skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I always find these "Macs are over-expensive" arguments pretty ignorant. I suspect they come from people who have never used a modern Mac regularly.

I have a recent Macbook pro sitting in front of me. Granted, you could match it feature-for-feature and probably save a bit of money (not as much as you think, though), but, there's one feature you wouldn't get with any alternative: build quality.

This lovely piece of kit is far and away the best laptop I've ever owned, from a hardware point of view. Not only is it sleek and elegant, but it feels really good and solid (thanks to the single-piece shell). The trackpad is second to none. The keyboard is brilliant. The suspend/resume is flawless. Everything is basically perfect about it (ok, except for the glossy screen).

You can't get that by cobbling together hardware like most other laptop manufacturers seem to. And for a piece of kit that I sit in front of for about 14 hours a day, it's nice to have something that's so finished. No dell or HP or Acer or whatever ever did that for me.

So, no, you can't get the same hardware for cheaper. Because the way the hardware is put together is part of the hardware.
thanks you. I didn't think any shared hosts would allow UDP listening, I'll look around for that.
frankly, I don't think the demographic that is buying Macs (mostly college-aged kids) hasn't changed and won't simply stop buying Macs because of some ad campaign by Microsoft. Windows Vista sucked before it was released, it sucked when it was released, and it still sucks at the point when Microsoft is trying to bury it. Macs offer a very different user experience from Windows, and it's like saying a Chevy is better than a BMW because it's cheaper. They are two entirely different products that both happen to have a screen and a keyboard.
So Apple's perceived value dropped and "Microsoft's" perceived value rose?

There are two variables that need to be controlled for here:

1. Apple hasn't made any major product announcements this year. Apple is a company that lives and dies by its carefully controlled press releases and a sense of "newness" and "cutting edgeness".

2. There's no indication that the MS ads in question actually caused this shift. If they're talking to canny consumers, this switch could be around the perception of netbook sales alone. Those are skyrocketing, and a perfectly usable and incredibly portable machine for under $400 (after tax) is a great value.

Still, take this with a grain of salt. People love to provide reports that Apple is suddenly failing or did not deliver on sales promises, with all kinds of conjured "data" to back it up. In the end, Apple has consistently delivered or exceeded on their projections and they've held up their sales significantly better than everyone else in the market during the economic downturn.
Yeah, I know some font rendering technology specifically draws dark-on-light-bkgnd differently from light-on-dark-bkgnd, though I can't recall where I've seen it, or the details ...
Travel full-time for less than $14,000 per year
Back tattoo designs
I just started looking for ideas for my next tattoo. I've checked out numerous websites for tattoo designs, I'm looking for "anchor text". Does anyone have suggestions? I believe that site has a good selection, but what are the pros/cons of these type of sites?
Surely eBay has a far higher market share of "Online auctions" than google has of "Online search" though. That was my point.
They are having lots of trouble selling ad space in various territories. Though I agree that the article should have mentioned it.
meh. people look to 37's designs for inspiration frequently. so the sites look similar. i could probably find another handful that also look similar. hell, i could find tutorials on how to make your site look like 37s and articles on why their pricing table is a good one to replicate.

they're not related.
> On the contrary, a study by Ulrike Malmendier and Geoffrey Tate found that C.E.O.’s get less effective as they become more famous and receive more awards.

I can't help but think of Buffett's investors-as-coin-flippers.

> After ten flips there would be approximately 260,000 people that had successfully called ten consecutive coin flips. After 20 flips, based purely on chance, there would be approximately 250 people that had called 20 consecutive coin flips - a seemingly miraculous feat.

from http://www.investorhome.com/coinflip.htm
Article posted some days ago:

http://db.tidbits.com/article/10276

A few desultory comments:

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=610026
There’s a lot more to a liberal education than improving the economy. I think that is one of the worst mistakes that policy makers often make not being able to see beyond that

If all you have to offer is intangible benefits, then you are welcome to all the intangible support from the taxpayer you want!
I extracted every email from Gmail a while back. It took a few hours, but now I have local backups. I just used imap and moved things to a local imap server.
Don't underestimate the lengths the Air Force will go to to screw with the Army.
Google Keeps Gaining Search Share
I read it recently and liked it quite a bit. I think one of the things that stuck out for me is that he and Graham were taking this sort of 'quant' (using the term very loosely, as some people here do that, and I don't really know about it in detail) approach back in the 50ies - they absolutely poured over the stats in an era when that wasn't as easy as it is now. Now, Buffet is big enough to be able to do stuff ordinary investors can't, like buy entire companies.

In other words, perhaps part of his success belongs to a bygone era that won't come around again.
I tested a forum avatar that was downscaled to the point of unrecognizability... and it found the specific original image immediately.

It is pretty impressive.
Palm Pre to arrive on Sprint on June 6
I guess they figured it's better to release it 2 days before WWDC than 2 days after WWDC...
Probably because it would be impossible without having a dedicated physical disk for each slice on the machine, or some kind of really fancy network storage array.

Maybe that will change once SSDs become the default hardware. Without the bottleneck of seek time, latency should be much easier to quantify. Also, since you wouldn't be penalized for "context switching" (I know this term doesn't really apply to disk IO, but I mean switching disk jobs often, which requires a head move on HDs) you could maybe someday slice up the SSD time like a CPU and guarantee it directly. (For instance, if the SSD is capable of 200mbps, you're slice could be guaranteed 10mbps. Or something more technically realistic, I am but an amateur.)
>They left out another big lier: themselves. The financial media are as much to blame as Citigroup, the government, and whoever else. Hell, perhaps even more so given the press's traditional role of watchdog and investigator.

That's really unfair. The Motley Fool is about as much a part of "the financial media" you speak of as Slashdot is a typical "news corporation". They have been acting as a watchdog and warning about various bubbles for a long, long time.

The Fool has always been an outsider, unafraid to speak the truths that no one else could-- that brokers don't have your interests at heart, that the market can't be timed, that 99%　of all mutual funds lose to the market over a five year period, that all the great long term investors are value investors rather than technical traders, etc. The vast majority of "financial media" writers simply couldn't write those things and keep their jobs.

In that sense they really are like the Shakespearean motley fool.
There are times I wish we could down vote submitted stories. This is one of them.
Google's search engine is part of an entire class of pseudo-monopolies which arise in fields where all but one of the participants simply insist on sucking. Apple's iPod is another.
Google is benign. I have no objection to their being a monopoly.
You have a point about individual ministers' personal lives. :-)

The press do seem to have different standards for different politicians.

(I didn't follow the dance around foreign minister Bildt, but remember a journalist complaining that it was a democracy problem that Bildt had his own blog so he could get his own version out...)

That is hardly the same as leaking embarrassing internal papers (which have showed up quite often in Washington Post/NY Times).

Leaking of papers did happen with the Muslim Brotherhood guys that were sent back (and tortured) in Egypt. But how many more times?

The press has for decades gotten direct subsidies from the state here -- and I've seen notes that acknowledge influences, but note exactly how much...
There was a time when getting Linux running on a standard PC/laptop brough much joy ...

Now its all about running Linux on beefy servers, obscure embedded devices, cell phones, clusters, and well, you name it.

Who knows what technology we'll have 10 years down the road, but lets hope that the "YEAH!! I GOT LINUX TO WORK ON IT!!!!!" feeling never goes away :)
I agree, was thoroughly impressed with them when I tried some random images.

Unfortunately, they might have to add a Twitter suffix to their name to attract funding.
Daimler Takes A 10 Percent Stake in Tesla Motors. Where’s My Electric Benz?
Agreed. 1,000+ employees, 10,000+ servers, plush offices etc don't come cheap.
How to Find Bugs in Giant Software Programs
> the boot sector was completely unchanged

perhaps it installs "blue pill."
Heh, I did the same with my usual avatar with similar results. They've been about for a while - it is impressively useful & they need more funds for sure.
How about fluency in a foreign language? Is that an intangible? How about the ability to write a lengthy, well-cited, well-reasoned paper in English? Is that an intangible skill?
So Apple should pay me lots of money to show me with my Mac...? :-)

With or without my Linux computers? :-)

(Sorry for wasting reading time with a joke.)
Just to clarify:

What I'm saying is that my phone is usually OFF when I'm with friends. This is why it infuriates me so much when people use theirs around me.
Credit Card Industry Aims to Profit From Sterling Payers - The New York Times
I'm always surprised how many people think that the introductory solitary sentence "Wrong" is an appropriate response to a comment. Particularly so when the original comment is hypothesizing about someone's opinion of something (whether Apple will be "upset" by these ads).

Not to say the comment is "Wrong." It seems like a decent hypothesis that Apple's marketing strategy is to broaden its customer base, and that Microsoft's ads are hindering that strategy. I do think, though, that part of the reason behind the incivility of online discussions is the tendency of members to express opinions in the form of terse, unqualified statements of fact.
Why Has Globalization Led to Bigger Cities? (IT, in part)
Thanks. You guys might want to check this here: http://arxiv.org/abs/cond-mat/0301543
Took me a couple of reads to understand that too, I thought they were talking about the Music companies buying into Spotify.

It actually means that downloaders getting music illegally from The Pirate Bay, may be (via ad revenue) lining the pockets of a backer who has links to far-right groups in Sweden:

http://www.theregister.co.uk/2009/02/26/pirate_bay_neo_nazi/
CarsForaGrand.com: Simple idea that's generating big bucks
I've been seeing too many advertisements masquerading as HN stories recently. I'm assuming this is completely intentional and not just dumb luck.
Microsoft Incorporates Virtual WiFi Technology into Windows 7
Google Calendar now has tasks
>> "If WalMart did an ad campaign to steal potential Gucci customers, Gucci should be very worried."

How successful would such a campaign be? I'd say not very at all. If I were Gucci, and Walmart were doing a campaign, I wouldn't be worried in the least.

Some people buy based on price, others buy based mainly on quality. Neither will be particularly interested in the other.
Yeah.. it looks heavily borrowed, but I think as long as it isn't an exact copy you can't really hate on that: things done well are bound to be copied in any discipline.
you can flag spam if you have enough karma.
spotify not being able to monetize is a joke, they are in the position to completely dominate the market, and launched from day one (I believe, if not at least very early) with media subscriptions.

media subscriptions can make a lot of money, spotify are the first with an application that could pretty much kill physical media sales, if you replace all that market, thats a hefty bunch of cash.

micropayments, people still want to own their music, have it backed up, play it on their mp3 player, I believe this is in the works, if it happens, then they have all of itunes money.

advertising / merchandising / ticket sales, if you become the home of music to most people, then you pocket pretty well here.

They still have a bit to go, I am hoping they come up with a better way of transitioning free customers to subscribers than bombarding them with ads, but from what ive seen that looks like the strategy, people dont need a lot of convincing to upgrade their accounts because the service is so good.

their mechanisms for finding music, the artists radios suck, however they have a fundamental change in the way people can find new music because... sharing playlists actually works, drownedinsound / pitchfork / my friends with good taste can all make playlists and share them with me, thats a million times better than some dodgy collaborative filtering.

Their social aspects are pretty non existant, but thats very easily added, they are new and they have done the hard ground work and passed with flying colours.

They dont have all the music in the world, but they have a lot and its only going to grow, any limitations on artists are purely down to it being new and needing some more traction for labels to understand they dont hae a choice.

The music industry has been faltering time after time to try and keep people paying for music, spotify from what Ive seen has the chance to completely own the new music buying market.
Call me cynical but isn't the music industry famous for business ventures that don't make any money. They just ensure they get their cut in advance, and cook the books if necessary to make sure there's nothing left for the artists to get a percentage of.
Will the Java Platform Create The World's Largest App Store?
Read "How to get Rich" by Jack Dennis ... see his part about giving out equity.
I wouldn't call it a long history, and as much as an ad is ironic or funny, it is there to sell you something, it's just pretending not to be to get your attention and making you want to watch it. I find it worrying that people would spend $1000s on the basis of watching a funny anecdotal ad.
Is it just me ... or does "IBM BladeCenter E" sound much more impressive than the little box in the pictures ...?
How successful would such a campaign be?

A better question is: how successful would the campaign have to be in order to get Gucci worried? I'd say not a lot because Gucci has a very small market vs. Walmart. If Walmart can get even a small slice, that amounts to relatively large $ revenue loss given Gucci's pricing.

Neither will be particularly interested in the other.

That is what a good campaign does: flips customers from one category to another.
I think that two different cultures are being discussed here.

> I expect that my life experience constitutes an extremely biased sample of the power elite. I don't have to deal with the executives of arbitrary corporations, or form business relationships with people I never selected. I just meet them at gatherings and talk to the interesting ones.

I would be more interested in a study of CEOs that looked at the kind of company being run. I expect the subset of CEOs that deal with transhumanism or new technologies to have a more winnowing route to the top than the CEOs of larger or more traditional companies - a Sears can only innovate so much, and even with a looter CEO can manage to stay afloat.
Speaking as someone who double-majored in computer science and a humanity (history) at a top-tier university, I think that the humanity degree should be firmly classified as entertainment, or enrichment.

If you're rich, and have $40 (or $140k) and four years of your life to devote to it, then, by all means, go get a humanities degree.

I think that it's just as useful and enriching as spending $140k and four years learning to become an expert windsurfer, or skateboarder, or glass blower.

However, for anyone who doesn't consider $140k and 4 years "discretionary entertainment budget", then a humanities degree is a huge waste.

People justify humanities degrees as teaching you "how to think" or "how to write".

Hogwash.

Most engineers that I know think far, far, far better than most humanities majors. The humanities only rarely require critical thinking. Further, they don't even train you, in any real sense, how to reason by analogy or how to write well. At most, they filter the folks who already know how to do these things.

Having attended an Ivy League school and seen both types of education, I would not recommend the humanities to anyone other than idle children with trust funds.
What does it mean that Zuck has 3 seats -- one empty, one he holds, one by Andressen -- does Andressen get to vote as Andressen wishes, or does he have to vote Zuck wishes, or does Zuck effectively get to cast all three votes?

How do these board seats relate to the preferred boat seats?
For those who are curious, this is just an article about Cufón, the javascript font rendering engine.
Idée Inc has been around for quite a while doing cool image stuff - they are almost certainly funded. This is a really impressive pattern matching search.
I buy many products from food, clothing, gardening, and house supplies that practically advertises the "off-brand" "cheaper" point. I like my cheap crap t-shirt from walmart. In a consumer market quality is not always the thing people are looking for. I get frustrated with my 100$ vacuum cleaner plenty but never enough to go buy a 600$ one. I don't think Apple should get upset, I think they should provide some lower end products. Even if the cheap apple computers are running P4's with 256m of memory, putting some products in the price range people are looking to spend would kill this advertising strategy and I will finally be able to convince my mother to get a Mac. (maybe throw a monitor on a mac mini and reduce the hardware a little).

Just a note: the emachine I bought 2 years ago for 200$ is still running great.
Once thing I noticed is that adwords tightly integrates with analytics but not much else. Thus, google is using their monopoly in adwords to prop up analytics - an illegal practice at least at the first glance.
All ads do, for most people, is focus attention and create a "brand sense." IBM used to meticulously cultivate a very "professional" sense of their brand, for example.

As a basis for product awareness, there is nothing wrong with this. For example, I was drawn to Nikon DSLRs over their competition when I learned saw the Danny Choo Nikon ad (I read a lot of what Danny Choo produces and I like his writing). Once I started researching on my own I found the camera I wanted and bought it (D90, btw). All the ad did was provide a signpost, should I feel ashamed or manipulated? I definitely did research and agonized over the exact camera and model to get, so I don't feel like I was tricked into a bad, shameful purchase. Nor do I feel particularly manipulated by choosing this brand over any other, there were specific features (mentioned in the ads) that I decided I wanted to prioritize.
Kansas City's Master Planned Community
Cedar Creek offers over 4,500 acres of rolling countryside, lakes, golf, and green space in Kansas City. Area's largest resort style master planned community.
Subsidizing Mozilla to be the default search engine in firefox ?
Neat idea, especially if you only need one or two sheets of the stuff. Any more and you're probably better off heading to an office supply store (if only to save on costly printer ink).
"The humanities" are really something of a grab bag when it comes to categorizing fields of study. When it comes to categorizing the different departments of a university into colleges or whatnot, things like "engineering" and "science" clearly share some type of methodology or otherwise easily fit together. But "humanities" ranges from downright useful stuff like foreign language and history to things like philosophy and English (which can be studied fruitfully but most universities fall short due to some bad fundamental approach like postmodernism) to crap like "ethnic studies" and "women's studies" (identity politics: the department).
Statements like this just feel wrong to me. Shouldn't there be some difference between being a monopoly and simply being successful?

Google isn't doing anything to stop you from building a competing search engine, and people try every so often (Cuil, Wolfram Alpha, etc.)

Also, Adwords are sold at auction, so doesn't the market set the price? The only sketchy thing I've seen with Adwords is that you're able to purchase someone else's trademark as an Adword.
I don't understand where the study he sites leads to the conclusion that good corporate leaders should be dull. He mentions: "The traits that correlated most powerfully with success were attention to detail, persistence, efficiency, analytic thoroughness and the ability to work long hours."

That doesn't mean someone is dull. They could be funny, engaging and thoughtful and still be detail-oriented and hard working. Brooks is just playing off of stereotypes to reach his conclusion.
Not really news, but I'll take it. Clojure's been popping up everywhere lately and I'm currently knee-deep in functional programming in my PL class, so I'll definitely bookmark this for when I feel like learning over the summer. Thanks!
"entertainment value of an ad doesn't necessarily bear directly on its effectiveness"

It can be a lot less effective then annoying commercials too.
You speak as if no engineering graduates possess these skills.
Those are fine and exceptionally useful skills in combination with others, but on their own do not offer many opportunities. Someone whose only skill is fluency in a foreign language is limited to working as a translator; someone whose only skill is writing is pretty much limited to working as, unsurprisingly, a writer. I'm not saying that either field is unimportant but they're extremely competitive fields with a high ratio of qualified candidates to good-paying jobs.

In contrast, someone with a scientific or engineering degree and fluency in a foreign language or the ability to write well, has a very good chance of never being out of demand.

The problem isn't with liberal arts skills, it's with students who pursue them to the exclusion of -- rather than in addition to -- more practical curricula that are actually desired by employers.
TL;DR --> McDonald's owns every www.mc(state).com site and uses each domain for recruiting purposes instead of a central page.

Somewhat anti-climatic but I made it all the way through because I recognized the blog/author and was pining for an article similar to this classic from last year...

http://themetricsystem.rjmetrics.com/2008/11/06/single-lawn-...
Atlanta and Georgia lead U.S. in new business creation
Either way it's dangerously close to Apple's product launch... seems like they're playing with fire.
General number field sieve (Factor numbers in super polynomial time)
Things Wolfram Alpha Does Better (And Vastly Different) Than Google
So why do they still get to ship their runtime with Windows? Is that a relic of the anti trust settlement?