% (which is still pretty bad:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carbon_dioxide#Toxicity
.)
A queue would be cool, a la instapaper.com, but supported by the browser. I notice most of my tabs are "waiting to be read" things opened from Hacker News.
Javascript has implicit semicolon insertion. This means that some lines of code will not do what you'd expect if you make a dumb mistake.
A day in the life of a grad student
Look, here's the deal. If you are a man, you have to actively move the eyes away, but the pull is always there. Now that does not mean you cannot be professional, but it does mean you have to constantly and actively choose to be so.

A woman who dresses provocatively in the office is a distraction. Far be it from me to tell women how to dress, but most women do not understand the effect they have on men, and of those who do, very few understand that men are, essentially, helpless when it comes to their reaction (even, as I said, if it is a reaction that they suppress). Heterosexual men who do NOT have this aspect of male nature are in the vast minority, although thy do exist. It is a part of being male, and as such, I refuse to apologize for it.
I admire the Dutch a whole lot too. But why would the crime rate be falling?
(Is this accounting for cost of living?)
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This article has an interesting take on the immigrant population. http://www.nrc.nl/international/opinion/article2248923.ece/G...

With a minimum wage of about $20/hr it's difficult to break in at the low end of the labor market. [edit- appears this is an off base presumption]
Storage
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Irony is fine. I'm just tired of its current popularity: http://www.google.com/search?as_oq=ironic+irony&as_sites...
The incredible FUD post.
behaving in ways that maximise achievment of your goal(s)

But that's exactly what IQ tests measure, at least in the context of academic and job performance. IQ tests are used because they are the most economical predictor of achievement in certain areas.

Stanovich seems to be saying that he can predict some kind of achievement (or "well-being," whatever that is) by examining people's susceptibility to certain mental quirks like the sunk cost fallacy. Ok, it's a fine hypothesis, but where's the data?
Wait, at $45MM, that would be $60MM from developer sign ups.
Figures I've seen used purchasing power parity, so yes.
The first programmer was a woman.

Perhaps a better checklist would be "actual reasons why the average human, without regard to gender, does not enter technical fields"
Sonic the Hedgehog on the iPhone
Thanks for so many comments guys. Really proves to me how great a community HN really is, especially seeing someone link my post up.

That said, let's get to discussion. The purpose of the post was for my own benefit, but I felt like many people are in the same condition I am, so it was worth telling myself out loud, if you will. I have a tendency to have so many things on my mind that I get bogged down with potential scenarios, both good and bad, and let them overwhelm my actual productivity, and I suspect many people do as well.

Also, the post is assuming a particular level of expertise in your chosen project, profession, or challenge. That said, it still stands true to newbies--maybe even more so. When you are new, experience provides entrenched knowledge which is much better than what you get out of reading an article. Just as well, when you are (finally) an expert, you have a general feel for what is right and what is wrong, and the mistakes you make have lower margins of effect. So yes, it IS important to rule data and details into your decision making, but just like my experience in freelancing, I've found that most people are actually capable of working QUICKLY and at unparalleled QUALITY if they put down their email and just dig in to the work until it's done. What takes most designers in my niche two days takes me 1-3 hours, and it pays off massively for me. Similarly, people are exceptionally capable of digesting data QUICKLY and EFFECTIVELY and can make sound decisions in haste. Of course, some should take some more time to weigh, but in general, I think people discredit themselves on their potential rapidity.

What I was hoping to accomplish was that were are all very dynamic and capable of beyond what we think we are, both in quality and in speed, and this is most important in influencing changes with your life, or your project, or your business. Everything changes, and those who are able to get through the decision making process and get to action, through more iterations of decisions, have a tendency to succeed more.

Hopefully that clarifies a few points of confusion. If not, feel free to ask more specifically what you wanted to know. :)
Yves Behar's supercharged motorcycle design
Depends on your definition of poor. Here in The Netherlands, poverty is defined as the lowest x% of income. (From what I hear, it's the same in the larger part of Europe, but I can't remember my sources...) That would make high income disparity almost synonymous with high poverty.

And there is something to be said for it. If everybody in a country is making more, the price of living will be higher as well. If you're in the lower x%, you'll still have a hard time to pay for it.
Good article and its nice to see people acknowledging the hype around the app store. I have been doing iphone development almost exclusively since november. This includes writing 3 of my own apps and contracting on two others.

I was encouraged by the success of my first app to write others. I spent a month or two working on my next app and it barely made a dent. I think I've finally made the money back i paid the graphic designer.

Another app I made in two days pulled in a couple thousand bucks over the course of a couple weeks. Go figure.

I think the take home point is that its really hit or miss and that success doesn't correlate with quality. I would be reluctant to recommend working on iphone apps full time to anyone unless you're prolific enough to overcome the poor odds of success.

I think a lot of this has to do with the way the app store is set up. The author hit the nail on the head pointing out the importance of being on the top 100 lists. Really, if you aren't on there you are invisible to buyers.

OTOH, selling iphone apps is a lot easier than selling desktop software. And its pretty fun. I definitely recommend it as a hobby and if/when i decide to get a 'real job' I'll probably keep making apps.
You have a low bar for "proof." Michael Arrington is not the NY Times and his waving his hands in the air citing anonymous sources is neither informative nor interesting.

I will cancel my much beloved Last.fm account as soon as there is proof. Until then, please keep the bar above petty sniping and speculation.
Clearly the prison lobby needs to have more things made illegal, like eating certain plants, or writing software to allow blind people to read e-books. They also need to make the sentences longer -- mandatory life in prison for everything. Finaly, they need to lower the minimum wage and cut government services, so more people are desperate enough to commit crimes.

That will solve their problems... it worked for the US, anyway.
Building Talent in a Time of Layoffs
This is how many markets are created. It's why so many school age kids play sports, they want to be famous and rich like the extreme case of the pro-athlete.

It is why 37Signals writes about that guy with the cars for $1000.

It's why lotteries sell so many tickets. It's why there are so many actors and actresses in Hollywood -- most of whom wait tables and valet park cars to make ends meet. They can't do it acting...

it's why people who write blog posts about SEO can get so many viewers.

It's the lie of easy. Apple knows full well that most developers don't make money building apps. Everyone knows full well that the average school student would be better off ditching sports to study for their SAT's and ACT's. Everyone knows buying lottery tickets is a waste of money.

But yet, rural towns all over the united states spend more on football stadiums than they spend on text books...

Point is, it's a problem much bigger than the app store... what is the root of the problem and how do we solve it?