skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Who Pwns the Internet? A map of TLD dependencies
Does Microsoft's Bing have Google running scared?
How much did you pay to read the blog post?
Was anyone else confused by this article? I assumed he was going to be talking about the efficient market hypothesis

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

Anyway, this seems an uncharacteristically juvenile HBR article. Of course businesses are not 100% efficient, they are run by humans after all. But firms which are more efficient then others have lower operating costs, better R&D, higher margins, more innovation, etc. - these are the competitive advantage that 'efficient' firms use to get the edge on competitors. That's not to say that each one doesn't do something to make you as an investor go crazy.
I miss focus follows mouse.
Internet to the rescue! Steal somebody else's course packet and direct your students to it. Maybe have a couple of course packets. Variety helps, and students these days are (or should be) good at ignoring vast amounts of irrelevant material.
Google Adwords and Porn
If you have a porn site, you can't publish adwords ads, Google Ads won't be displayed on your site.

But if you have a Gmail with lot's of porn, open one of your porn mail, and you can see Adwords ads.. Think about that.. I think that's evil..
This is related to Window's Data Execution Prevention (DEP) security feature. A detailed description can be found here:

http://support.microsoft.com/kb/875352

IE8 and Google Chrome interact with this feature for process isolation. I've seen reports online of this feature affecting both:

http://activerain.com/blogsview/763323/data-execution-preven...

I'm sure Microsoft discovered this problem during the very thorough testing of IE8 and added some code to fix/defend against this problem by editing the boot.ini. Clearly this is an issue which affects a very small number of users, so it is reasonable to expect that the fix can itself break for an even smaller number of users.

sigh So in the end, this is more mindless, ignorant Microsoft bashing. It simply isn't justified. There are many things to dislike about them, such as weak leadership and lack of "taste". But certainly not incompetence or malice.
NSFW tag in HTML 5
Just because there are greater "evils" out there doesn't excuse lesser ones.

It's calculus, which, as invariably gets pointed out in discussions about overpriced textbooks, hasn't changed much in the last century. How much value does that textbook actually bring over other calculus textbooks? Enough to justify a $20 million house? Does it present new and exciting ways to look at calculus? Does it make it that much easier for students to absorb and understand the material? Or is it successful mainly because of political skill inside a cartel-like industry?
This is an article about my book, The Geek Atlas.

There's much more about the book via http://geekatlas.com/
Pretty good. Also you have some decent reviews going. Good luck!
How to Achieve Top Rankings in Search Engines | TechJaws: Internet Security
Evaluate your technical debt with Sonar
this is the author in question - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/James_Stewart_(mathematician) ..
his book was actually pretty good and I could use it for about 3 classes in my calc sequence.. pretty good value for money
Of course it doesn't. But if you are making claims that a particular feature is adaptive in a specific way, you had better be able to provide some evidence for it - and one way of doing this is showing the trait being adaptive in a different population in the same ecological niche, or having an explanation as to why not, or being able to somehow rule out the other dozen perfectly plausible reasons as to why the trait exists.

Not every phsysiological trait has to be adaptive.
The article posits that certain parts of our societal ecosystem are getting so complex that failure has catastrophic consequences and gives two examples: power grid failures and failure of the financial system. It goes on to propose that if something is too big to fail, break it up. to wit, enforce antitrust when something is too big to fail. While antitrust and limiting size is part of the arsenal of solutions, it is incomplete.

It is not a solution to eliminate complexity. The electrical grid is an example as is the financial system. If we pave over New Mexico to generate green solar power, we need a complex electrical grid to deliver the power to the users, otherwise we all have to move to New Mexico. The power grid problem is a need for redundancy. Parts will always fail. We need to have enough redundant capacity to route the power around the failed component. The Internet is robust because it has lots of redundant switching capacity.

The financial system is a different animal. Its problem is not one of single point of failure, typical of physical systems, but one of systemic failure, algorithmic failure. It all breaks in the same way because everyone is using the same algorithm, whether it be everyone invests in real estate using the greater fool theory, or everyone uses the same risk management model, or everyone writes derivatives without enough reserve. The savings and loan crisis of the 80's wasnt the failure of a few big players, it was the failure of lots of local players. Back to engineering, these are failures of positive feedback loops. What is needed is negative feedback, something that pushes back in the opposite direction. In the case of derivatives, a reserve requirement is a negative feedback.

I think the financial system also needs the equivalent of the CDC to watch for viral memes. The South American loan defaults, the savings and loan crisis, the near failure of Lehman Brothers in the 80's all should have vaccine against over speculation among the financial community. It didnt. Instead we got Alan Greenspan.
No. Just use the product rule. The derivative is

x^2 cos(x) + 2 x sin(x)

Finding derivatives is actually really easy. There are just a few simple rules you have to apply deterministically to any problem, and the answer will pop out.
Examples of 1st class thinkers: Knuth, Sussman, Papadimitriou, Tardos, Vazirani, etc. I admire Jobs for his sense of style. I admire Gates for his business acumen.

I used to like reading Seth Godin. He makes some valid points. However, anyone with a functioning brain is capable of arriving at the same conclusions he does. He does not go into depth because there's no depth to go into. His posts are sweet and fluffy but have zero nutritious value. It's a bunch of truisms that add little to anyone's knowledge.
You'll find that with only a little practice using tap gesture for button press becomes second nature. From there it's only a 5 minute learning curve to double-tap equals right button. So if you're serious about putting Linux on there, and frankly I think that's just silly, don't let the touchpad put you off.

I'm perfectly happy with Coda for web development, although I wish it had function collapsing.
That looks like a great piece of software! I have been bugged by the lack of maximize for a while now. This looks like it will fit the bill nicely.

Out of curiosity, what is a typical "donation" to the developer in this style of licensing?
Heh. "standard text"

So anyway, the journal asks why I'm citing Alberts so much and I write back, "Alberts is the standard text, editor."
How much did you pay to read the blog post?

Ok, well seeing as you're trying to be a smartass, let me answer you.

Using rough calculations... I use my internet for about 6 hours a day x 30 days a month so I get approximately 180 hours of internet usage a month or 10800 minutes.

Since that blog post took me about 2 minutes to read and I pay $170 a month for my internet access (which includes telephone line rental), then I guess it cost me about 2 cents to read that blog post.

So his 2 cents, cost me 2 cents.

Now we've gotten semantics out of the way, let me answer you properly.

Seth uses his blog as a marketing tool to both sell his books and to promote his "Seth Godin" brand which helps him get his consulting and workshop gigs too.

So yes, he might give away snippets of information on his blog, but make no mistake, he doesn't do it free - he has other outcomes in mind.
Looking back on it, I think it was neither; it was just superfluous. Take calculus for example: why would a teacher assign 60 or so integrals to calculate when 20 would have been enough? Maybe it prepared me better for college -- I can't say.
>the financial system also needs the equivalent of the CDC to watch for viral memes.

Amen.
The mouse speed algorithm. I'm using an iMac for three days and want to throw it out off window. I just keep missing the clicks! Or the mouse go too fast and pass the controls, or too slow and don't reach them.

But the worst thing is that when I switched to my Dell Notebook (ArchLinux), I was too used to the iMac's mouse =\
I wonder if the kind of prosperity Silicon Valley has is only possible with specialization. And specialization is a high reward/high risk strategy.

Perhaps other regions with a diversified economic base can never be as spectacularly wealthy, but they should be more insulated from industry collapse.
Black-Scholes assumes the change in stock prices follows a normal distribution. It is quite easy to show, by pulling data from any online stock site and creating a histogram, that stock prices do not follow a normal distribution (instead they are power laws). If stock options followed a normal distribution, 'crashes' such as last year should basically never occur.

Simple models also assume independent variables, because dealing with cross-correlations for thousands of stocks is hard. This is a mathematical statement of the 'common sense' expectation that you loose a little, win a little. However, in reality the market is highly correlated, for example in the last year virtually everything has gone down.

This is pretty common knowledge in the research branch called 'econophysics', google it. It's an interesting field, one of their major 'result' is that classical economic theories are fairly flawed, and only seem to work because they are like self-fulfilling prophecies (traders implement their beliefs, but only up to a point!).
Great tip! I wish firefox behaved like a good OS X app. just tried it in firefox and it brings up a help tab.
At least San Jose is in a pretty nice area, with a good climate, and access to some nice places (beaches to the SE, San Francisco an hour north, hills to the west and east). That's got to count for something.
My sample consists almost entirely of engineers, so I'm disregarding most of humanity, but within that limited sample I believe the answer is a definite yes. That's one of the few saving graces of the American educational system.

Of course, our educational system still sucks at it. I can't tell you how incredibly soul-crushing all my math classes were until about the time I got to trigonometry. And English classes generally suck royally. And don't get me started on biology classes taught by young earth creationists. Or the culture that looks down on learning. Fuck.

I think maybe it's getting better?
I have two:

1) The new Macbook Pros moved all the function keys around. I can no longer control the volume with one hand, because the Fn key is too far away from F10-F12. (I want my F-keys to be F-keys, not Fn-F-keys, because I use Windows via Fusion all the time, and use F-keys in Mellel all the time as well).

2) When opening a Finder window, Finder starts to create thumbnails of all the documents it understands, and replacing the default file icons with the thumbnails. Nice feature - except that every time it creates a new thumbnail it refreshes the window. Consequently, if you are trying to rename a file, you can't do it in the window. Every time you try, the window refreshes, and you lose focus on the filename! You are forced to do a Command-I just to rename a file. There is no reason this has to happen. Why can't Finder refresh a thumbnail without stealing focus? Idiotic.
"It is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends upon his not understanding it!"

It seems your Dean would've been good friends with Upton Sinclair.

Although, it does raise what I think is an interesting question. It has been said on here a lot that markets tend to see monopolies as market damage, and route around them; this isn't quite that severe, but seems to be a vertical monopoly to a certain degree. How would one route around this? The obvious option would be "go to school somewhere else," but this seems endemic in academia as a whole.
I am a grad student. I hate the textbook cartel as much as any other grad student who needs to spend 5%-10% of his salary in expensive textbooks. However, this whole "textbooks must die" is linkbaitish and stupid. They don't have to die. Don't shoot at the books, shoot at the cartels. In any case, I read this post and learned zero. Godin is preaching to whom exactly?

Saying that textbooks must die reminds me of the Nazis burning the books they considered un-German. Textbooks can be wonderful when they're really good, and no Kindle or anything will kill the joy of reading a book in paper. Of course, if one looks at marketing books, it's clear they're mostly junk and I would not mind if they were replaced by e-books at all. However, the same does not apply to math / physics books, which tend to require a lot of effort and time to be written, plus the illustrations, etc. This hard work needs to be paid for, and I am willing to pay for it just as long as it's more like $30 rather than the obscene $150.
Yes, but nobody forces you to watch a sport or go to a certain business.

Textbooks are required for college classes.
Windows does the same thing. DirectX 10 is only available on Vista, for example (Unless of course you hack around this, using something like Alky, but then again, with enough work the same could be done in OS X).
Nice. I would like to see inclusion of the following metrics:

1. Class coupling - amount of time it takes to grok the code

2. Build time (full, typical partial etc) - amount of time developer is twiddling his tumbs

3. Time between checkin, integration tests and end-user tests - amount of time code spent being created but not used, aka "waste" per The Toyota Way

4. Referential loops in layering diagram - amount of problems that need to be overcome to start refactoring
I would love a world of people who had skipped English Literature to read a book for fun. I tried to do that all through school, and according to standardized tests it paid off big time, but the English teachers got all tetchy about it. Sheesh.

For some reason a book is never as good when you have to read it. Especially if you have to read it at the same pace as the rest of the class, and discuss it in patronizing detail during class.
The base tickets are far more than $100. You also need to factor in the cost of tuition, transportation to and from, and the opportunity cost of having classes take up your time.

Or, to put in another way, you are not mandated to attend a class where the professor will charge you to see a certain sports team play. Somewhere along the way, you made a choice that brought you to this mandate.
True, but Joel's point is that a rewrite can actually be bad for the code not just the business, because you throw out years of real-world testing and bugfixes.

I think that applies on project with multiple developers and whose developers are not in the company anymore. When it's a solo developer, he still has the experience and doesn't lose so much from throwing out the code
If nothing else, people should learn statistics. Statistical thinking is absolutely essential to understand most social, economic, and political issues in the world, and people who just don't get it are mentally crippled. I see this all the time.
I think the thing that bugs me the most is the fact that there is no way to create a new window from the dock. The only thing that the dock does is start the application if it is not running or activate the application if it is running.
For a site promoting entreprenuers and innovation the attitude towards this textbook writer seems odd. At least he's contributing something to society to earn his wealth..
Or maybe the textbook could focus on the important theory that needs to be covered, and leave keeping up to date with the newest fads up to the students and the professor teaching the course?

The theory is what gives the textbooks value. It's the timeless and constantly useful material that makes a textbook worth referring to decades later.
"All over the world people are monitoring unfolding events in Iran via the internet, where an apparently decisive election victory by the ruling party is being challenged on the streets."
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/middle_east/8099579.stm

It's not necessary to declare your thoughts as "Fact, Fact, Fact" when your facts are speculation, comments about "fairness" and generalizing about motives of "the tech blogosphere."

"Fact: CNN is being maligned unfairly." - your view of what is and isn't fair isn't some fact that people are forgetting. Cable news organizations don't require video of the events to talk about them and besides that there's plenty of video on youtube and photos on flickr. The BBC link above shows video, and there's plenty more on youtube.
Take it as you will.. A story.

We change our own oil in our vehicles. We save it in oil cans for either burning on a fire or pouring along with gasoline down a hornet hole. We know it's "Bad for the environment" but we do it.

One year, we decided to re-roof our house. Considering it was 2500 sq ft, it was an arduous job. Now, for those that know about roofing, you use tar paper, which is asbestos with really thick petroleum tar (think super thick motor oil). One evening, we left a half of a roll lying outside cause we were too damned tired of taking it off the raised porch. It was on concrete, and not the grass.

The next morning (we started about 9am), the roll of tar paper was crawling - literally. There were hundreds of thousands of ants milling about everywhere. We go to shake them off, and lots of egg sacs fall out. But along with the white egg sacs, we notice that the inside of the roll is now pure white fibers. The ants ATE the petroleum tar.

We've noticed similar events, but never saw it happen over the course of 12 hours. We then tested it later with used motor oil... they ate it up too.

It just tells me that whenever nature creates something (petroleum), it also creates something to eat it. And sometimes nature creates stuff to eat man made stuff.
I remember Stewart's Calculus as a reasonably good textbook. Though they seemed to publish a new edition every two years. Chapter and problem set numbers would get shuffled around, and so you needed the newest edition in order to do assigned homework.

How much has undergraduate level calculus really changed in the last 200 years? The constant updates disrupted the used textbook market and drove sales of new books.
> Let's first focus on teaching the essentials to everyone. If we have time and resources to spare after that, then let's teach Shakespeare and trigonometry.

I've had a lot of boring and mostly useless basic classes inflicted on me because someone had the bright idea of making everybody learn "the essentials". And because it had to be taught to everybody, naturally it had to be aimed at people who are about one standard deviation below average in intelligence. Remedial classes shouldn't be forced on everyone, but that's what ends up happening.
With every update to SQL schema, you need to restart the database server

I know there are some RDBMS haters on the Internet but this is just plain ridiculous.
virtualbox is good.. +1
The fact that a regime stifles free reporting doesn't excuse the media from reporting on it. I was extremely disappointed with the recent news from Sri Lanka for the same reason. You didn't cover it because Rajapakse's administration didn't allow any media? FAIL.
> Other field may required lot of mathematics. If you need mathematics for your career, why not take a school specialized in making engineers out of you?

Two words: premature optimization. Why should everybody have to decide, in their early teens, what career they're going to be doing for the rest of their lives?

> The smartest scientist in the world probably don't need English Literature 101. English literature is probably the scientist know, but is it revelant to his career? No.

Same deal. I'm no fan of English Literature classes -- I'd prefer a comfortable chair and a good book of my own choosing -- but language skills are important, and forcing people to specialize too early has its own downsides.

Incidentally, most math education also counts as premature optimization, where they spend ungodly amounts of time memorizing the procedures for each type of problem in the curriculum. Sure, you'll be able to find X quickly -- but can you actually apply this knowledge? For most people the answer is no. But this miseducation persists because it's easy for teachers and gets good test scores.
I can't help but wonder how much you could do with a super computer budget working with these (http://www.amax.com/CS_nVidiaTeslaDetail.asp?cs_id=PSC2) It works out to ~10$ / 1ghz core.
But decades ago other professors were putting together xeroxed collections of articles.

Cohesion is a problem with xeroxed articles. Not to say it isn't with most textbooks, but it can be one of their primary goals, whereas the primary goal of an article is to disseminate a set of ideas in as efficient a way as possible, with some assumptions about prior knowledge of the reader.

I remember sweating through problem after problem in calculus so I could do problem after problem on the tests.

So did I. Part of internalizing the fundamentals of a subject is working through exercises that depend on those fundamentals. You don't get that when something else is doing the work for you. Learning isn't easy, and we need to get over the desire to want to make it so.
I'm not sure about that. Boston and NYC both are incredibly prosperous and have well-diversified economies.

I think it's more that diversified, healthy economies take time to grow, and you'll never get the sort of fast growth rates that Detroit or San Jose have had in a diversified economy. Boston and NYC have both been around for close to 400 years; they've had industries rise and fall, which gives them a broad base to fall back upon when the latest industry du jour dies. Boston had a problem much like Detroit in the 1930s-50s when the textile & tanning industries moved south, but it also had grown strengths in education and finance (dating back to the 1600s) that served as the backbone for the tech & biotech revolutions of the 1970s an 1990s.

An interesting comparison might be with Salem, MA, which at the time of the revolution was the 6th largest city in America. Salem's growth was much more concentrated in shipping that neighboring Boston. So when technological development replaced sailing ships with steamships, which needed a deeper harbor than Salem could provide, the city declined until it was a mere suburb of Boston.