skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
ROI decreases as more money is invested in the market.

Also as an investor, beating the market is not simply ending up with more money. I can go to Vegas with 1000$ bet on black and have a 48% chance to look like I "beat the market" but I could have also lost money. You can change the type of risk you are talking in roulette but a 90% chance of winning 1000$ involves a ~10% chance of losing 10,000$. This still sums to a negative number even if it looks like a great bet most of the time.

Investing is normally a positive return over time. But, if you are willing to lose a lot of money 5% of the time you can probably make it look like you invested well. The risk is still there, but it normally looks like you are "beating the market" even though you are just placing bets.

(This ignores actually producing a product or exploiting insider information. It also ignores scams where you take a tiny risk to lose more money than you have.)

PS: Hedging also has a cost and the net effect is a loss.
I found this site devoted to buildings made from containers.
http://www.isbu-info.org/
I ought to speak faster. Hope it didn't bother anyone.
The 5 Most Persuasive People On Planet Earth
I'm working on this problem.
Stop Waiting to Create, Do It Now
I think what (s)he means is 'the big G' = 'google.com' in his/her email address.
6101 Lcd Display Lights Led Problem | repairmobiles.saaqi
The iPhone 3.0 SDK GM seed has been available for a while now.
Spark for the iPhone
This will be my 3rd iPhone when I do the upgrade. I bought the 1st gen when it came out, then upgraded a few weeks after the 3G did. I have now had to extend my contract for an additional 2 years two times before, and will again.

For the device that I want, I have absolutely no options except for this 1 carrier. This isn't about a contract, its about repeat iPhone customers being handcuffed, bent over, and a line of prisoners playing "shower time" behind you.

Its acceptable if you get a 2 year contract that gives you a subsidized phone for free. Those phones cost next to nothing to build and the carrier quickly recoups the cost within the first couple months.

The iPhone is different though. You aren't getting the unit for free. You're paying $200(or more) PLUS the 2 year contract. Also, iPhone users pay AT&T more per month. I'm paying about $110 per month for 900 measly minutes, 200 text messages, and "unlimited" data. I haven't yet capped out my phone, but with the bandwidth capabilities of the new phone that's very possible.

The iPhone makes it much, much easier to use data and text messages, so its really easy to go over those limits. If I use my 900 minutes? $0.40 PER FREAKING MINUTE. Is AT&T INSANE?

AT&T is making thousands of dollars per year, per customer on the iPhone. And they have signed up millions of new ones in the last couple of years. They are literally sleeping in multiple beds of money at this point.

Finally, they should keep the phone prices as low as possible ($200 is a great price point) for both new and returning customers. The main reason is that their exclusivity contract with Apple runs out in a couple years. They need to be getting as many of us to sign up for new 2 year contracts as possible before we have other options.

They are trying to be greedy in the short-term at the expense of their long-term health.
I've been thinking about opening a cafe/coworking place in SF with some friends.

Which of the following would make you most want to work there?

- great coffee

- plentiful power outlets

- comfortable seating

- community (presence of other hackers/entrepreneurs)
First clue from the Twitter feed (@Tengrand_IE8):

"If you are already using IE8, please switch off the Compatibility Mode!"

This is going to be great. /sarcasm
XQueryX is not supposed to be a "new and improved" query language. It's just an alternate representation of the XQuery language. See the very first paragraph of the introduction:

The [XML Query 1.0 Requirements] states that "The XML Query Language MAY have more than one syntax binding. One query language syntax MUST be convenient for humans to read and write. One query language syntax MUST be expressed in XML in a way that reflects the underlying structure of the query."

XQueryX is an XML representation of an XQuery. It was created by mapping the productions of the XQuery grammar into XML productions. The result is not particularly convenient for humans to read and write, but it is easy for programs to parse, and because XQueryX is represented in XML, standard XML tools can be used to create, interpret, or modify queries.
Copy and paste programming comes to consumer reviews
Yeah, I misinterpreted that too. The subject they are intending is the idea of telling your friends, not the entire contest. If only they were that self-deprecating...
Agree with most of what he says, but the author doesn't take into consideration price point. While I may not pay $1 per Time article when there are free alternatives floating around the net, I would definitely fork over a few cents for an article I know that is (or at least has a greater chance of being) well researched, written and edited. This is contingent on a good universal micro payment system, which may or may not arrive.
I usually open classic first, and from there i open in separate tabs new, the front page and my saved discussions to see if theres anything new there. I open a few submissions from all of these pages and go through them. I've gotten very efficient in my HN browsing.
Set up tethering on iPhone 3.0 software
I don't believe the site is run by mozilla
Coffee, power outlets, a price that isn't ridiculous like the current co-working spaces in SF. Maybe some sort of programming quiz to keep out the weird "social media consultant" crowd. Also 24 hour access. Most (all?) coffee shops in SF close too early.
Yeah, i agree. You can outsource transcripts really inexpensively to third world nations.
I think I'll wait for the non-invasive version. My trusty old Logitech will do just fine until they figure out a way to do this without opening a hole in my skull.
I always use Firefox, but today I went to the contest site with IE8 on Vista. The message said, "But you'll never find it using Windows Internet Explorer 7". MS couldn't even detect their own "best ever" browser. Very sad.
Are you kidding me? I live in Manhattan. The shed's bigger than what I live in now.

And in grad school, I lived for a while in a bedroom that measured 81 sq ft.

Bachelors (especially) need almost zero space to actually operate. Hacker-bachelors (hackelors?) just need power, network, and a project (+ atop the standard amenities) to keep themselves pretty satisfied.
oh nethack, how i love thee.
I don't know how it works with other frameworks, but with ActiveSupport in Rails, when I want to say "30 days from now", it's "Time.now + 30.days", and Ruby does the math from days->seconds.

(IIRC, 1.month = 30.days in Rails.)
This is really cool as I'm in the process of working my way through SICP (though painfully but learning), I was wondering if I could really use Scheme for real world usage. This seems to be the most likely answer.
So, the MS contest is performing useragent analysis to generate custom pages based on your browser. If you use Firefox or Chrome, you get a customized jab at your of browser (e.g. "old Firefox" or "Tarnished Chrome".)

...but if you use Opera, they just call it "that browser."
I thought this phoenix was lame - the fox is WAY cooler!

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/newstopics/howaboutthat/5540...
Rosetta is an optional install/download now. You can install it from the DVD under the 'extra tools' installer, or you will be prompted to download it the first time you run an application that is a PPC application.
I'd like someone to compare it to LLVM.
Because it makes some people go, "Ooooh!" when they see it in an ad.
"costs real money year by year for several years but then pays off hugely at a sudden moment, has just the characteristics of an insurance policy with generous policy benefits."

Sounds more like playing the lottery to me. It could work reasonably well provided:1) the small losses don't add up to more than the payoffs, and 2) the payoffs aren't so far a part you go broke waiting for them. By Taleb's own arguments (in Fooled by Randomness, I haven't read The Black Swan), the unexpected events are too unpredictable to count on even that much. Most likely he's just been lucky with the timing.
Wow, grants.gov has $220,000 open for something very similar to what I'm working on.
You can't ignore producing a product. The purpose of financial markets is to provide liquidity, hedging and information to people actually producing products. The financial markets tell us that GM deserves no further capital while Apple does. This increases market returns by allocating resources towards productive investments and away from bad ones.

As for ROI decreasing as more money is invested, so what? As more money is invested in the market, it chases more marginal investments. Thus, total returns / total invested goes down. What's your point?

Incidentally, hedging has a cost. That's not the same as saying the net effect is a loss. By that logic, all trade is a net loss due to transaction costs. Like all trade, hedging exploits comparative advantage. If I have a comparative advantage in making widgets and you have one in risk management, and our comparative advantages exceed transaction costs, we have a net gain.
Adobe on "HTML5"
Daylite Touch for iPhone & Productivity Manager for Mac. Awesome Mobile CRM
I too, really like the idea of a single VM for many languages. Having just watched the Google IO video on V8, I'm starting to think there are some serious advantages to specialized engines.

For example, V8 replaced the regular expression engine that Webkit was using with one that was specially designed to work with Javascript's regex syntax. Maybe you can get similar performance with a generalized engine, but I'm no longer of the mind that one VM for all languages will be the end-all-be-all solution.

http://code.google.com/events/io/sessions/V8BuildingHighPerf...
http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=656536
May be they can have these floating around like in Up movie.
That don't seem to be something I'll write about on a release note... would you?
This guy seems to agree with you: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=662553 ;)

In the big picture I don't know if something like that matters as much as sharing a lot of advanced VM techniques.
This is all highly Hiro Protagonist, don'tcha think?
Stackoverflow Eating Away at Experts-Exchange
Why Oracle wants Solaris
Time for TechCrunch to do another poll. What's more important: Amazon or North Carolina?
Agreed. The subscription model is a weak hack around the historical lack of a good micropayments system.
Never Lose Your Pet With Microchip Technology | TechJaws: Internet Security
Curious: that link worked when you posted it. Now it's dead.
No I would not give my full SSN for submitting just a resume. There is every chance of misusing. Microsoft vendors never asks full MSN for resume submission. Only last 4 digits.
Martin Zwilling wrote back

Thanks for the note. I have added a credit link at the end, and an apology note
as a comment to the blog following yours.
I’ll be more diligent on this in the future

He also added a postscript to the post this afternoon

P.S. I would like to give credit to an October 2005 essay by Paul Graham for a
couple of the ideas above, at http://www.paulgraham.com/ideas.html
Tables Tents: The Promotional Tools
Exactly my problem with this. I would be find buying one of these, but the price needs to be cheaper.
It's probably a good thing that the author is being open about this, but if she really didn't want to "kill a baby," in her words, but she also wanted to "keep [her] options open," let's not pretend there wasn't another choice.
How is /classic different? I've heard it mentioned a couple times, but there wasn't an update on news news. Pros/cons? The submission order looks just a bit different to me.
The biggest problem I have with his "premonition" and the date given of 30 years is that a number of people could have written the exact same prediction in 1979. Deeply-verifiable code is the fusion research of computer science, always x*10 years away.

Personally, I think that the solution to a problem can be no simpler than the problem itself. As programming has gotten more reliable, we've tackled larger problems, and we continue to wish to tackle larger problems. Our problems are growing in size faster than code verification techniques are, so far as I know.
I'd say catching, but not eating away.

There's nothing in this graph that suggests market share is being taken away.
Good. ExpertSexChange.com is just awful, with their "must be registered to see this answer" BS. I always groan aloud whenever I accidentally click on a link in Google search results, since it's just a waste of my time. And, of course, I go right back to searching.
Seems slow (maybe it's busy), and also has the wrong (for me) keybindings, but I really respect the effort of actually doing it!
That's some great spin there. The only good argument they have is that HTML5 will take a while. Compared to HTML5, Flash isn't so much better that it's worth sacrificing openness to use it. We'll have libraries that take care of the cross-browser differences. Sure, there will be problems along the way, but it'll be worth it to kill Flash.
About time... I can't be the only one who thinks Experts-Exchange is lame...
The rankings are based only on votes from accounts that are over a year old: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=607271
They're from the UK, so I should think that you Indianans could make similar blueprints, and produce these for under half the retail price.
Out of all of the suggestions, I liked this one the most. jbr, give me an email to aupajo at gmail and it's all yours if you want it.
$30-50k is a rip. If you are going to live in a shed to save money, you can get a perfectly fine shed for much less. ~$10k

http://www.panelconcepts.com/priceitOR.htm
Nice. I've been lurking quite a bit on rec.games.roguelike.development lately. I'm surprised more roguelike developers haven't started targetting javascript / web browsers. Still a lot of C / C++ and curses.

So, anyway, I've always wanted to make a roguelike so a couple weeks ago I started this:

http://eki.github.com/jquery.roguelike/

I really need to refactor and start documenting the code soon, but I'm trying to get the basic game play done first. Right now the dungeon is 5 randomly generated floors that can be navigated with the arrow keys (or wasd), but no enemies yet.

(Oh, and the canvas stuff won't work in IE)
I always thought the long-term blood glucose levels were the reason that runners traditionally have a spaghetti dinner the night before a big race. Am I confused, or is there just bad science behind this practice?
You might already know this, but I believe the answer is always on the landing page. You just have to scroll all the way down. They put enough crap on the top of the page to make you think you have to login.

The site is still lame though ;)
What a bullshit post.

So why don’t we open source the Flash Player? Well… First of all… I’m not sure what good that would do?

Maybe you need to think about it a little more.

That said, Adobe doesn’t own the rights to every single bit in the Flash Player. We don’t own the rights for the video and graphics codecs for example.

That didn't stop Sun from open-sourcing the rest of the JVM. If they can do it, so can you. If you don't want to open-source Flash, just say so. Don't insult my intelligence by pretending your hands are tied.
Yeah, I thought so too....bye-bye EE, if you don't adapt.
Do the figures for ExpertSexChange include those people who clicked on it from Google then went back to searching again after finding out that you need to pay/login?

If that is the case, ExpertSexChange is in bad shape than what the stat suggests.
decrease in monthly uniques (-2.69%) against continued strong growth (10.70%)? The overall market is growing because there are two (2M visitors/month combined, vs 900k a year ago). But the mix has steadily changed. If that's not market share loss, what is it?
That must be new (like in the past couple of years). I've been trained out of considering it worth scrolling down. I usually click the back button before the page even finishes loading...it's pretty much instant. I look up to the URL bar, realize where it's taking me, I say something nasty and curse their mothers, and click the back button. The whole process takes about a second.

Now that you mention it, I seem to recall reading about Google cracking down on that kind of thing, and sites like Experts Exchange changing in order to keep their ranking.

So, Google may forgive them, but my hatred diminishes more slowly.

In other words, "may they rot in hell, or at least decline in popularity until they can't even pay the bills for their servers".
So not true. The Community Edition is completely free and we use it at my company.

What do you not get with the CE? No Outlook connector, no Apple iSync plugin, no mobile BES plugin, and no ability to delegate the administration of specific domains to particular users. But for a plug-and-play solution, it's awesome. POP3, IMAP, LDAP, CalDav (including Free/Busy times extensions) work flawlessly. Uses Postfix for the SMTP so you can do lots of tricks behind the scene if necessary. Administration is a breeeze. My company migrated to Zimbra from our home-grown Qmail/CourierIMAP solution, and it's one of the best IT Infrastructure decisions we've ever made.
Italic is more annoying/difficult/straining to read. Seriously. You know how they say hackers don't think about user experience?
it's truly lame, but I always have to laugh when I hit CTRL + END on their question-pages
Yeah, the prices are hard to justify. I don't have $300 or $400 to spend every month on top of rent money. All the co-working spaces I've visited here seem like nice places to work, each with its own individual culture and network, but the price tag is unfeasible for unfunded bootstrappers.
"Our temperaments are quite hard-wired in our brains"

Yeah, but the wiring can be changed. I used to be introverted; now I'm quite extroverted. I slowly changed.
Partitioning with Python
Indeed, what's so curious about this article is that Starbucks was the poster child for selling the experience versus the coffee, and has been used in many case studies to demonstrate exactly that point.
I agree that it might be a while before the standard is final. And it will be even longer until all the non-HTML5 browsers are gone. But a decade? C'mon. All 5 major browsers should have a released browser with at least a few HTML 5 capabilities by the end of the year.

If your audience is targeted to newer browsers or if you're using a framework that can degrade gracefully, it shouldn't be long until you can start using this stuff on real sites. Some pretty popular sites (gmail) are already using this stuff.
and prior to that they posted the message "Follow me and join the IE8 Treaure Hunt!"

Can they not even spell Treasure correctly?
Sass & Less
If you enable the "Develop" menu on the Safari 4 options you can change the user agent to IE8...
>Why should a distant seller have an 8+% cost advantage over local sellers?

States don't have to have an 8+% sales tax. Some states (at least Oregon last time I checked) don't have any sales tax. There are other ways to collect taxes, which, in addition to not punishing local retailers, are less regressive.
I imagine that they hope the negative publicity will get NC to change it's mind without having to resort to legal means.
Yeah, from the post title here and the opening of the article, I thought this going to be alternative housing on a budget, but instead it was more vanity guest house for the stuffwhitepeoplelike.com set.
Socialism is where you take my work whether you pay me or not and give it freely to everybody else.
I didn't know that was a concern, thanks for bringing it to my attention.
I wasn't looking for a lecture, only an answer.

An "Executive Summary" at the beginning would have saved time for many readers, I believe.
I think the fundamental problem here is that we, as true hackers, place too much emphases on the importance of openness. I'd argue that, for the average developer, strong design tools and the promise of cross-browser consistency is well worth sacrificing openness.
That might turn out to be a feature - more carbon in the winter and less in the summer could = smoothing out seasonal variation, if my wild speculation is correct.

At any rate, I don't see how you could turn a desert or a field into a high biomass forest without sucking up lots of CO2. Of course, once it's full-grown it will be in equilibrium, losing carbon as fast as it gains it.
If you like this subject check out the book "The Lever of Riches" which is an in-depth study of the issue:

http://www.amazon.com/Lever-Riches-Technological-Creativity-...
Yahoo Gallery to be shutdown on July 14th
First, it's more PC to have their North Carolina members complain about it which might stop it from passing.

After that, it's probably cheaper to get someone else to do it for them.

Only if the losses were substantial, or too many other states started following the lead (which could then make the losses substantial) would Amazon bother.

Odds are it's not cost effective for them.
Not only did we build a whole 1600 f^2 house for only $168k here in DC, there were severe limitations to how big, or how small you could make your house just about everywhere we looked. There were no lots available where local government would allow less than 1000 f^2.
I see what you're saying, but I wasn't coming at it from a Stallmanesque openness-for-openness's-sake angle. Openness is also important as a guarantee, particularly in this case. For example, and this might sound like something RMS would say, we should be able to display Web content on some new device, without depending on Adobe to develop and maintain support for a version of Flash Player for that device.

Why should the "open web" depend on Adobe or any one company to do something you need?
I am pretty happy with this news. I am sick of experts-exchange. When u searched something you got a link of exchange-experts, but technically you got nothing because u need to login or register or pay or something else to see the content.
Any idea if you can actually get an iPhone app published this way? Usually the code generated from one of these high->low level compilers is tough to read and nearly impossible to understand. If it hasn't already done so, I imagine that Apple might bar submissions with obfuscated code[1], and it can be argued that the resulting code produced by the Scheme to C compilation is obfuscated and therefore ineligible for App Store inclusion.

[1] I was operating under the assumption that the source, not a binary, was provided to Apple. I stand corrected.
Okay. I'll play along as long as this isn't getting emotional.

What makes it OK for you to hijack Iranian government websites based on hearsay you read on the internet, but makes it bad for the Chinese to hijack the Dalai Lama's computers?

Perhaps you missed the several times that I said I did not make that choice. Let me be clearer: I do not think that is right for me to do in this case, and I do not support doing it.

What do you mean by "right"? The point I was making is that you have to make the choice. Life is something you participate in. You have an obligation to make the choice. Quite frankly I don't care which one you pick. I chose not to support hacking their sites. You may choose otherwise. Or not. Instead of just asking "what makes it OK?" perhaps the better question is "How is this different from X for me?" It's your job to figure out your own rules; not go around saying the problem is insolvable. That's whacked. Nobody is looking for a universal solution. What's required is a personal choice. Leave ultimate truth to the philosophers.