skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
How are global warming, evolution and "most of cosmology" untestable?
The fact they hired an ad engineer doesn't equal adwords. What she's saying is actually common sense: other search engines had ads at the time, and targetted to the appropriate search queries and results. Google had lower burn because all they had was a search engine, while othrs had massive portals. Google's search technology was done in house, while others licensed Akamai. (Yahoo had manual editors at the time, too.). This also meant the portals had nearly the same results and Google was where you could get an alternate opinion. Google kept their ads separate from search results, which was lauded by Slashdot users and Google picked up lots of word of mouth about that. After that, Google came up with the do no evil motto as an official stance. (Only as Google grew bigger did this motto get associated with Microsoft comparisons by the zealous Linux userbase of Slashdot.) When Google came out with AdWords, it was basically a clone of Overture; it was AdSense that was an actual innovation.

This is from my memory of the events, not press releases, biographies, or books, so it's probably more correct :)
I love reading about entreprenuers who have paid some sort of homage to Rand (his current company was originally named Rearden Steel).
While true about the average blogger's understanding of enterprise computing, the author of this particular blog has spent a good few years deploying Sharepoint into enterprises.
It sounds like you're equating "AI" with "sentient intelligence with its own values and goals which will only arbitrarily coincide with ours." Certainly, that's a possibility--and one AI researchers would do well to avoid.

But the possible intelligences we can observe on this planet have more variety than that, and the useful intelligences we've created have even more. There's no reason a smarter-than-human AI couldn't simply be a general-purpose tool in the way that a faster-than-human spam classifier is a special-purpose tool.
Or that our research aligns with the public's needs. That's what I take away from the miles of unused tubes in Texas.

The other problem is scientists aren't very good at organizing and lobbying. The biggest neuroscience organization, the one I belong to, has a well-known health care lobbyist representing them. His name? Newt Gingrich.
Sure, a propeller, or a windmill, or a sail, are all airfoils that experience lift. They just don't "fly", ie keep something suspended.
Those things existed since at least 1997. CyberArmy had their own contests like this and they promoted people into "ranks"; the whole place had a cheesy forum/bbs feel to it and it didn't take long before someone decided to put them out of their misery and rm -rf'ed them out of existence .. including the game server.

Anybody who is anybody probably will not like the patronizing student/teacher role and he would certainly despise the sanbox; it might not just be your vmware image, but also your webhost, their colocated box, and every other box in that datacenter, and perhaps a few more wifis within an earshot from there -- all might be sent to the abyss of server hell, and your good name immortalized in a lulzful lamer log.

Do not invite the curiousity of bored people with something to prove. Do something else with your time, instead.
As it happens, most (all?) western European countries have longer life expectancies than the USA

The average life expectancy in the EU is 78.7 and in the USA it's 78.06, according to Wikipedia.
I get a completely blank page. Looking at source ...

Ah. You use the "canvas" tag - so I can't use it.

Sorry.
You’ll note, by the way, that a lot of online retailers take a weedwacker to their entire navigation system when you’re getting into the purchase funnel.

Check out political campaign contribution pages. Most don't have a single link to take you away from the contribution page. This is their main goal, they got you to that page, why would they want you to go somewhere else.

https://donate.barackobama.com
https://secure.campaignsolutions.com/fojm/donation1/
he forgot "fucking expensive" in his list. An iPhone is supported by a massive carrier subsidy. an iTablet would likely cost upwards of $700, seriously limiting its mass-market appeal.

Also, I'm rooting for nokia's next generation n900 tablet series.
It wasn't until the end of the article that I realized that it was the Sutherland of graphics fame. His early work was profound, and ahead of what everyone else was doing. I remember reading the original paper (or maybe it just was an early one) on the hidden line problem.

It is great to see some research at this level. Feels like we have been building stuff that is based on the 8085, constrained by compatibility. Everybody but Burroughs, that is, what with their b1700.
Not because there's something especially mysterious about it; it's just an instance of the more general rule that (a) people misunderstand anything complicated and (b) this doesn't stop them from expressing opinions about it.

There is one thing that's slightly different in this case: the misleading coolness of diagrams of the Bernoulli effect. One can easily see how in the hands of a popular writer, that could get transformed from an interesting optimization for wing cross-sections to "how planes stay up." I was fooled by this till a later age than I'd like to admit. It never occurred to me to ask how planes fly upside down, if the shape of the airfoil is how they generate lift.
Agree 100%. If you haven't already seen it don't bother. Not worth watching.
Twitter is bigger than Yahoo and MSN combined? you gotta be kidding me.

[Edit:

This is according to AddToAny, makers of a website widget that publishers can put on their sites to allow visitors to share the content with their friends.

What are the odds that sites that have this widget are run by Web 2.0 hipster twitterati, and their readers are of their kind?

P.S. I do all my link sharing via Skype, IRC, and various IM services.]
China, now, wants to conquer sun and wind
I read his bio and all it says is that he's worked as a consultant. Consultants don't deploy anything (though they will claim they do).

You bring in a consultant to advise you but they never make the actual decision or even necessarily know what thought process is going into that decision. In this case the proof is in the post itself. Not only does he not address all the factors I mentioned above he focuses on things Enterprises simply don't care about. Again I say: Support is king. If you write about Enterprise IT without even mentioning support you don't know what the heck you're talking about.

I'm not blaming consultants. The nature of a consultants job (never actually doing the work) creates an enviornment where he or she is detached from what's really going on. But that detachment means their opinions on IT computing and what drives it are next to useless.
Sketchy Lisp: An Introduction to Functional Programming in Scheme
I totally agree, just quit watching it mid way.
Zelda?
http://pygowave.p2k-network.org/waves/ryfHdRJuEA/ ? I really don't know how to export waves. I added jochen to the wave.
Unless the issue is that you somewhere in facebook's TOS actually give permission to these things, isn't it just a simple copyright violation? You could send them a DMCA takedown notice or take them to court for damages.
Enough Lame Computing - The project for rewriting the computing world
"Sorry, you do not have permission to view this Wave. You must be added by the people who participate in this Wave."

My username is jochen
Although I'd find it fun to have a sandbox, I have to agree with this. It's dangerous territory, and someone will think you need to be taken down for good.
Why FOSS Advocates Are So Loud
I don't see how that is contradictory or surprising; the fact that they had an engineer for advertising doesn't mean much, since all the other search engines had advertising.
Same questions as all other new JS framworks are faced with. How is this different from existing code (jQuery, Mootools, Prototype, etc.)? What advantages does it give? Why should I choose to invest my time in this?
The New Joblessness
Practical Reusable Unix Software
Likewise, invite me... I'm ph0rque on there.
Rejecta Mathematica
There's always Uplink: http://www.introversion.co.uk/uplink/2/

It's got UI and plot issues and could be improved upon. (For instance, it's sometimes quite hard to let the game know you did the mission.)
Warcraft map stylesheet for London
A fascinating comment. I never found Google's results to be noticeably better. What got me to switch were their simple UI and, most of all, how fast they were. These two things were of course related, since that lightweight goofy UI was so much faster to load. Indeed, performance is UI if you think about it.

I've read that studies show that if you put the Google brand on search results, people automatically rate them as having higher quality. So a lot of this is perception. (Quality is related to performance too. Once people notice that a piece of software is faster, they're primed to believe that it's better in every respect.)

Your comment confirms that the reason most people cite for Google's success is quite different from what actually gave them an edge. Of course, once they got it they capitalized on it bigtime.
I Know It Is Possible To Live With Zero Money
Ditto. I'm 'mattyb'.
Don't fear being rm'ed, fear "tutoring" people on hacking. Anyone who is even remotely affiliated with the scene knows how offensive that is. The lady who ran the Happy "Mostly Harmless" Hacking site recived death threats, not to mention volumes of scatalogical rape-fantasy "fan fic".
I've seen contests like this held before. As long as it's all your hardware, and the contest isn't causing the network to crash (like you said, rule out DoS attacks), I don't see why anyone would have a problem with it.
Amazing... Even when talking about Feynman this guy talks more about himself.
It is a hardware thing.

The browser is still the killer app where users can control their context that created the momentum behind the web (simple distribution and access to content all through the same controllable interface).

Native apps were once king on the desktop but hardware got fast enough that it was able to handle the multiple media types and demands of a browser. Once mobile gets to 1-2GHz processors 512MB-1GB of RAM you will see a return to the browser on mobile just as on desktop.

Right now mobile devices are like computers in the late nineties and not able to run most things that aren't native to the device. Which actually helps the whole consumer feeling of getting something for their money that others dont' have, thus the AppStore market.

As soon as browser based apps are usable on mobiles many things will return that way.

More immersive games and applications (that take more processing) will always run native on desktop and mobile.

In a short time when everyone is copying the iPhone and doing it fairly well, developers will get frustrated with all the different platforms again and reactualize their love for the browser which is really a distribution channel.
Someone needs to keep track of these types of predictions and track how often the author is wrong. It is costless to make big predictions, because rarely do people come back and say "You were wrong." It would be nice if I could search for this author's forecasting performance.
This is a ridiculous 'article'. Where to start... Just flag it Ronnie, just flag it.
Thanks for the input. But a 5-10k budget for something like this to me seems amazingly high. The only things that seem even remotely complicated in this would be the offline synchronization, and the taking/uploading of photos. I don't know about the synchronization, but is it really difficult to create an app that can take a picture and upload it to a webservice?

I'm not trying to argue, I am genuinely interested in if this is actually a difficult thing to do....
Hacker group L0pht makes a comeback, of sorts
I think that if you try and hold infinity in your mind as a real thing it could break you. Same thing if you think really hard about the concept of time... you start thinking in circles and yet with each lap you feel like you've made progress and so you press on until you stop out of exhaustion or finally snap. I won't say don't think hard about time and infinity but if you do, be careful because that way lies madness (and a Fields Medal and a Nobel Prize!)
If by markup, I assume you mean bolding text, things like that, or did you mean something else?

I suppose that would be nice, I guess the iPhone doesn't come with a native rich text editor of some sort?

So do you happen to know anyone that might be interested ina project of this nature??
Thanks for taking the time to write about this. I've followed some of those links and will consider your proposal.
CPS based functional references
Check out:

http://www.google.com/#hl=en&q=hacker+wargames

http://www.nationalccdc.org/
http://isis.poly.edu/csaw/

Or my own work on the subject:

http://www.dtic.mil/cgi-bin/GetTRDoc?AD=ADA481288&Locati...
bawr here, I'd appreciate it as well.
It's not that anything you've described is hard, it's just a lot of work. Looking at what you've got up there, it's going to require quite a few iterations to get all those features added.
Good regional take on YCombinator proved idea
that's not what I've heard at all.

http://www.techcrunch.com/2008/07/15/free-apps-no-longer-dom...

according to that article, only 20 percent of apps in the store are free.
3,000 Low Temp Records Set This July
All else being equal. All things being equal would defeat your argument.
I understood him perfectly. There have been multiple, public IPCC reports, summarizing thousands of peer-reviewed, scientific journal articles documenting global warming in fields as diverse as oceanography, geology, biology, ecology and chemistry over the last 30 years. Meanwhile, neither of you have provided evidence for your own opinions, yet you have the gall to characterize an entire field of scientific research as completely false.

This exchange is a case study of why global warming critics are rhetorically identical to anti-evolutionists and flat-earth believers: it's trivially easy to throw stones from the fringe of a scientific debate, then hide behind the fallacy that that you're the unsung outsider, defending science from the bad logic of the mainstream. It's a remarkably convenient position, since it allows you to criticize everything, but provide evidence for nothing.
This is worth less to me coming from Fred Wilson. Look, it isn't his fault, but the reality is I've read Fred Wilson's blog for some time, including the comments, and 99% of his comments are adulation. They have an undertone of "You're a VC with money and I want you to like me so I'm going to heap praise on you"

The second I see Fred Wilson throwing down on Hacker News or Reddit I'll respect his opinion in this area a lot more But right now he's just having a conversation with those who love him (or pretend to) and that's something almost everyone would be in favor of.
benparr is my username.
I don't think outsiders grasp how much of an impact the emphasis on "guanxi" and family relations has on everyday life in China. On one hand, you can see this as 90% of Chinese billionaires are the kids of high ranking officials.

Bot on the other hand, you can see this as 90% of Chinese kids of high ranking officials are expected to marry someone who is successful/will make them look good. Anyone who's dated an Chinese girl whose parents are relatively successful (especially if they are East Asian themselves) will probably tell you a thing or two about having to measure up to standards.

In Chinese society, people use their relationships to leverage life (and by extension, business and politics) to the full. Thus, it's not acceptable to marry below you because if you do, you may be forced to hire the relatives of your lowly mate. It is shameful if your family is not doing well, and it is shameful if your close relatives don't have a job. This is the cost of sticking together, having strong friendship and family bonds-- you do not want any relationships that are too one-sided or unsustainable.

While modernization has weakened this system nontrivially, it does feel that it is still the norm, and we have reason to believe it will continue (at least to a greater extent than here in the West). The reason is that China has too many people, too many mouths to feed. China produces many more engineering students than does the US. But most of them aren't hireable. There's a reason why we're still "better".

Finding the right talent in China is even more formidable than it is here, and it always has been, thanks to the fact that China has 3x more people per acre of arable land than the average country (cited from Stratfor but I can't find the link).

Now I'm not saying that the system is fair or even efficient compared to the Western system, but using the family to extend one's goals is a byproduct of Chinese society.

I would argue there is some wisdom in what they do. Here in the West, our HR departments often prefer to hire people who are referrals. There's an implicit understanding that good workers like to hang out with other people who are good workers. In this light, the Chinese are merely extending that wisdom beyond the workplace.
There's that, and the fact that both Bernoulli and Newton's laws offer a thorough explanation of flight.
I've never seen a good summary of Google Wave. Anyone hear a good one?
What do you love in people?
Your cure against cynicism ;)
http://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=fredwilson
There's a difference in degree here too though: there's a massive difference between "son of a lawyer" and "son of a central committee member". Gates is considered one of the more privileged billionaires, because his mother was on the board of directors for United Way and his father was a prominent lawyer. That seems like a crack down from his parents being President or in the Cabinet.

It also ignores counterexamples like Steve Jobs (from a working class, blue collar family), Larry Ellison (Jewish immigrants who worked as modest government employees) or Larry Page and Sergey Brin (children of professors).
'stuart' as well if you don't mind
Gala's story has been posted here before. It's inspiring insofar as he identified a need, built software to fill it, and got rich. But one aspect is maybe not so repeatable: he funded it with $600K of his own money.

The most interesting part to me is how he found a programmer capable of building the product. It wasn't luck. He spent money on a few bad programmers, figured out that they sucked, and changed course. That's intelligent and rare behavior for someone in his position.

Edit: another thought was nagging me about this and I just realized what it is: although the articles about this guy present him as a non-technical founder, that's slightly misleading. He may not know a programming language, but the stories make it clear he's a technically minded person (e.g. he wrote the first version of the software himself, in spreadsheets).
Breaking It Down: Regular Expressions for Regular Programmers
Your position: science can imitate (and maybe even surpass) Nature.

My position: science will never ever be able to even come close to Nature (a simple example? Look at the most simple form of live possible: current (so heavily applauded) science has no idea, whatsoever, what even the principle of every live-form is consisting of -- it's called the "soul", BTW).

WWW -- Who Will Win?

;)
Entrepreneurs Can Change the World [video]
Or you can learn regexes interactively:

http://weitz.de/regex-coach/

I personally use Emacs' regex-builder mode to get quick visual feedback on what a pattern matches on a given input data before I set it loose. (regex-coach is Perl compatible but emacs is not; I frequently type [0-9]+ in emacs to mean \d+)
But we are not talking about RTG:s here, we are talking about real reactors.

... Which are potentially even safer, because the fuel is not terribly radioactive until it has actually been in the reactor. Ship it up in parts, assemble when safely in orbit.
Wow, that's creepy. I've just been building exactly the same thing - i even used the same keywords.
It's interesting for UI design, but anyone saying that you can bring web applications - logic included - "to life" with no coding is selling snake oil. Some coding is required even for the most banal of CRUD apps, even if you're using a glorified database front-end like Maypole.
Re: Apple's iTouch tablet will become its flagship product.
Superbly inspiring movie. Seeing Malcolm in action against impossible odds time and time again has only raised my already high opinion of him.
What would be the intended target market/use case for such a device? Are people expected to carry around both this and a smartphone at the same time?
I don't agree with the article but I don't think it's fair to accuse the author of trying to sway opinion for the sake of his stock. After all, he probably wouldn't be long on AAPL if he didn't believe what he was writing.
yawniek
I bet you could build it in a weekend, too?
This guy should consider comparing what he speculates about this product with other imminent products (ie crunchpad...)
I saw this on reddit earlier and it reminded me of this neat, unannounced hack by Kaz:

http://paste.lisp.org/display/71952

P.S. Don't try it in your working buffer if you have sb-alien imported ;-)
It is basically a combination of real-time instant messaging (where each letter typed can be seen as it is typed), email, and collaborative document editing all in one. You can have as many people typing and editing at the same time as you want - which can be very entertaining actually among curious hackers goofing off. The key though is that each conversation is contained in a single object, the wave, and you can add as many participants to that conversation as you like, including "synthetic" participants or robots. Right now robots have to run off Google's app engine and you can write them in either python or java (we chose clojure on top of the JVM). You can also add "gadgets" to the wave, which are client side objects that all participants can see (in the same state) and when the state is changed, all participants see that change as well. Additionally, the wave is tracked temporally, so that you can "replay" the conversation as it occured.
What is Web Hosting?
Web hosting is service provided by a company that has space available on the internet for your personal website or business website.
An idea for teaching everyone programming using twitter.
Microblogging has made blogging quick and easy. No longer do you need to write up an elaborate blog post. Just a sentence or two would do. Tweets are also quick and easy to read.

Why not adapt this idea to programming? For example, you could allow twitter users to write python programs that fit in 140 characters.

Such programs would execute in your twitter reader by default, sandboxed and with a time limit. This would be particularly compelling if you have access to a graphics library and can create cool patterns in your tweets.

People can learn what these programs do by example and adapt them for their own tweets.
So what we are doing is using a Robot to transfer information between our webapp and Wave and inserting gadgets to give views back into our webapp, etc. Robots are a very powerful idea.
Making good programmers feel like bad programmers
Mixx Trailing Digg Even Worse after Traffic Took A Dive In June
one out of six construction workers is out of work.

That's insane! More than 80% of construction workers are still employed? We were only building ~25% too much?

I would expect the construction sector to shrink by something more like 50%.
<q> doesn't seem to work in Firefox 3.0
I wonder if radically different worker efficiencies would account for this.

That is to say, if worker X1 is 10% as efficient as normal, and gets laid off, it contributes one whole unit to the unemployed but one tenth of a unit to productivity loss.
Obsessively recording and sharing our vacations