skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Besides this being old news, yes let's all hate on Microsoft for them writing actual code and adding ClickOnce deployment support to Firefox.

I agree the lack of an uninstall option is silly, but calling this a "rougue Firefox extension" just makes you look like an asshat.
Unfortunately for his argument, Greenspun seems to be unfamiliar with the history of the magazine.
He writes:

"Suppose that an idea merited 20 pages, no more and no less? A handful of long-copy magazines, such as the old New Yorker would print 20-page essays, but an author who wished his or her work to be distributed would generally be forced to cut it down to a meaningless 5-page magazine piece or add 180 pages of filler until it reached the minimum size to fit into the book distribution system."

This is simply untrue-- there have been, over the past 500 years, many magazines and journals publishing 20-page pieces. The shortening of the average magazine piece is an artifact of the past 75 years. To view the history of publishing as one monolithic period from Gutenberg to the Web is absurd.
"Had the app been as efficient three years ago as it is today, I'm estimating that about half of what was spent on hardware and related licensing and support costs would not have been necessary."

So first off the software costs where far higher than the HW costs. Second, possible savings of 750k would have come at the cost of features or development time both of which have costs. If anything this just points out how expensive using Microsoft solutions can be when you need to scale. But, even still I expect over 3 years the 750k "lost" is an insignificant cost vs the cost of development and roll out.

PS: Reading between the lines the HW costs where probably well under 150k. "up to 30% of 32 database cores all by themselves."
I'm enjoying my time with maven/jetty too. It was a steep learning curve but once it works its very smooth. I also recently substituted Java for Scala and can recommend that highly if you're doing the coding for the fun of it.
Last time I wrote a parser, I used yacc/bison. It wasn't particularly difficult to use, although I never stress-tested the language I put together.

Anyway, the field of parser generators seems to have grown recently. I had never heard of ANTLR before, nor Lemon. Thanks for the pointers in this thread, I'll be sure to investigate them. There is also Parsec (for Haskell), and ocamllex and ocamlyacc (for OCaml). If you use C++, look into Boost.Spirit. I use tinyjson in production, which uses Boost.Spirit and it works quite well.
The present value of math skills is not just Q-N, because there are confounding factors. For example, do smarter people gravitate to quantitative careers? Do more ambitious people select quantitative careers? Do people with a better starting environment in life receive the necessary encouragement and guidance to pursue a quantitative career versus those with worse starting environments?

I have no answer to those questions, but they are all at least credible concerns. To fairly answer the OP's question, we'd have to observe people who exhibit all the qualities of a person selecting a quantitative career, but who have not actually done so.

This is similar to the problem of measuring the returns on attending elite colleges versus standard colleges. Measured by comparing the earnings of elite graduates versus standard graduates, it appears that there is a high return. But measured by tracking earnings of those who earned admission to elite colleges, but instead chose standard colleges, the difference disappears: there is no incremental return, for a person qualified to attend an elite college, for doing so.

We may have a similar problem here. Any ideas on the best way to measure this?
no its not dead, the only reason "paid" content started to pick up, is because the internet population has grown from techie geeks to include the general population.

The techie geeks will move heaven and earth to save $5, while other people will just shell out the $$$, figuring it's less than what they would pay for a meal at McDonalds
You may be legally required to be present, but that doesn't mean you have to do anything. I have no particular problem with copying busywork, but claiming you're required to do any such work is a cop out. (Also it is shockingly easy in the US to get out of the legal requirement of attending school, even of one's own volition when they've reached high school age.)
While I don't question how the login time causes frustration, I would address the real issue instead of blaming Microsoft: You have a broken login process.
No. I had a friend whose high school life was literally ruined by cheating.

He was a "pathological cheater": smart, and in the top 5 of the class by his own steam, but had a tendency to cheat on everything, even practice PSAT tests administered by the school. He cheated on an essay contest, his winning entry was published (oops!) and he was called out quite publicly when the paper published a retraction.

Rather than own up to it, he made up a bullshit story about how his story was only superficially similar. In fact, it was word-for-word identical, with the title changed.

He changed schools in order to avoid a failing grade for cheating on an exam (and mounting humiliation) to a Catholic school. He was supposedly kicked out of that school for (you guessed it) cheating.

He graduated from law school last summer.
I think a better title for this article would be "Why the Palm Pre Will Fail to be an Immediate Smash Hit Like the iPhone". (Maybe there wasn't enough space)

Here's hoping that Palm has the financial resources to withstand a slow uptake. I love my iPhone, but I hope Palm succeeds here. Competition == good
Flagged because of registration wall.
There are other classes of cheating beyond copying another's work. For example, in many of the pre-college math classes I had, looking up the answers to the odd-numbered problems in the back of the book was considered cheating. You couldn't necessarily complete a homework this way, as you had to show your work, but you could verify your own answers. While I never bothered to do this (I did fine in math at the level these started appearing anyway), I didn't care that others did.

Also, many of these classes considered it "cheating" to program your calculator to compute solutions for you. Usually, on a programmable calculator, the program would only substitute for memorizing formulas. Memorizing formulas is pointless, as if you eventually end up using one often enough, you'll memorize it anyway. Again, I never actually did this (I preferred to just learn how the formula was derived), but I occasionally helped others do it.
Google is no Microsoft, but they aren't all that innocent either
Hm, I did not notice any anecdotes in the article, unless you count stuff like "some societies post boy warriors to guard the women" - sure he does not give the evidence for that in the article, but there might be more extensive studies of it.

Anyway, I don't want to defend it as science - it's an article on the internet. But the flaws in the reasoning definitely are not obvious to me, as they seem to the first commentator. Would be interested to hear more details.

Edit: OK, I counted the "sexy" occurrences, too. Did not bother me much - it is clearly written in "popular science" tone, not "hard science" tone.
This sounds like an edge case to me. Now that it's no longer 1998, most of us don't spec out $500,000 boxes for our stuff anymore. A $5,000 box will get you a long way for just about anything you need to do.

I suspect that the author is looking at a problem that would require tons of hardware regardless of how well it was optimized. Evidence of this can be found in the fact that even after tons of optimization, his $1.5M setup is still running at 20% load steady state.

Our single <$5,000 box handles about 4M pageviews per day without moving the cpu above 5% steady state. That's the sort of baseline I'm used to from the Microsoft stack, so it causes me to question whether the author is really looking at a mainstream case.
Isn't the real story of this "incompetence is expensive"? Seriously, that application design is worse than the worst implementation we've ever had in a failed outsourcing project. (I make Big Freaking Web Apps for Japanese universities at the day job.)

Up until recently universities pretty much had to overspend on hardware, though. (Virtualization/expandable-on-demand cloud computing may eventually get around to changing it, but the customers aren't ready for it and the programming costs to take advantage of it dwarf the benefits for our clients.)

Most of the important systems that need to scale have very, very bad usage patterns from a hardware buyer perspective: for example, take course registration. (Edit to clarify: They are probably not talking about course registration, because there is no way in heck that peak is only 50% more than the steady state.)

At a university with 10,000 students, about 360 days out of the year you can run the course registration on a laptop while it is being used to play World of Warcraft. Then there is course registration season, at which point your peak concurrency goes from 1 user per hour to generally a multiple of your student population all signed in at once. (Because, no matter what you do, they will open multiple windows/connections/etc because "the site is so slow, come on duuuuude, why the heck is this POS always so slow?")

All the accesses are dynamic. Most of them have writes attached. You have to get caching right because if you overbook a class and tell 15 students that they're confirmed a seat in a room which sits 12 because your cache got stale for three minutes, your customer gets yelled at, and they will turn around and yell at you. The end users are also typically incompetent at using the system (typically 1/4 of them have never used it before) and they will perform an impromptu fuzz test on it.

(Oh the stories I can't tell, sadly.)
Looking at things along the hardware/programmers are expensive/cheap axis (take your pick) is short sighted and highly subjective. Setting aside political considerations, the real thing decision makers should focus on are the organization's underlying time and efficiency constraints and unfortunately these things are most often overlooked, misunderstood or inaccurately represented.
I'm an avid cinemaphile and can't wait to see this. Saw the trailer, saw that it was from Sony pictures classic and had to see it. Huangm, really jealous that you got to go to Sundance and see it there!
But iPhones are showing huge gains among the lower income classes. And middle to upper class kids are getting them as birthday presents when they turn insert-teen-age-here.

They have totally crossed the chasm.

The Pre hasn't even begun. And the author makes an excellent case for why it won't.

And here's one he left off: Apple has experience making this chasm-crossing happen. Palm does not.
I think the problem is that the costs add up slowly. Your site starts getting slow? You just throw another dedicated server at it, increasing your cost 300-400 bucks a month.
I don't think that's cheating. That's disobedience to arbitrary dictates. You didn't dodge the essential aspects of the exercise (learn what gcc does), just the accidental aspects.

That's like if a professor insisted that you use a particular brand of pen when writing the exam. Disobeying that order isn't cheating.
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I read that essay, and I think the reason for their existence is simpler: they make face-on mating more comfortable and aesthetically pleasing, which facilitates pair bonding.

One disagreement I have with the OP is in the assertion that permanent breasts would be a necessary disadvantage, ignoring the size issue. Permanent breasts probably evolved gradually, from unnoticeable to male-like to small to the size they are today. A prehistoric hominid female who sprouted D-cups among her flat-chested peers would be at a disadvantage for the reasons the OP gave-- she'd appear infertile at all times-- but the permanent-breasts/no dichotomy is false. The change almost certainly occurred incrementally.
Digital version:

* one path of sale (I do not have to integrate 2 systems to deal with my customers, maintain multiple email newsletters or manage some kind of tacky merge)

* one service that will be distributing the money to me

* one set processing fee that I pay for all sales (predictable income)

* no address required to buy (at least, not given to me)

* no shipping cost surprises for my customers

* no questions of variable quality

* no extra cost for color or binding options

* no potential for physically damaged or lost copies

* higher profit margin

The last one is the real kicker, even if I were willing to invest time and resources to handle the other issues (which I am not). The people who want printed copies are very unlikely to pay $70, thus making the entire thing moot.

This is the concept: not all customers are equal. I don't want every joe off the street. When customers start costing me money, it's not a business.

But the most important thing is: nobody is going to refuse to buy the digital version if there is no paper version available. They can get it printed and bound at their local copy bureau for pittance, much less than Lulu (or equiv.) costs.

I don't understand why people don't get this.
When did I say I wasn't lazy?

I see the sort of laziness that strives to avoid tedium and boredom as a virtue.
maybe, but name one instance where they have screwed over one of their partners.
The only reason google looks good in this article is because it is compared with microsoft. google is the new microsoft, I would be cautious when it comes to partnering with them.

What do folks here think?
Of course he doesn't care.

My day job sells integrated solutions to Japanese universities. We would care very intensely how much the hardware costs in a circumstance like this. (Which we wouldn't be in, because we try not to deliver software which is an abomination against all that is good and holy in terms of database use, but still.)

The math is simple: the university typically has a budget of X million yen to Get This Done. It doesn't matter what the line items are on our invoice -- we can't charge them more than X million yen.

Given that constraint, what do you think we want to charge them? Software license fees for our solutions, where our margin is anywhere from... crikey, I can't tell you the numbers, but "high to higher". Software license fees for third party providers like a certain Enterprise Database, where the margin to the reseller (us) is from low to medium? Or the margin resellers get on hardware, which compared to our software is small enough we could use it to remove food from between our teeth?
Do people with a better starting environment in life receive the necessary encouragement and guidance to pursue a quantitative career versus those with worse starting environments?

The known fact (well known to economists of education) that advantaged young people are more likely to pursue and complete college degrees is indeed a confound here.

http://www.jkcf.org/assets/files/0000/0084/Achievement_Trap....

So, yes, when any of the helpful links that have been submitted in replies in this thread report that college graduates, or college graduates of a particular kind, have higher incomes than other college graduates, or than people who didn't graduate from college at all, it may be that college didn't cause the difference. Maybe the environmental advantages that PRECEDED college caused the difference in lifetime outcomes.

But as OP I am indeed asking what a parent should think about how much to spend to ensure precollege advantages. It looks like HUGE expenditures in childhood to ensure children's success in college preparation and especially in math preparation are well warranted.

measured by tracking earnings of those who earned admission to elite colleges, but instead chose standard colleges, the difference disappears: there is no incremental return, for a person qualified to attend an elite college, for doing so.

This is the generally announced result of the Krueger-Dale study, but I agree with the critics of the study

http://www.overcomingbias.com/2009/03/college-prestige-matte...

(previously submitted to HN)

http://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=379801

(a footnote in this study criticizes the Dale-Krueger study methodology and data analysis)

that the correct conclusion is that attending the best available college is plainly beneficial for students from low-income families, and perhaps beneficial for all students.
If the journey is more important than the destination, knowing shortcuts doesn't bring you any experiences. You would want to prolong the journey more and more and avoid shortcuts altogether. I wouldn't listen to the anecdotes of a known 'adventurer' who only took shortcuts. I like to listen to somebody who has been there, done that and bought the t-shirt, not to someone who only bought the t-shirt.

Likewise, if your 'friends' from school enter the same job market and get the job you could have instead, you pitty them for cheating and even helping them. You know what you're worth and can withstand the tasks they throw at you. While cheaters don't know and don't understand the world they operate in. They probably keep on cheating....

- Unomi -
Cetaceans (whales and dolphins) have internal testicles. It's easy to guess why: they would incur a significant decrease in hydrodynamic efficiency if they had external testicles like other mammals. However, they risk not having viable sperm due to the warmer internal environment--even worse than in most land animals since cetaceans have a thick layer of insulating blubber. As a result, they have developed an alternative cooling system where blood that has been cooled in capillaries close to the skin converges on the testicles, effectively cooling them.

All of this is to say that being in an easy-to-hit place apparently does not lead to as much evolutionary pressure as contributing to poor hydrodynamics.
Is there a way to trigger Firefox to install an update the traditional way (as in with a user dialogue)? If this is the only way possible to install an extension (without asking the user to visit addons.moz.org for example) then it's Mozilla's fault rather than the developers'.
The premise that Q-N is positive could be flawed from the start.

That's an important caution, and thanks for posting the link to the book description. Whether Q-N is positive in general is, of course, an empirical question. (I'm pretty sure the general answer to that question is yes, quantitative careers outearn nonquantitative careers in the aggregate.) You make some very good points about individual preferences and particular skills that trump math skills. If I had a child who played soccer like Freddy Adu

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Freddy_Adu

and who enjoyed playing soccer, I'd only bother him about enough math homework to make sure his agent wasn't cheating him.
If it makes you feel better, I assumed this was a joke!

Avinash is a very Indian name, yes. It's "Avi", a nickname I have, that gets mistaken for a Jewish name.
By your logic, all the folks that pickup trash in India should be allowed to move to America and work at a cheaper price than Americans. I am guessing you are also not in favor of the idea immigration, preferring instead a world where anyone can go and work anywhere.

Notably, they should be able to switch
employers without being deported

Agree. That would fix a lot of the issues. But good luck trying to get that through the corporate-backed H1B lobby that thrives on the uncompetitive nature of H1B.

H1Bs are taking jobs away from them,
which implies that they are interchangeable cogs

In most cases where I have heard that argument, it is someone arguing that their job can't be outsourced out of America. They seem to be right if you have to bring the H1Bs into America to replace them. If you can replace Tom in Cambridge's job with someone in Delhi, I have no problem with that.

one of the biggest factors in my career
is still that I was born in Cambridge,
Massachusetts

The solution to that is not to import someone who is willing to work less expensively into your country to replace you.

And regardless, the idea behind H1B was never to create "fairness" between the haves and the have-nots. The goal of H1B is a selfish one: to help America. If it is not doing that, it's time to reconsider.

If you want an H1B-like visa to address the disparity between the Indian and the American developer, have a debate in Congress and create a new category(some would argue we already have many, ie. the green card lottery).

The market price is a signal - it tells
you whether there is currently more supply
for an industry than demand.

Agree, but that assumes the market is open and fair. With H1Bs it is not as you yourself point out in your first point.
The LLVM Kaleidoscope example might be interesting to you.
so maybe brazil is such an early adopter it ends up ignoring sites that get popular everywhere else, then? :-)
So did I initially, but then I expanded my point to make it clear why it was relevant, and adding extra information.

I find this happens to me a lot. I make a point, but it turns out I was too obscure, and neuro-typicals don't get the point. I then expand on it, and all is well.

Did your initial point add value to this site?
How can you price future assets in todays dollars with unstable economic growth?

The same discount rate applies in general to both income streams in the usual calculation. It is enough to figure out how different the income streams are likely to be (very different, according to some of the links already submitted as replies here) and then get a ballpark estimate of the present value of that difference. By hypothesis, most parents substantially underinvest in ensuring their children's college readiness and math ability.
This is a really strange interview. Granted, Woz is a sucker for shiny objects, but praising "the algorithms" after seeing just a presentation? Also, the interviewer's favorite features were website preview popups and customer service numbers.
There is a strong mindset about math that "you're either good at it or not". It's a nice application of the research by Carol Dweck about people's views of intelligence, popularized in this article: http://www.scientificamerican.com/article.cfm?id=the-secret-...
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> There would have to be a complete image recognizer
> implemented in the genes?

Are you questioning the fact that humans and animals have image recognizers? Or do you doubt that genes play a major role in their development?
From a Yale's perspective they don't mind that some rich student is cheating if they are not blatant, because it does not harm the school's reputation to let them relative to the benefit of having that type of student graduate. Having an football player cheat at Virginia Tech is inline with the schools larger goals relative to having that student fail.

Now all schools are going to make a pretense of an academic honesty policy, but some schools actively use that as a screen to let students cheat their way to C's.

Edit: I still think cheating harms fellow students, but plenty of schools let fairly rampant cheating go on for years.
Can we at least wait until people have the possibility to try it out before debating that? The title is as likely as "Why the Windows 8 will fail". The author doesn't know what kind of apps will be available, doesn't know how Pre usability will be received by a "typical user", doesn't know a lot of things that people from Palm already know.

Yet people from Palm decide to launch and I believe they have much better market analysts than Joe random blogger. Can't we leave "Why the <thing that is not even available yet> will fail" topics for sensationalist blogs? They sure like earning ad revenue during events such as Pre launch and will write anything to get more clicks.