skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Keyword advertising isn't like the housing bubble at all. Housing prices were driven up by loose lending practices and very cheap/easy credit explicitly FOR housing. There is no such subsidy market for search words. While there may be a google bubble, it has nothing to do with how the housing bubble was created and sustained.
How does one maintain quality? To go beyond a single part, they will probably need to do geometric tolerancing to account for all the component variations. Also, distributed manufacturing may not be as efficient.

Mao actually experimented with "crowdsourced" manufacturing in his Great Leap Forward. To boost steel production:

Mao encouraged the establishment of small backyard steel furnaces in every commune and in each urban neighborhood

The results were low quality steel and probably lots of environmental damage.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Leap_Forward
The great logician and mathematician, Alfred Tarski, was an amphetamine user. As well as great sci fi writer Philip K. Dick.

So, in vulgar Popperian fashion, I declare the theories in your posts to be falsified!
Carve Steel with Saltwater, Electricity and a Tin Earring
Interesting article, with some useful insight, but I don't agree.

I had talked about creating a startup for a while, but it was hating my job that pushed me over the edge.

Yes, starting a company is hard. Yes, it can be boring and frustrating and the only thing preventing you from going out of business is your own will power.

I'm not profitable yet, but even dealing with everything the author mentions, I'm still happier than working for untalented managers at a bureaucratic corporation.
It is one thing to say start your business for the right reasons but this takes it a bit too far. Hope people don't get discouraged.
They refer to "intellectual property from Microsoft" that is being distributed with Linux, that hasn't been paid for. Does anyone know exactly what they're talking about?

Anything gNewSense got from Microsoft, Microsoft got from Apple in the first place. I respect people who choose Microsoft products because they legitimately believe them to be superior, but tactics like this are immature and spineless.
True, but at the same time enough blogspam cruft (crenk.com and a whole bunch of others) makes it through without a problem.

I find this especially troubling because plenty of time there is some good interaction going and then boom subject gets killed. To take it out of the 'new' and 'home' pages fine, but if it already has comments by parties other than the submitter you might as well let it be. It's not like it will cost anybody if it does.

That said, the apple appstore has seen a bit of over exposure, I think that is what did it in this case.
Congrats on the success. It looks like you're getting around 250 downloads a day. That is great

If the 8th ranked app is getting 250 downloads a day, it looks like the Books category is more lucrative than people may have thought.
Microsoft's new pressure-sensitive keyboard prototype
This looks interesting, but read carefully - while I haven't had the time to look at the article and the site in detail, it seems that it could be described as 'fringe science'...
I'd be suspicious of super cheap LEDs on ebay -- they may be cheap but they're unbranded and you don't know how long they'll last. And I'd definitely stay away from the ones that consist of 50 normal LEDs all pasted together. Normal LEDs aren't made to deal with the high current and heat you get from packing them together, so their lifetime is anyone's guess.

I've been putting in LED spots for my office (instead of 25W halogen MR16 lights). I've tried some off of ebay that (claim to) have Luxeon or Nichia LEDs. I've also gotten some from http://www.ledwaves.com/. All are pretty nice, but I haven't decided what color temp I like so currently there's a mishmash of cool and warm ones...
@amr - why do you think that this is taking it too far? I would love to hear your feedback. My personal experience with setting off on my own was just as I describe here, so maybe I am the oddity. I was surprised, and quite honestly overloaded, but the minutia of stuff with which we had to deal, especially when we got into the fund raising process.
How do you know those two wouldn't be even better had they not used amphetamines?
As long as it is not called a Thesaurus Legum, I am fine with it.

This would be an excellent resource, is technically achievable, and would further the worthwhile (in my judgment) goal of undoing the guild-like control over legal knowledge once held by the lawyers.
Here is what I'd do, start from here:

<div class="comment level0">
<a class="up"></a>
<a class="dn off"></a>
<h1>title</h1>
<p class="minus2">comment here</p>
</div>

Then apply styles at will, increase padding per level and dimming per negative karma.

I bet code size decreases while readability increases.
It's an interesting point you raise about being happier than if you were at a large corporation. I can totally understand that, and in fact my point was don't have the fact that you hate your job be the reason. For you, it was one of the reasons, and in fact appears to be the tipping point.

My experience with some entrepreneurs is that they didn't really understand some of the pain and suffering that comes with running their own gig. Because of this, they get disenfranchised.
If your exploratory programming involves JavaScript/Ajax, tables can be a pain in the butt to deal with. Semantic HTML makes manipulating the DOM much simpler -- no need to dodge around meaningless markup junk.
I highly recommend Hayashi's book on Econometrics. It's what we used in the first year of my PhD program in Economics. But it's probably worth starting with a basic probability and statistics book, preferably one that's pretty mathematical. I've used Hogg McKean and Craig's Introduction to Mathematical Statistics and it's really good.
Absolutely. I think this is the real answer. Developers need to learn to document and improve their UI skills. To me those are core skills of a developer. We can't expect professionals in those areas to come in and rescue open source.
Confirmed: Microsoft Is The New Owner Of Office.com
Foyle's bookstore in London has a financial section larger than a lot of bookstores, including a wide variety of books on statistical modelling for financial instruments.

In terms of keeping up with the community, zerohedge.com provides valuable advice and recently provided the full PDF of 'an introduction to high-frequency finance'.

In terms of low latency architecture and platforms, check the docs for Red Hat's MRG, SuSE's SLIRT, and highscalability.com. You'll find most of your Unix knowledge is tied towards performance rather than determinism, and you'll need to re-learn a lot of your knowledge and delve deeper into strace and systemtap.
Not to mention that you can compile CUDA code in "emulation" mode for execution on the CPU, too. The utility is largely for debugging, because the CPU is darned slow executing it, so I'm not sure it has any use in production.
Awesome Video Tutorials For Web Developers
ASDF-Install and GPG Signatures
I feel cautious optimism at this sign that the top folks at Apple realize that the app store approval process is a mess, and is perceived as such.
Microsoft is now the proud new owner of Office.com
SBIRs are like crack. It's easy money, but then you get on a government delivery cycle and standards.

I wouldn't touch them at a startup.
The follies of ‘management science’ and the consulting that promotes it.
The problem that I see is that Apple has no business being in the censorship or rating business period. Sure there are "business reasons" to perform these roles, but they are antithetical to a free society.

The free market answer would be, if you don't like it don't buy an iPhone. That's great, but as technology marches forward there can only be a finite number of companies with the skills and resources to create smart phones, Apple being one of the nicest offerings. This concern will probably never effect enough consumers for this to ever hurt Apple's bottom line, and so they will never feel a free market pressure to change their behavior.

A sort of net neutrality type of guarantee must be struck here, market forces will not prevail because this simply isn't an issue enough people care about. Rights are being infringed however and that must be addressed.
It's nice that Schiller took the time to respond, but his letter doesn't make them look any better. They're still acting like useless self-appointed meddling busybodies with rigor mortis of the anal sphincter. I can accept them setting standards for hardware and software quality, but when they start imposing their standards on the flow of information, services (Google Voice) and ideas, they've lost me forever.
I think it's spot on. The reality of starting a business isn't glamorous, people should realize that before they get into it.
Team Apart (YC S08) wants to eat Webex's lunch
The real wtf is that electrical engineers do not have their VCS.

They also use opaque binary formats for their, what we'd call, sources. Gross!
Top 5 Categories of Employment (Industry/Skill) in 2020?
My guesses.

1. Data Analysis - Statistics, graphical interpretation of
information, data mining and such

2. Intermediation, management - so broad as to be almost useless to you, but... the Web, the Net, globalisation, all of these probably make the long run average size of the efficient firm, on average, smaller. If you know a lot about an industry or an industrial niche you can connect people and take a cut or a fee for introducing them. This is basically the extension of the import-export firm model to services.

3. Biotechnology - This area is now in something analogous to the stage the IT industry was in in the late 50s, early 60s with the giant semiconductor companies. No one knows what's going to happen but it's going to be BIG. Aiming to be the Intel, Microsoft or Google of the industry is a bad bet but there will be money here in spades.

4. Professional services - Lawyers, Accountants, Bankers, all businesses need these people eventually, they're all skilled profesionals with hard to commoditise skills, with a possible exception for Bankers, a great deal of whose value is in reputations, connections and trust. The Law is a frankly horrible career but if you can provide a service or product lawyers want, you're golden.

Don't go to Law School unless you can get into a Tier 1 School
re:glamour, I heard Megan Fox would date me when I started my own company. Sadly...not the case. =)
Rakudo Star: a "useful release of Perl 6" coming next spring.
I don't think they are converging at all. The fundamental difference is that GPUs are using the vast amount of silicon real estate that in a CPU is used for cache for computational units. That gives it much higher computational peak performance, but it also means that your memory is uncached, which will kill you in applications that do unstructured memory access.

I think of it as analogous to cars vs semitrucks. Trucks are efficient at hauling massive amounts of stuff to the same place, but not at transporting 100 commuters to their different workplaces. They are optimized for different problems and I don't think there's a better argument for saying that GPUS and CPUs will converge than to say that semitrucks and cars will converge.
A lot of our revenue actually comes from the rest of the world- Australia, Canada, and the UK are all solid, and we've been in #1 Books for Canada for solid stretches.

We're actually 25 spots away from being Top 100 overall right now in Canada, so much of our revenue is attributed to the world, and not just the US. This is something we're going to expand on a lot more moving forward, as it's caught us by surprise.
pressure-sensitive? like buttons?
It looks like they decided the biggest asset in their company was not the customers but the domain name. Imagine how many will be so confused after going there that they'll never go back.

Has anybody ever sold the domain out from under their userbase and made the transition work ?
Yes, but the pain you describe is worth it and makes you a stronger person. The pain of being in cubeland however is not so worth it (for me).

It's a question of what you will achieve after going through the pain of starting a company vs. the pain of being an employee of a traditional software company.
Because Ghod knows that any negative comment about those topics is inherently good and worthwhile.

In other news, "they" didn't laugh at Einstein or Newton, but they did laugh at Bozo the Clown....
"No doubt all these social explanations are true as far as they go, but they do not address the deeper question of why people’s psychology should have evolved in a way that makes them want fewer children when they can afford more."

I've always explained this as so (I have no evidence for any of this):
1. People in different social classes have different inherent desires in life. Some people simply want a family and have no other ambitions.
2. Lower class people (or people that have more children on average) have a harder time delaying gratification on average. Delaying gratification is a skill very beneficial when attempting to be successful and is related to the ability to think ahead and visualize the future. Having this ability instills different desires in a person and may detract a person away from parenthood due to truly understanding how much of a commitment children actually are (20+ years of your life, hours a day). Having this ability also helps one realize the difficulty in caring for many children.
Does this come with an emulator for Windows, so you can test it without a GPU?
This sort of tree animation is a powerful way of exploring structured data like this--I've used it on call graphs and seen it used for social network data and RDF before. Remarkably smooth animation here.
Alos, the point of working with HTML is to let the app users to modify directly their report in the HTML and then still be able to download the PDF.

Think about an invoicing tool. You could have the invoice in HTML with some kind of rela pdf look.. users could for example delete rows, change amounts, ... and still be able to download the invoice in PDF just after.
The key LED manufacturer are working hard with all kind of R&D programs to improve the situation. I saw on a presentation lately that e.g. the new Osram high bright LED has an improved process addressing the issue. I agree that this is an engineering process improvement problem and will be mostly resolved over time.
Top five economy based board games that make you think
except you don't mind if the twin gets killed.
Since the YSlow recommendations and practices are almost universally used, wouldn't it be possible to automate the process? Could someone write a servlet filter that incorporated the optimization rules and automatically applied them to outgoing content on the fly? And you could make this an Apache module so that it could sit at the web server layer instead of at the container layer.

This would also address issues that arise when you're using a product or framework that assembles the page dynamically, and you're not in control of how the css links are constructed.
Turkey's treehouse village (video)
Nobody remembers the free auction site Qool.com?

I still have some t-shirts I got from them back in the days of the internet ad bubble ten years ago.

Users earned auction points by visiting pay-per-click links and buying through referral links back then, naturally. But it was fun.
... which would explain why it doesn't work in Chrome either.

It's surprising that they would put this out into the world as though it were finished, seeing as it runs on such a small slice of the world's browsers.

Seems like there's nothing there that couldn't work in Canvas (and thus be usable in every major browser). I wonder why they chose such a dead-end tech to do it in.
Was it really the icon's graphic design, or the fact that the word "free" is positioned very prominently within it? It'd be an interesting experiment to actually change the app icon for a month and test the results. Of course that's risking real money, so it'd be understandable if you didn't want to take the chance. :)
Judge rebukes SCO, blocks sale, appoints bankruptcy trustee
Even though Facebook is largely defined by the power users and the company's goal is to just keep ratcheting up engagement, I don't think that's the right way to judge it as a service.

As a casual user who visits Facebook a couple times a week, I find it to be tremendously valuable. Contrast with email for a moment. I somehow made it into my inlaws' family list. This is a group of perhaps 100 families who all manage their own copy of the list via Reply All. Many of them post multi-page updates of their domestic tasks several times a week. I can never be removed from or block this list because I may receive legitimate email from any of these people. I may occasionally actually be interested in what they are doing, but as it is the problem is worse than spam by a long shot. Now that some of them are getting on Facebook it is a huge improvement. I can block the truly annoying people and still keep ambient awareness of what's going on on my own schedule.

I think Facebook is a tremendously useful tool, which is often obscured inside the echo-chamber by the feeding frenzies around virality and engagement. In other words, I believe Facebook is sustainable.
I don't think that a rating system is antithetical to a free society. It is reasonable for consumers to want to know if there is material they would consider objectionable in a product, and it is reasonable for businesses to provide this information. A problem that Apple does have is that they appear to be applying standards for what might be considered objectionable in inconsistent ways.
Twitter Site is down But Facebook Gave Me Errors First | My Philly Network
DNA computer 'answers questions'
Apple working on device abuse detection technology
I up-modded you
I think that must be a British term.
5 Tips for Raising Your Girl Geek
- Host your CSS, JS and images on a CDN
-- Serve them from a different domain. Otherwise every element request requires cookies to be sent in the headers. Waste of overhead for end users.

- Combine as many JS and CSS files as possible. You will also want to compress them.

- Use memcached to cache backend elements to speed up pageloads and hit the database less.

- If you arent using a CDN, at least use a reverse proxy so you don't create unnecessary overhead for your webserver.

- Get a profiler for your app. See what areas are slower then others. Find a database profiler and fix queries that are slow. If your using MySQL use the slow query log to see where there are hold ups.

- Make sure you have the proper indexes on your database. Over doing it can waste memory.

- Try and use gzip if possible. Most browsers support it and it can have a noticeable speed increase.
I agree, but at the same time, you only learn by doing.

This is true, but I think in the original poster's case it could be much more easily and reliably be accomplished by continually giving him problems that are within (or more ideally, just outside) his circle of competence, rather than a problem like "predict stock prices" which isn't in any human being's circle of competence. Moreover, with the latter problem, he'll get virtually no feedback as to whether his answer was correct, because a correct answer for "use statistics to predict stock prices" doesn't exist. Odds are that if he follows that path he'll quit before making any progress, or at the least he won't be able to close the feedback loop that is so vital to gaining expertise.

I think that if he's starting from ground zero and wanting to learn statistics, he'd be much better served by sitting down with The Cartoon Guide to Statistics and a deck of cards and set of dice first. He can work his way up to conquering the stock market :)

Don't tell Google that it's slogan ("Organize the world's information") is biting off more than it could chew.

I think that's apples and oranges - he's trying to learn statistics, not trying to convince potential clients or investors that he's already an expert. I don't think it would be harmful at all for him to have a lofty, far-out goal like "predict stock prices" to aim toward, but I do think that if he starts out trying to learn statistics by typing "statistical stock prediction methods" into Google, he will burn out rather quickly. Pagefaulting in knowledge when you need it is probably optimal for something where you just want to make sure your knowledge is passable, but if he wants to truly know his domain, he's gotta get out the marbles and urns. :)
Oh man you soooo nailed it. Best video response ever.
Second the idea that a lot of statisticians don't know what they're doing. The first mistake is to make things easier by glossing over, or mangling, the mathematical details. Many statistics textbooks do this, and the only real protection is to have a good math background. The second mistake is to treat statistics like a bunch of techniques to be learned and applied with little regard for the philosophical problems inherent in every attempt to model the real world.

The Cartoon Guide to Statistics is an excellent way to go from zero to a good overview of the basics with a minimum of hard math. After that, if you're mostly interested in applying basic techniques to your own stuff, you want a good undergrad textbook. I don't have any good recommendations here, unfortunately. If you have a good math background (or are motivated to get it) and you want to keep going, Statistical Models; Theory and Practice by David A. Freedman (http://www.amazon.com/review/R2XUNM92KYU7BB) has the math, the philosophy, the hands on analysis of studies, and the exercises to put you in a better position to evaluate statistical research than some people who produce it.
I was being slightly ironic. It's kind of funny that you would credit maternity leave policies and high transfer payemnts for raising fertility. Most of the liberals I know are effectively sterile; my conservative friends tend to have kids early and crank 'em out. It seems like some people are in favor of parenthood, in theory, and others are going to do whatever it takes in practice to have the number of kids they want. Guess which group claims to be more concerned about "Maternity rights!"

I think that's what we're seeing here. Hispanic Catholics, ultra-Orthodox Jews, Neo-Victorians (http://web.archive.org/web/20070714214937/http://www.nyobser...), and Mormons are all having lots of kids; secular people and classic WASPs aren't. Which makes the latter groups smaller and less relevant over time.
Yes. Gruber touts Schiller's response as 'thoughtful', but what Schiller says is inconsistent with Gruber's own excerpted reporting so far. Bottom-line:

Dictionary.com's app contains 'fuck', was released in April (before parental controls), and now has an "age 4+" rating.

NinjaWords was given 'fuck' as one of several examples of problem vulgar terms in screenshots and told to resubmit and/or wait for parental controls that would put them in the "17+" category.

At the very least, Apple's prior guidance to NinjaWords was confusing and incomplete, if it did not clearly state that 'fuck' was fine and the other slang was the problem.

Schiller (at least as Gruber has excerpted) doesn't address this failing at all.
Not the focus of the article, but very poignant:

Children have surprisingly perceptive risk intuition. They know when parents are serious about a threat and when their threats are empty. And they respond to the real risks of parental punishment, not the inflated risks based on parental rhetoric... There have to be real consequences.
The Tyranny of Process Worship Within IT