skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
It's a normal threat in business, but when customers are paying for products or services, the old companies still have some movement. If Dell is charging $1,000 for a computer and another company comes along with a way better computer for the same $1,000, Dell can drop the price to $500. Then the consumer has to decide if the better computer is worth more money, and you can bet that Dell will keep a lot of customers by doing that. But if Dell is giving away that computer for free, and another company comes along with a better (define "better" however you want) computer that is also free, they're screwed.

The computer example is obviously not a realistic example, but you can apply it to any market where people are already paying for something instead of getting it for free.
That is, unless your Facebook "friends" are actual friends with whom you have many channels of communication...it just seems tacky and manipulative to me.
I think there is the impression that if your service is free, then no one can undercut you so the cheaper competitor has been eliminated.

But that has made freemium companies feel safe. Mark's point is that you still have competition on other fronts besides price: interestingness, marketing, etc.
I had my account "deleted" over two years ago. I went through the email back and forth with the customer service representative who confirmed my acount was deleted. Unfortunately I just received a legitimate friend request from a college friend. Looks like it wasn't deleted after all.
The Best Kids’ Books Ever -- Summer Break and IQ
You can send friend requests directly to email addresses. My middle school brother just found me on Facebook that way.
I refreshed the deactivate page, and it doesn't seem to be completely random, but it also isn't 100% the same every time. It seems to pick between the same 20 or so friends for me.

Another thing that's interesting is that the deactivate option is exactly where it should be, rather than buried many levels deep in menus. I tried to remove my classmates.com account the other day, and it was a mess.
My favorite method of getting rid of possesions is just sell the 10% you use the least. Then repeat on the remaining stuff. The first iteration is pretty easy. Once you actually experience how little you miss the items the 2nd, 3rd, 4th etc iterations come naturally.
Is Interaction Design a dead-end job?
All of these questions could be categorized as testing "critical thinking". Should we really find it all that surprising that a majority of people lack such skills when a large number of jobs (dare I say most) only require skills along the lines of rote memorization of a finite amount of information. I find it scary how few people lack the capacity for independent thought. They just wait for others to tell them what to do and then follow unquestioningly.
Perhaps the people who do the "best research" in compilers/languages simply suck at marketing.

Also, and I know this might be a heretical thing to say... maybe the ideas just aren't that good.
We can try it ourselves. Just log in and go to http://www.facebook.com/deactivate.php

The 5 that show up for me are people I recently friended (unfortunately all dudes)
There is a long-standing anarchist critique of industrial society, and both the Unabomber and Bob Black are part of that tradition. The Unabomber just never got the memo that "we tried bombing our way into anarchy back in the nineteenth century and it didn't work out so well".
How high school students start thinking about code
The Edwardian sentimentalist strikes again. It takes a strange view of history indeed to suppose that strapping a school bus onto a great big sack of hydrogen is somehow a regal and wonderful technology of the past that we should all pine for, wondering where we went wrong with that "aeroplane" nonsense.

Cool photos though...
It's not a trend so much as it is a redefinition of intelligence. When you get older, you realize that somebody can be bright/wise/funny despite being fairly stupid in so-called "quantitative" terms. Somebody who can't read and isn't very logical can still accumulate common sense, mature with age, and become a better person in a lot of ways. So while people are stupider under the strict sense of "Lots of people can't do very simplistic things", they're brighter than the rote negativism would let on.

Put another way, I've got a friend who's a poet and who's training to be a nurse who insists Sarah Palin was a brilliant politician maligned by the liberal media. Online it's fun to suggest that a single stupid thought invalidates a person's entire existence, but - both fortunately and unfortunately - it's possible to think stupid things and still be a smart person, and vice versa.

Isaac Asimov, one of the most brilliant men I've had the pleasure of reading, wrote a short article on this and on the fallibility of lots of intelligence measures. You can find it here: http://www.wanderings.net/notebook/Main/WhatIsIntelligenceAn...
> But that has made freemium companies feel safe

I did not realize that there was this special feeling of safety with freemium services I guess... why would anyone feel safe from competitors? In any business you have a revenue model, someone can usually copy that and compete on all the other factors... no matter if your product's price (something very different than the revenue model) is zero or non-zero.

Freemium or purely-advertising-based companies should even worry about competitors that release for pay services, price is not the be all and end all of why a customer engages. And since we're strictly talking about "freemium," that implies a for-pay option. The new competitor could be a for-pay-only service but have an excellent advertising campaign (or excellent product + the word of mouth that it will generate) that simply leads more paying customers to the buy button.
I just tried this, and for me at went as far as selecting pictures that have both me and the other person in them. Really trying hard for that personal touch.
Having ability to learn and having learned are quite obviously different. For example, I was good at languages in school, and could easily have gone on to a language degree at a good university, but decided to do law instead. 3 years later and my French is very out of practice. It is (unfortunately) easy to have a talent for something and fail to cultivate it.
It appears to be completely random. I got entirely different selections on two separate clicks.
From what I understand, Ritalin is prescribed precisely because it has much less of that 'euphoria' than, say, Dexedrine. In my completely subjective experience, Ritalin causes less 'euphoria' than caffeine. Granted, I think Caffeine, especially the first sip after going several days without, feels quite good. But, if I am on vacation; I mean, real vacation where I am not working on anything, I don't take the Ritalin. I feel better without it, if I'm not trying to do something.

It is very important, if you do use psychoactive drugs, to have some sort of external metric. When I was undergoing various ADD treatments, I had my boss evaluate me every week. I found that what I was doing before (that is, using unusually large amounts of caffeine) was not better than baseline me.
Manipulative? Yes. Tacky? No.

They're reminding you that you have friends on Facebook. Tacky would be them telling your friends to convince you not to abandon your account.
For me (tried with a few refreshes to get multiple samples), it seems to show pictures of people who I have recently exchanged messages (rather than wall posts, or just about any other form of communication) with.
I do understand them, I grew up among them.
He did bring up one valid point during the interview to that point. The engineers/etc they know are based in the Valley, so if you want someone who you can have face to face time with on a semi-regular basis, so they can't help you if you don't deal in the area with their pool of people.
...or, praise them for working hard in a subject where they aren't talented enough to whip through the homework in ten minutes. If the kid is razor-sharp in math but merely above-average in reading, then their efforts in reading are the ones that particularly need encouragement.
Oh wow - I love it. I love it both for the angle and I thought the writing was great.
I guess provigil/modafinil is too new to be mentioned in this old article?
Freenet fails to deliver on what it promises. Your peers can identify you as the origin of inserts and requests with a high probability. If you use Frost you are particularly vulnerable.
You can't see the small print on the deactivation screen in the photo, but here it is:

Note: Even after you deactivate, your friends can still invite you to events, tag you in photos, or ask you to join groups. If you opt out, you will NOT receive these email invitations and notifications from your friends.

It's a bit unclear in what sense your account is actually deactivated.
> How does industry make us smarter?

Smarter is the wrong word, more knowledgeable would be more appropriate. Pre-industrial was just a way of calling them ignorant by our standards. I wasn't actually referring to industry so much as their lack of modern science. I really should have said bronze age or iron age men.

> And why judge people by "modern standards?" Doesn't that just beg the question?

Because they're modern people. They have access to vastly more information about the world than someone 2000 years ago did and to ignore all that is stupid. To base your life around the writing of bronze age hippies who probably didn't realize they were tripping on ergot and not actually talking to God is sad.
I just did some testing by refreshing the "http://www.facebook.com/deactivate.php page and I always got two same friends. Next I realized that it was displaying a picture where both of us were tagged. I had untagged myself from a bunch of other albums, so the other 3 friends picked were pretty much random.

So, its definitely giving high priority if you both are tagged in the same picture irrespective of the fact if you are really good friends with them or not. One of the friend tagged in a pic with me was added about 4-5 months ago, whereas my other friend I have know her since 2001, but on facebook since 2004/2005. 70% of my friends added are from the 2004 - 2007 time period.
"Jeff Atwood is wrong on the Internet", film at 11. Why is this news?
Again, how do you know you have a talent for something unless you actually do it?

Put another way, how do you know your abilities were actually above average if you didn't follow through on them?
that there's some paranoia you got
As one of the ten million folks trying to grow their own garden this year for the first time, I can attest to the difficulties that exist. Pests are the number one problem I am having, followed by soil conditions and water. I am not giving up, but I think it is going to take me several years to figure out which crops I can grow well, and which pesticides to use. It's a fun experience though for me and my kids.
Ten people and computers in commerce: Spreadsheet Way of Knowledge
"Aging and Death are Good and Needed" is Still the Expected Opinion
> Many such authors think "object oriented" or other fancy chinese words like polymorphism mean something which it doesn't, really.

I don't know that 'polymorphism' is a 'fancy chinese word' or really just an attempt to bridge a definition which had already existed for a hundred years which had a common contextual meaning.

The number of fallacies and blind ignorance in this post is absolutely astonishing.
[off-topic, nitpick] To anyone who plans on writing a blog post with graphs: please differentiate data sets with actual colors as opposed to closely related shades of blue.
Along the lines of the other person who responded, norting pills is just a stupid drug culture thing. If you want the pill to come on faster, break it into pieces or chew it. The drug is not stronger intranasally, it just comes on faster and it's bad for your mucous membranes.
You mean you can't connect a keyboard to a USB port?! Wow! I would understand that game publishers would not invest money targeting keyboard users when there is no keyboard bundled, but not supporting keyboards and mice when it would make perfect sense to support them in addition to game controllers seems pretty dumb.
7th grade, TI-BASIC. That's what got it started for me. The book that came with the TI-83 had a little chapter on the built-in language and I ran with it. No student with any knowledge of algebra and symbolic mathematics should be making these errors (shown in the article) with named arguments though...that's just weird. Who sees "0 = x" in class?
It's interesting to read that. I've always found it hard to explain programming language problems, because I internalized so many conventions so long ago. It can be a challenge to plumb your memory and list all the interesting bits.
it runs on merb actually.
It's tacky because the psychology they're attempting is disingenuous. It attempts to form an association between their self-serving message and your friends' pictures.
I was a volunteer tutor for a 5th grader for few months. He had the reading ability supposedly of about a 3rd grader I was told. He could pretty much read any word, but we'd crack a book, he'd point at the word, say it, then continue to the next word. Punctuation meant nothing. He could have probably done it for days. Part of my job was to stop him and ask him questions about what was going on. Blank stares. I moved and couldn't tutor him any longer, but I don't think I helped, which was frustrating. The thing is, he had been in the program for years. And was undoubtedly going to passed to 6th grade, and probably won't break out of illiteracy without an intensive program.
Point being, I don't think his situation is all that unique.
In algebra class, the order doesn't matter, because you're never doing assignment operations, you're just figuring out equality.

= vs == strikes again.
My hypothesis is that the tail broke off due to over-speed, which would cause a rapid nose-dive. (I think) also the tail contains the radio antennae.
> What is not obvious, and what there is no evidence for, is that these states are the same as what is achieved on stimulants. It is my own experience that they are very distinctly different

Who cares? Really? People use these drugs because they give you super focus, both the feeling, and the reality. You're too concerned about the mechanism rather than the effect.

> The very fact that they are achieved in humans without use of stimulants should be a strong indication that the stimulants do not recreate the same effect.

That makes no sense at all. Sleep is natural, it doesn't follow that any pill which also induces sleep is not doing it via the same mechanism. In fact, it's an indication of nothing, either way.

> Lack of focus is not due to deficiency of Ritalin.

No one claimed it was. You're ignoring the desire for superhuman focus. People take these when they want more focus than is natural.

> That people believe (as you do) that these drugs merely enhance existing brain function is a sign that people really aren't aware of what they are doing.

That people such as you are so strongly opposed is a sign that you're not objective about the issue and you assume others don't know the risks and if you could just educate them they'd change their behavior; you'd be wrong.

People willingly take far worse and far less safe drugs off the street just to get high. Those who use prescription drugs like Ritalin off label to enhance work or study performance are not the people you need to be concerned with. Drug use is not drug abuse.
I do not always agree with Stephen Fry but find him to be one of the most thoughtful commentators around on almost any subject, full of sharp insights and with a writing and speaking style graced by innumerable felicities.

A most worthy follower of P.G. Wodehouse.

He even makes poetry interesting ("An Ode Less Travelled" is his quite fascinating book on this otherwise often dull subject).

Anyone wanting to develop strong skills in communication would do well to study his style closely.

This piece is very long, and even rambling, but a joy to read from the standpoint of style alone.
JSON: What It Is, How It Works, and How to Use It
While I'm not sure I can disagree with the conclusion, I disagree with the arguments leading up to it. Some of the most interesting progress I see today is occurring in the field of computer vision, and the reason why it is occurring today and not 15 years ago is because 15 years ago, you had a Pentium/MMX 133 with 16 MB of RAM. All of the algorithms that today run in just-barely-real time, or run in batch mode on a timeframe that a single grad student can do many compile-run-analyze-try something else cycles on per day, would have taken weeks on that hardware.

I think general AI will see some stuff like this too, algorithms that could have been conceived of 20, 30, 40 years ago but couldn't be feasibly run on even a supercomputer of the time, that run fairly comfortably in a modern <$1000 laptop at Best Buy. (And of course runs even better in a dedicated server performance box; my point is that even low-grade consumer hardware is pretty damn amazing nowadays.)

When I took a grad-level evolutionary computation course about eight years ago, one of the two professors related a story about one of his earliest runs of an evolutionary algorithm. He literally carried around a stack of punchcards as he moved between several schools, and set up the computation so that he could run it for a few hours as there was time, then suspend it again. It literally took him years. This same computation of course runs in a few seconds on something as powerful as an iPhone. (Which isn't too dissimilar in spec from the laptop I used in that class, an 800 MHz Duron PoC (even at the time, admittedly) which was proud to have 256MB of RAM, IIRC.)

It's not just the raw speed of the algorithms, it's the speed of the analysis loop. Where computation time once dominated the research of even the best minds, soon the best minds of our generation will actually be able to get feedback about their AI explorations on reasonable time scales. The fat lady has not sung yet.

(This still explains a lot in the non-AI cases too. It took a while before garbage collection was not a big performance hit, then it took a while longer for popular languages to pick it up. It was never forgotten, it's just that there is often a larger gap between "a good idea" and "a good implementation" than ideas-people realize. Clearly, UNIX is old and out-of-date, but creating an entire ecosystem that is clearly superior and also ready to go is not something you hand to a grad student to write a thesis on. And so on.)
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Test keyword combos to see where your site ranks.
I noticed this the other day on my iPhone. Love it. It works great!
While true, in algebra x=0 and 0=x are equivalent, the convention that the teachers teach is to have the dependent variable on the left.
some quack parental theory that leaves them in rehab for the rest of their lives

You're doing fine. Try to keep in mind that the notion that minor differences in parental style can send your kids into rehab for life is, itself, the quackiest of quack parental theories.
I have a rfid chip in my wrist. One of my friends owns a chain a piercing shops and offered it to me for free so I got it done.

I unfortunately haven't had time to build anything to make use of it though so it's been of little use to me except as a conversation starter but he has his set to unlock his apartment door.

Range isn't huge a couple inches is pushing it so I'm not really worried about tracking me(I don't rub my wrist against every rfid receiver I come across). Besides with facial recognition available today if someone wants to track me around a city they would do a lot better using security cameras than trying to install rfid receivers everywhere.
I was just saying the same thing in the "IE is dying" thread. I suspect "shades of blue" is the default setting in whatever graph program everyone is using these days.
Erlang scores a marketing coup
Attention managers! What is the black magic stealth technology behind feared Goldman Sachs and its whispered microseconds-fast automated trading systems?

Serge has been pretty active online, it seems.: http://www.google.com/search?q=Serge+Aleynikov+caml+OR+ocaml...
There are many many examples of this. For example, if you give girls math tests and tell them your purpose in giving them the test is to check for gender differences in math performance, the girls do significantly worse than if you tell them nothing.

And it's not just intelligence - this is why sports psychologists can make a living coaching athletes.

Of course when you carry out research like this at school level, you can assume that the material is not impossible to master even for a child of average intelligence. I don't know whether these results hold at the world-class researcher level. Still, the school years provide an important foundation for later life, so it is proper that people look into what affects performance.
I think most companies chose Windows:

1) because it's what their IT staff is comfortable with and it's what they advise companies to buy.

2) Unix sysadmins are somewhat more expensive than their Windows counterparts

3) Because there are a lot of applications that run only on Windows. The fact several of them are malware is completely ignored ;-)

4) There is a whole lot of documents that are in Word and Excel and that cannot be reliably converted to, say, OpenOffice. Companies must live with their past.

(burn, karma, burn)
A 38 page powerpoint presentation.
Very illuminating. Who knew such things as:

Liquid hydrogen leaks can be ignited by the static spark set off by the leak itself?

Hydrogen flames are not visible (see slide 16: hydrogen refinery would look same when on fire as when not.

Compressed H2 gas or Liq H2 have only about 15% or 30% of the energy-per-gallon as gasoline.

And on and on... Sure casts doubt on feasibility of H2 as a medium for energy storage.
According to the technical info they are using the following libraries: Merb (main site), Sinatra (stats), Nokogiri, and Curb

Their single(!) server is running: Nginx, Phusion Passenger, MySQL (stats), and Ruby 1.9.1

http://wikitech.wikimedia.org/view/Mobile
> Really, whatever can be done now with a computer was in principle doable in 1965

Why are people so attached to this line of reasoning... it's like saying whatever can be done now with an automobile was in principle doable in 1920 because the laws of mechanical engineering haven't changed. Cars now are "just" faster and have a few more doohickeys on them.

It's sort of a tautology once you make the paradigm in question all-encompassing enough. I would love to see mind-erasing advances in CS, too... but the lack of them does not mean that smaller and continually useful advances aren't happening and aren't worth discussing/praising.
I don't rub my wrist against every rfid receiver I come across

Really? If I had an rfid chip, that's exactly what I'd be doing, just to see what happens.
Net Neutrality Gets Boost from Feds
"He hadn’t quite internalized left-hand side vs. right-hand side." This is noteworthy.

In mathematics, equality is symmetric (a=b is the same as b=a).

In programming, variable assignment is asymmetric (a=b is not the same as b=a).

Some programming languages recognize this but get the change wrong by changing the equality operator to == or === and always preferring assignment to be =. Some get it right, e.g., := as assignment.