skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
@yungchin - but teaching IS part of Seth's job, he gets paid to speak and to do consulting, just because the job title is different, doesn't necessarily mean aspects of the jobs are any different.

As for some textbooks being out of date, that is really a matter of context. For example, textbooks on marketing or other such fields that move fast there are definite advantages to having material that is up to date.

However, let's look at the flipside, textbooks on renaissance period art. There really isn't much that hasn't already been written on the subject, so there really is little point in having "up to date" materials when there are probably many definitive works on the subject.

I agree that there's little point in paying inordinate amounts for out of date text books that are assigned to you - but that being said, suggesting that those same people who write these books should distribute the same materials for free is also preposterous, given Seth himself doesn't do it.

If Seth gave away his books and focussed on making money from his speaking/workshop/consulting gigs, sure - I wouldn't have batted an eyelid, but the fact is he doesn't, so that part of his argument reeks of hypocrisy.
If I thought the point of the article was crash speculation, I wouldn't have posted it.

Instead to me the point was the difference in what the pilots thought of the design of the airplane and how the airplane was actually designed.

That's an important point. I'm sorry he used this crash to make it, but I think it deserves to be discussed, especially with fly-by-wire (but really with any FAA-approved airframe)
I decided to try switching from Google to Bing for a week today. I'm calling it my "Bing Week".

http://twitter.com/jgrahamc/status/2176900329
The article is also available on Wired’s own site: http://www.wired.com/wired/archive/7.11/cheyenne.html
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Thanks a ton. I'll make sure I pick up Kimball's Data Warehouse Toolkit and check out intelligententerprise.com. The four that pop out most from your post are Pentaho, MonetDB, Infobright, and schema-driven ETL, so I'll start my search there. Thanks once again for the help!
Yes, the plumbing takes care of that for you. Oracle does similar tricks if you run it on NUMA hardware.
It's a good idea to leave out the &Accelerator keys anyway, as there isn't much gain in them. I try the shift the option and the command key while looking at menu in every app I use. Sometimes something interesting happens ... At least in most of the apps I pay for. And there are ways to overcome such shortcuts with other shortcuts, as long as the app is scriptable and you have a keyboard enhancer. Rumors has it that there are many scripts at places like macscripter.net and others with scripts to start with.
If it nags you that much ... I lift my fingers ... :-)
Some of the comments here are about the excessive cost of ebook readers, or the fragility of the devices. But typical college textbooks cost US$100 or more. At that rate, a new EeePC costs 2.5 textbooks, and an OLPC XO would costs even less if they were available for sale. Even if elementary and high school textbooks cost less (down to US$50 maybe? They're still all-glossy four-color-printed quarto-sized hardcovers sewn in signatures, aren't they?) you could afford to buy a new netbook per year per student — assuming you can't make do with a used two-year-old smartphone.

That's assuming, of course, that the textbook costs are related to printing the things, not writing them or extracting rents from schools.
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I just finished my 'Bing Day' and it's been awesome. I'm going to keep trying it for a while, but keeping Google in the shortcut bar due to habit.
I think this is the worst about owning a Mac. The Open Source Anarchy is very well established on the Mac platform. To many repositories and sometimes forks from repositories which aren't totally compatible with the repository it once came from and this sometimes results in configuration nightmares. Both with latex and a forked version of Vim for my part. I think Apple really should make some guidelines in this area. Or that the different repositories should sit down together and agree over some standards. Installing is one thing but 6 months later when you need to overhaul your configuration ...
Agreed. I don't see how this article serves anyone's interests other than LA Times traffic numbers.

It offers nothing but further rampant speculation on top of the usual news cycle on airline crashes. Worse, it offers zero closure to the families of the crash victims nor relief to the air crews and passengers of the 100s Airbus A330s now flying on a daily basis.

At least it's labeled as "opinion" and the author clearly demarcates this line of reasoning as pure speculation. That's far more disclosure than most "professional" journalists do these days.
This article got trashed yesterday. For obvious reasons. My comment yesterday still applies:

"I bet Cnet and the like just have MadLibs-like templates for "journalism" like this. "Does ___ have ___ running scared"?"
Ironically, the Founders didn't expect a role for political parties and most were concerned with their rise.

"There is an opinion that parties in free countries are useful checks upon the Administration of the Government, and serve to keep alive the Spirit of Liberty. This within certain limits is probably true--and in Governments of a Monarchical cast, Patriotism may look with indulgence, if not with favour, upon the spirit of party. But in those of the popular character, in Governments purely elective, it is a spirit not to be encouraged. From their natural tendency, it is certain there will always be enough of that spirit for every salutary purpose--and there being constant danger of excess, the effort ought to be, by force of public opinion, to mitigate and assuage it. A fire not to be quenched; it demands a uniform vigilance to prevent its bursting into a flame, lest instead of warming, it should consume."

GEORGE WASHINGTON, Farewell Address to the people of the United States, Sep. 17, 1796
According to the notes from a hearing held in February 2008, the average cost for textbooks in the State University of New York system (SUNY) is $900 per year. If we are conservative and say that $300 of those $900 dollars are for things that cannot be easily replaced (lab books, workbooks, CDs, unique books, etc.) that still amounts to $2400 over the course of four years that could be saved if the text books were made Open Source. For that price the student could buy a laptop capable of everything they'd need over four years at school (a Macbook with bumped up memory and Apple Care protection plan is around $1200 after the student discount, Dell would likely be less for a comparable configuration) and a Kindle and still have money left over for beer.
Link to SUNY Investigation: http://www.suny.edu/files/sunynewsfiles/txt/TextbooksTestimo...
From the concluding paragraph:

This is pure -- and premature -- speculation. But it is not speculative to observe that some vertical fins are weaker than they should be, and that this is because of the regulations that govern how airplanes are built. The FAA, together with its international counterparts, should amend certification requirements for future aircraft to restore to the maneuvering speed the safety status that pilots always believed it had. The rules that govern the structural integrity of airliners should not include asterisks.

Peter Garrison has a long history of writing and editing aviation pieces. He's written a fair number of accident reports for the aviation community. He understands the nature of premature speculation. He made the call that this issue is important enough to use the crash as a vehicle to bring up.

I agree.

The purpose is not to speculate on the crash, provide closure to the crash victims or relief to the air crews. The purpose is to bring up a regulatory issue that needs further attention. In this case, I think it's a worthwhile cause. In 99% of the other stories, I did not. In fact, I blogged about how terrible it was to use a crash just to drive traffic. http://www.whattofix.com/blog/archives/2009/06/funeral-home-...
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Even calling it a "swindle" is an example of this phenomenon. Why does it necessarily have to be "the political elite"/"the ruling class" versus "the disenfranchised populous"?

I'm sure a huge number of politicians are very frustrated by many of the policies of their party and would like to diverge from them to a greater or lesser extent. They are constrained too.

Why can we not see this as an emergent phenomenon of a complex system, with little overall direction?
I found this article quite compelling:
http://selfawaresystems.files.wordpress.com/2008/01/ai_drive...

Imagine you do have an AI with a certain goal. It seems obvious that:

It will resist being switched off (because if switched off it cannot fulful its goal).

It will try, and likely succeed, in becoming more powerful (to better satisfy its goal).

It will not want to change its goal (because it sees that changing its goal means its current goal, i.e. the one currently motivating it, will go unfulfilled).
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The author seems to blame the two-party system and the class divide between politicians and voters for the fact that nobody is shrinking the size of the government.

I have a much simpler explanation for this phenomenon: no substantial body of voters want smaller government.

The clique of libertarians who actually believe in "smaller government" and not simply "government taking less of my money in taxes and spending less on the things that I personally don't like" is substantial on the Web and among the intelligentsia, but not so much in the voting booth. Look at how poorly Ron Paul did in the Republican primaries.
So why exactly is the OS layer becoming irrelevant? Is this that idea that everything in technology will henceforth occur in a Web Browser ... perhaps in some HTML4 compatibility mode?
I think the thing that needs to be realised is that online collaboration is not merely the same as file sharing - particularly in the construction industry.

It's only at certain small parts of the overall construction process (from design through construction and then commissioning) that "collaboration" can be reduced to distributing files: typically where the files in question are "Issued for Construction" or "Issued for Review" - the formal gates in the process.

The rest of the time, as the documents are developed, and interpreted, collaboration (particularly in an online sense) means that additional information needs to be conveyed with the drawings to provide context and/or revision without the formal issue of a new revision of a drawing or document, or even a redline markup.

Some examples of these sorts of situations:
- Where as-built changes (i.e. where changes have been made on site from the "approved" drawings) need to be incorporated into drawings which are then handed over with the completed project
- When a drawing needs to be clarified between site and the design office.
- Where a contractual clause needs to be varied on a subcontract, because both parties agree it might be mutually beneficial to do so.
- Where a initial draft of a drawing needs to accept the input from multiple engineering disciplines in order to produce a final drawing.

These situations - which are, by far, the most common type of situations in construction - are ones where the transfer of documents is insufficient to communicate the context and changes which another person needs to understand to provide input. These are the situations where email comes into its own on the construction project - particularly if done through a document control system so the audit trail is established.

I think the future of construction collaboration will look a lot more like Google Wave than DropBox. Until then, email will hold an important role in any construction project - despite it being a shitty medium to share controlled documents, but because it can surround those documents with further information and context in the easiest way possible.
I wish safari would allow choice when it comes to search engines. Even the windows version of safari allows a yahoo option.
The same thing happens between the armies of nations. Nation A's army attacks the civilians and army of Nation B; Nation B's army attacks the civilians and army of Nation A. Even though they're fighting each other, the civilians on both sides are very similar to each other, and the war makes them all worse off through taxation and slaughter.

The armies are also very similar to each other, in values and in training, and very different from the civilian population. In fact, they probably trained together in joint exercises or at WHISC before the war.

If you slice the identities one way, the attacks by the armies on the civilians show that the armies are dangerous to the civilians, and therefore civilians should endeavor to eliminate armies, as did the people of the United States in the American Revolution, and as did the people of Costa Rica during the previous century. But of course the more common way to look at it is that the attacks by Nation A show the great necessity for the civilians of Nation B to support the army of Nation B, in order to deter and defend against attacks from Nation A, and vice versa.

So armies, as a class, whip up support for themselves by attacking and killing the civilians whose support they depend on.

And so today in Israel and Palestine, each nation has strong popular support for organized violence against civilians on the other side.

Of course, historically the connection between armies and governments is extremely close.

Is there a way out? Are the Costa Ricans in imminent danger of invasion due to their lack of armed forces? Having armed forces didn't seem to help the Salvadorans, the Guatemalans, or the Nicaraguans when the US funded terrorist campaigns against their people, didn't help the Panamanians or the Granadans when the US decided to invade them, and didn't help Guatemala when the United Fruit Company organized a coup. In fact, in most of those cases, the army acted against its own people.

But would Honduras have avoided the Football War if they had had no army? Or would they now be a province of El Salvador? Would Cuba be a territory of the US, like Puerto Rico? (And would Cubans be better off if they were?)
No. I think at most, probably when Eric Schmidt changes channels on his enormous HD television he is mildly annoyed at the awful mind-numbing commericals Microsoft's "marketing" team has come up with Bing. I don't remember where I first saw it but I think "But It's Not Google" captures it pretty well.
For instance, the exclusive rights to the television broadcast spectrum are sold without auction for $100,000 per year to NBC, CBS, and ABC

Source please. I don't believe you.
But do you think CNet is as bad as Network World?
Not to mention their idiotic "I'm a pissy" adverts.
To reddit...
Upvoted in the hope it gets killed (again) quicker.
There's no reason to think that all adaptations are beneficial. Interesting though.
I love Python, but I keep asking myself if this is a good idea. There is no such thing as a one-size-fits-all language.
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Heh, someone has never played competitive sports with weight classes before.

He wasn't referring to the standard process of cutting weight and rehydrating after the weigh-in - he was referring to the fact that Ferriss won a kickboxing championship without actually doing any kickboxing, but rather exploiting a bit of a loophole in the rules that said your opponents forfeit if they fall out of the ring.

The way he won it is tainted with significant doucheitude, and I cannot imagine anyone I respect doing it. On top of that, how could you feel any pride whatsoever having won the title in such a way?

It seems like everything the guy writes should be suffixed with "but not really": "How to Gain 30lbs of muscle in a month (but not really)", "How to Learn a Language in 3 Weeks (but not really)", "How to Win the Chinese Kickboxing Championship (but not really)."
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One way to have a 4 hour work week is to sell a self help book like 4 hour work week and watching the suckers dig in while you reap the benefits.

Success! At least one person has done it so you know it works.

As a criticism I've seen at least one person who got to the top by being honest. Just don't follow every rule to the letter till it gives you a dissadvantage.
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Yes.

CNET also has a lot of articles that the headlines are purely questions.
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I don't think it is that kind of a technical problem. These are like fundamental issues in human interaction. I don't think you can solve this problem by coming up with a clever online community or interesting way of visualizing data.
The focus on "New!" Isn't all bad. It can mean something innocuous like "Here's something you probably haven't seen before..."

Of course, this is bound to degenerate into behaviour of hunting for scoops, in a hope to discover a new trend before it gets popular...
"the underlying "it's safer in a Boeing" bias."

Indeed. I saw a documentary on Flight 587 a while ago, and seem to distinctly remember that both Airbus and Boeing planes suffer from this "rudder reversal" issue.
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But isn't the entire premise of representative democracy is that you can have highly emotional factions and yet still have a productive conversation given the appropriate framework? Aren't there lots of examples of teams with highly divergent personalities and opinions that still manage to perform? In fact, aren't those some of the highest performing teams?

In Hollywood there's a concept called "creative tension". You can look at it as meaning "he's a jerk to work with" but there's a deeper meaning: from wildly divergent creative styles comes the best product. As long as you can set up the framework for productivity.
We have a Blue Gene at Argonne, it's not SSI. It is however not designed for embarrasingly parallel workloads, you use libraries like MPI to run tightly coupled message passing applications (which are very sensitive to latency). You can, and people have, run many-task type applications too.
For those that can't be bothered going through the photo slideshow, here they are:

Engineer

Nurse

Skilled Trades

Teacher

Sales Representative

Technician

Truck Driver

Information Technology Staff

Laborer

Machinist or Machine Operator
the positions are hard to fill because employers refuse to raise wages to a level that attracts the proper number of applicants. SXD
I like how the article skims over the fact that teachers are underpaid.
Microsoft eXtreme Computing group takes aim at exascale calculations
people don't care about size (witness pressure to build ever larger netbooks) people just want a cheap device that meets their basic computing needs.

this happens all the time. products bloat in features and price, creating a market for devices that fulfill basic needs at a cheap price.

I see the success of netbooks in the same vein as the success of mint.com and the flip camcorder.
So it seems to me that friction is a pretty dicey thing to measure. It seems that friction is really a property of each of the two surfaces. For example, if we are measuring the friction between fingers and a smooth surface, you would notice that fingerprints reduce the friction. But what about the hand gripping a tree branch? Might not the friction be increased in that sort of surface-to-surface contact? Or hanging onto a hunk of the fur of a running buffalo for dear life?

Their approach seems to imply relatively smooth surfaces: "Because there are all the gaps between the fingerprints, what they do is reduce the contact area with the surface"

I am not seeing any reference to the fractal nature of surface-to-surface contact here.
This is an interesting data point, however one key factor in repeating positive affirmations is the repetition.

I'm not sure you can discredit the idea with a one-time test like this. It's kind of like getting a bunch of people to do push-ups once, and trying to draw some conclusion about strength training.
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this helps explain the predominance of constant new solutions for solved problems. novel trumps tried and proven.
In the UK we often hear of nurses and firemen being underpaid, and regardless of the inherent virtue of those jobs (such as it is) the fact is, both are oversubscribed.

The only true sign a job is underpaid is that it's impossible to recruit anyone to do it.
You're basing this on what? I'll assume "romantic fantasy" since private school teachers, hired through the free market, evidently get paid less (though the data is murky).
I can't imagine any possible awkward conversations from speaking Japanese-girlfriend
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Intelligent design proponents typically point at the fingerprint as something evolution doesn't well explain and proof of ID. The Muslim's Quran speaks of the fingerprint as a miracle of God's creation, pointing out the attention to the finest details as proof of God's capabilities.
My bad. Sorry for the submission.
Have you tried Inquisitor?

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even at the right wages there is likely little incentive to continue working in these fields. employers need to do a better job of shielding all the BS out of the system and creating a welcoming environment.
Oh why did you guys link to this, do you know how many hours I'm going to loose now?
And quite right too - if artists have to keep give their artwork away for free to get exposure (which is what they're usually told is the main benefit of giving their work away for free), who's ever going to pay them?
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And along the same line, if Google can't afford to pay them, then who can?
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Pity the author doesn't know the difference between 'i.e.' and 'e.g.'
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