skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Elsevier's attempts are laudable to make Scientific papers a bit more readable on the web. Most people will just download a pdf and print to read and keep! However, I was surprised to find out that their use of Javascript can only be described as 'archaic'! (Just do a page view of the images tab)
I've seen successful sales teams that emphasized how their product would help make money when the stock market was doing well; and when the stock market was doing poorly, they'd emphasize how their product would help save money.

Since people worry about their finances when the economy is weak, perhaps online businesses that help people manage their own costs will do better than an online jewelry store (for example).
I think it's nearly impossible to predict. We are in the middle of a societal revolution brought on by the availability of instantaneous communication across a distance and perfect memory and repeatability.... so, I think previous models of what happened no longer apply. Are pawn shops and flea markets going to rise now that ebay exists? I don't think so. I think accountants will go down because of quicken and even grocery stores are threatened by mail order business for nonperishables.... I think what will do well in the coming years are companies that exploit the new capabilities of this revolution, just like companies that exploited industrial principles did well in the last revolution. I think the current recession is just minor turbulence in the midst of the larger sea change.
As much as I like Amazon, I still end up going back to B&N and Borders. It's really hard to replicate the feeling of browsing through a bookshelf of new books on a topic that interests you and flipping through some of them. Even though the Borders recent web interface facelift try to come closer to this, anything on a monitor is just not the same.
Commercial rod and reel fisherman. I would catch cod, striper and tuna depending on the season. I have the boat and the equipment and if I ever get sick of coding that's where you will find me. I have been a soldier, a mechanic and a carpenter in the past and grew up on a sheep farm and enjoyed them all but the ocean has the strongest pull.
Nice username. Mathematician and emacs user?
Glowing scar is revealing Jupiter's secrets
"But one of the thems is life itself, so I would argue that yes, it is intrinsically better ;)"

All of this is life itself. No experience you can have is more like life than any other.
This was a serious comment - it's fascinating how Mark Zuckerberg is perceived compared to what he's really like. Let's re-examine sriramk's comments about Bill G and swap in Mark Z:

"I was always amazed by how much he kept track of stuff happening on the web. He would usually know the nitty gritty of some API of some hot new site on the web. He would have test accounts in every hot new social networking site and would have installed and played with every new product. He would also have very sharp, insightful commentary on macro strategy as well as micro-level tactical issues.

I think the sad part is that very rarely have people seen that Mark Z outside of Facebook. My feeling is that people outside Facebook have this slightly stereotyped image."

Mark gets passed off as the "goofy young CEO who had to get Sandberg in to play adult", but everyone forgets how much of the Facebook strategy he drives, how connected he is with new technology and also how quick he is to adapt strategy. It's also interesting how Facebook was not his first big success (I believe he was offered a $1,000,000 signing bonus from Microsoft?)
If I'm reading something huge that is seeming to go on forever, I usually put it away for a few days to a week and read a smaller, lighter book in between.
Ahem. news.yc is not here for you to run experiments on. People who don't participate in good faith tend to get banned.
Marijuana Legalization: Help for California Budget Woes?
"but your first sentence is calling me a liar"

Oh dear, I guess if we were in a bar we would now start a bar fight and hit each other over the head with beer glassed? Sorry if I hurt your feelings, and no, I did not intend to call you a liar, just probing a little. I see a degree of difference, but it is not important enough to me to have a fight over it.

Anyway, sorry I even chimed in onto the conversation. Obviously people have different reasons to publish their stuff.
Report: Steve Jobs Happy With Apple’s Tablet, Fast Tracks It For Early 2010
I'll start this off.

Customized/Personalized print magazines. Customize what topics you want, more text or more photos, what categories (Internet, Photography, New Gadgets, Politics, Economics and even subcategories). Then monthly or when ever you get a magazine that's custom tailored just for you. Price also adjustable (more you pay, less ads, or vice versa)

Business side: the content will be automatically arranged and placed, then printed, and shipped.
Meta is Murder

http://www.codinghorror.com/blog/archives/001282.html
More like the scientific article as it should have been by the mid-90s. Still, it's good to see some experimentation.
moot point : http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2009/07/23/obama-wont-support-... Obama won't support it. The first mover would be the clinics throughout CA that are already quasi-legal (various ones accept sham prescriptions) and they'd just open the door and make tons of money if they could steer clear of the gangs. You could probably do a Web2 pot app for CA script holders today, but I don't see it as a great risk vs reward especially since legalization is pretty much not happening in this decade.
"I'm a programmer"

Then I answer questions if they have them. Which they usually don't.
Go (back) to sea.

A long time ago I was trained as a commercial oceangoing ship's officer. Now I live on a small farm in a landlocked state and I miss the ocean more frequently in recent years.

But I still think the guys on "Deadliest Catch" are insane...
Thanks for the balanced response. I saw in his article a few symptoms in my own thoughts and feelings and was thinking that maybe I just haven't been self-examining enough or that I'm keeping myself too busy to notice that I'm not feeling fulfilled.

You helped me to remember that I spend time online as a tool to accomplish specific tasks, not obsessively as a substitute for real world socialization and activity. Thanks!
Porn star.
Also, if you're going out anyway for coffee and dessert, you might as well do it somewhere where you can put a few books on the table.
I decided to try to figure it out from this angle. What we have is a random walk where, with probability 0.51 we go forward, and with probability 0.49 we go backward. If we ever reach 10, we quit. I wrote a program to compute the cumulative probability that we stop at 10 over time.

#include <stdio.h>
#include <math.h>

#define GOAL 10
#define MAXN 20000

double p = 0.51;
double pr[2][MAXN + 1 + GOAL];

#define PR_(t, x) (pr[(t) % 2][MAXN + (x)])

int main()
{
int n, i;
double totalp = 0;

PR_(0, 0) = 1;
for (n = 1; n <= MAXN; n++) {
PR_(n, -n) = PR_(n-1, -n+1) * (1 - p);
for (i = -n+1; i < GOAL; i++)
PR_(n, i) = PR_(n-1, i-1) * p + PR_(n-1, i+1) * (1 - p);
totalp += PR_(n-1, GOAL-1) * p;
printf("n=%d p=%g\n", n, totalp);
if (totalp >= 0.99)
break;
}

return 0;
}

The results:

n=5488 p=0.989997
n=5489 p=0.989997
n=5490 p=0.990005

You get to quit much sooner if you can walk away as soon as you have $10!
Twitter Job Description by Date Joined
For online companies, the domain and search engine rankings matters much more than the name being trademarked.
Are there other instruments that are comparably scarce, or is the bassoon a uniquely uncommon specialty?

I'd guess the oboe as the next least popular, but that's probably just because of the joke.

What's the difference between an oboe and a bassoon? The bassoon burns faster.
Which is why you'd want to live in a community rather than some kind of antisocial suburban subdivision. Half of my post was about building that kind of community, complete with shared social centers. But with the ability to have a place at home where you can focus and achieve flow.

The right model for having someone else fix your meals and coffee is probably closer to a cafeteria than a Starbucks or restaurant. We're talking about a target market that really shouldn't be wasting money.
Game Video Recorders drive test
Commentary should still be evidence-based and fact-checked.
The user referenced in the article who complains and thinks that he deserves everything for free is not the kind of customer you want.
Just read your book quickly, before Amazon makes the choice to stop reading it for you!
I spent last weekend rebuilding my parents' kitchen as an anniversary present, and yeah, building houses is definitely rewarding, hard work.
I did that once and they told me I had too many books and they took them back and put them away. It kinda hurt my dignity :-(
De Beers profits fall 92%
Custom woodworking, or possibly photography. But modern photography is so computer-based in some ways I doubt it qualifies.
Machinist. I liked that class so much in highschool that I applied for mechanical engineering in university, although I'm glad I ended up in computer engineering.
Possibly your name had something to do with the misunderstanding as well ;)
Interesting thought experiment.

I would be a general contractor and sub-contract the work I wasn't an expert at.

I have a lot of experience doing repair work and would enjoy the varied tasks.
A friend of mine is doing his phd research on online discussion to solve this exact problem. Digg, HN & other up/down voting sites struggle to express the viewpoint of the minority. He is working on algorithms that basically let you vote on one side of an issue.

Take for instance a political debate, where Digg and many other community sites lean to the left. Once you have expressed yourself as a "leftist" on a thread, it removes your downvotes from "rightist" comments. This gives the minority a voice, resulting in pluralism as opposed to "winner takes all".

An interesting approach to a common problem.
As TC points out, one of the biggest unknowns is how they are going to handle the bandwidth demands - and suitable reimbursement for the carriers - how that will be priced/packaged to keep from pinching the end consumers too painfully.
This is one of the worst piece of journalism I've seen.

The "omfg" stories were horrible. They are claiming that wind power sucks because we have bad drivers on the road slamming into overpasses.
yellow cab driver in a major metro; genuinely interested in people and their stories. ask my passengers about their day, make notes and learn every day. if that doesn't count; a street hawker in nyc selling falafel/donner kabab with my secret sauce.
Researchers turn cell phones into fluorescent microscopes
Sound technician or go back to school to be an EE.
"That '_commerical_' support you're referring to doesn't scale worth a damn"

Please elaborate on this comment. Redhat has basically been the poster child for the free software/commercial support business model for over a decade now. I believe support for an open source software product can be scaled as a business.
Motorola Announces Accelerated Development on Android
Libcloud: a unified (python) interface into the cloud
Maybe I'll release Mnemo and see if it works for other people.

Please do that ... It sounds pretty interesting.
That's my feeling, but after not finding the books I want for several months of casually going to stores, I just ordered them on Amazon.
How Palm Re-Enabled iTunes Sync
Open a brewery. I've just started home brewing and find the whole process very addicting. From creating your own recipes to trying to brew the same beer twice, it's loads of fun.
Wasn't there a proposal floating around to make all orders valid for one second, effectively killing these types of trades? I'm all for that. No individual investor can cancel a trade that quickly, how come it's okay for GS and all the other traders to do it?
You'd think there'd be a bigger push to all-digital theaters just so the distribution costs would go down.
Yes, I have to wonder if the long (till Q1 2010) wait isn't as much due to hashing out possible deals with potential wireless carriers:

"And we shouldn’t have to wait a year or more for the device, the goal is Q1, according to the report. This indicated just a small slip from the Fall 2009 launch that we had initially been hearing."

[ Though on reflection, the whole customize-your-own-cpu is probably throwing in some of its own monkey wrenches. ]
http://www.joelonsoftware.com/articles/fog0000000013.html clears all this up.
If you're getting paid to support that user, then it doesn't matter much what you want. That is the case with a commercial setup.
Hops Farmer up in some rural Oregon town.
I think that the logistics involved with the deployment of wind turbines is really a limiting factor. As such, this is an excellent opportunity for hackers to work on. The question is, given the constraints that current wind power generation faces, what could we do to overcome them?
I did something similar when I read "The Powerbroker," which is 1300 dense pages. I was fascinated by it, and I learned an enormous amount of information, but I knew from the beginning that it was at least a four month commitment. (Most of my reading gets done in short intervals at breakfast and lunch.)

The last time I had read a book of similar size, density and importance, I had dropped it for six months - and that book ended up becoming one of my favorites. (For the record, it was "The Powers That Be.") I wanted to avoid doing that, so I just had a policy where I read a lighter book at home, and read the denser book when I was out. It worked great.
> If I had an infinite supply of food, I would not think twice about handing it out to others.

I don't know why people keep making this analogy, but it's a poor one imho.

Here's a better view:

* you have to work hard to produce that infinite supply of food, and when you're done people are not going to instantly buy your food ... it takes some time before your expenses are covered

* as time passes people will grow tired / bored of eating your food, and sales will drop as other infinite supplies of food from your competitors become available ... food that will keep them entertained

* for that not to happen, you immediately start working on a better version of your food supply ... and because expectations have been raised, you now have to work harder ... and it can take months, even years in some cases to produce a successful sequel

* you're also not going to abandon your existing customers ... if the food tastes bad sometimes, you've got to fix it. You have to write documentation and provide support, otherwise your customers won't know how to eat your food. And customers can also give valuable feedback that you must process.

* for you to keep on working, who's going to cover your expenses, who's going to pay the bills?

* and you also have to work a hell of a lot harder than the owner of a gas station that sits on his ass all day watching his employees, and that probably makes more money than you do

Really ... you don't see anything wrong with this analogy?
Do you think software just pops out of the ground?

Intellectual property is as real as it can be. The only problem are the laws that guard it ... which have been turned against consumers for the benefit of large corporations (not content creators).
racecar driver
The technical problems themselves would be interesting to work on, and I'm glad I know about them now.

But sadly, the article itself is exactly what you'd expect from an undereducated journalist writing on a subject that sits at the intersection of two disciplines (engineering and economics) that lay audiences are all but incapable of understanding separately. You can tell, for example, that even for the author the notion of "opportunity cost" just didn't penetrate, if he was exposed to it at all. One of many bizarre moments of hilarity: the knee-jerk impulse to inform us that the death toll from transporting turbine parts has risen as high as one.

There is no discussion whatsoever of the real costs of large-scale deployment of wind power systems. At best (i.e., if the rollout of wind generation continues to accelerate), we might be able to get 4-5% of our power from wind after another 20 years of effort, with the help of generous federal subsidies and at the cost of greatly increased instability in the power grid.

EDIT: One more thing. I'm skeptical that this new information will prompt environmental groups to stop arguing that we should ignore nuclear power options because the build-out phase would put too much stress on existing infrastructure.
The first question I have is : am I correct to infer that the set of rectangles must be a subset of the original rectangles? In other words, it is not sufficient to simply generate an arbitrary set of rectangles.

Finding a minimum set of rectangles to cover a particular space can be a tricky problem, I worked on rectangularization of dose curves in radiosurgery and under certain (restrictive) error conditions, finding a minimum set of rectangles to cover an x-monotone curve can actually reduce to an NP complete problem (k-MCST). I suspect your error cases are not that restrictive.

Just off the top of my head, the first thing this reminds me of is the convex hull problem as described here http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Convex_hull where the gift wrapping algorithm is a pretty good solution. If you take each corner point of a rectangle and each intersection point of any two sides of a rectangle as an input to the convex hull, this will generate a set of points on the boundary which are required for your covering. If original rectangles are required, any rectangle with a point in the convex hull is required. This generates a set of required rectangles, you could then remove these from your set and repeat, maybe? Similarly rectangles incident on holes in the polygon formed by the gift wrapping algorithm would be required. I think that's not exactly perfectly right, but is a general approach that should work with some tweaks.

If original rectangles are not required, compute the convex hull of corner points and intersections and include any holes, then you have a polygon and you need to decompose it into rectangles, that's a well known problem.

This also bears some similarity to the skyline problem http://acm.uva.es/p/v1/105.html which uses a plane sweeping technique that is very similar to the gift wrapping approach for convex hull.

I'm not really sure I understand the color restriction, that strikes me as potentially complicating because of the similarity to graph coloring...

OK I could probably keep running my mouth about this kind of topic all day so I am going to get back to bug fixing... if that is at all helpful and you need more detail I can try to provide it

EDIT : http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Convex_hull_algorithms There's a list of algorithms for finding the hull, perhaps a modification of the divide and conquer technique http://www.cse.ohio-state.edu/~gurari/course/cse693s04/cse69... would let you get your coloring constraints in? OK, I have to get out of this thread and back to work (:
I think that's a horrible attitude for an entrepreneur; there's a massive world of possibility out there, only a limited subset of which exists in the computer. If the tech industry vanished tomorrow, for whatever reason, what would be so bad about becoming a master builder, or a chef, or some other form of craftsman?

Or a teacher, a storyteller, or any number of other professions?

Is life so bad without computers that death is really an option?

Maybe I'm weird, but I've loved almost every form of work I've done; the politics and management haven't always been great, but for the most part, the work itself has always been enjoyable... and that goes for everything from fast food and mounting tires on cars, to drywall, to writing software and building robust networks.
Microsoft Agrees to add Browser 'Ballot Screen' to appease EU
http://blogs.zdnet.com/microsoft/?p=3502
I read that example. It's factually incorrect if you take the comment literally, but if you understand the underlying point that the author was trying to make, it is a legitimate addition to the conversation.

This goes to show pretty clearly that someone's facts are someone else's opinion. How much of a nitpicker do you want everyone to be here?
Thank you for reminding me of the persistent daydream that lives inside my head. Somehow, I didn't even think of it in considering this question; an indication that there is too great a distance between what I want and like and what I think I "should/must" be doing.

There is an old orchard that I have been visiting for years. Every hour it it is bliss.
"Don't eat your greens, just move straight on to dessert. Only read books you find easy and enjoyable. What could possibly be wrong with that?"
That's a pretty cynical take on it. The point was about designing things that customers will want to use and keep using. Nothing nefarious.
Harry Potter and the summer internship (cartoon)
While markets are supposed to ensure transparency by showing orders to everyone simultaneously, a loophole in regulations allows marketplaces like Nasdaq to show traders some orders ahead of everyone else in exchange for a fee.

That's just wrong, plain and simple, as is the colocation of certain privileged servers next to (and I mean literally right next to, in the same rooms, even) exchange computers. The exchanges should not be able to profit by offering certain customers higher quality access to data that is supposed to be equally available to all, it seriously raises doubts about the fairness of the system as a whole.
Premium Wordpress Theme Giveaway: Acosmin Mag
Barista. People walk in needing a pick me up and/or just having a bad day. I can brighten their day just a little.
AdWords Gets More Local
Got to say I love the quote "no light generated here, only heat". Did you just make that up? It's a great quote for discussion groups.
I can't express how much I love this style of teaching. This is about the only thing that you can do to curb this behavior and still maintain a relationship with your students.

I was a goof in school, but my teacher kept me from getting out of hand the exact same way. By guiding my exuberance instead of squelching it, we got along great, and I graduated near the top of my class.

+20 to dedicated teachers!
> You carry all of your tools in your back pocket

That would be cool were it true, but the fact is that all construction work nowadays requires a ton of equipment, stonemasonry included.
I'm not sure MITM is accurate, but the article's graphic seems to imply that the machines have access to the trades before they are executed.

http://www.nytimes.com/imagepages/2009/07/24/business/0724-w...
"without alienating the huge user base on which any viable monetizing plan must depend."

See, I think you've completely missed the point with twitter not monetising currently.

They're doing small, consistent UI changes, easing users into the potential ad-supported experience.

Twitter's users barely flinched when Twitter implemented the "ads" on the web UI on the right.

Now with the leaked documents, it's pretty clear where Twitter is going - Real Time search. One would expect some sort of adwords clone will be implemented.

Just because they're not monetising right now, doesn't mean there is no revenue plan being tossed around inside Twitter HQ. I'm not a betting man, but I'd lay money on it.