skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Of course we do not care man. It is not like the Chinese gave us the wealth. We invented stuff, we traded with other countries and shared our knowledge, they decided to close up, to live in some island, and now that they are opening up they will have to start at the bottom no.

You may ask whether the birth lottery is any fare and I do not know about that one really, it is, it goes really deep and it effects everyone, but being a practicalist, although this one event may be unfortunate, until the Chinese government opens up fully and adopts our values, there is not much we can do really. So stop crying and start working on making those super cool macs cheaper :)
To echo pg on this- another trick that i was taught early on was to book out a day or half day per week for meetings. Slot them in, try and get people to come to you (helps if you have membership to a club or some such :)) and then keep people to their time slots. If they need to follow up - email or reschedule based on an action point.

One other point: agile standups seem to work well even for makers because they're bound tightly to the start of working sessions and last for a short time. They enable everyone to feel connected to each other on a team, but allow them to disappear back into their office or cube to work for the rest of the day.
The New Orleans Saints 
This is a piece in Entrepreneur Magazine about the startup scene in New Orleans. Since it's in my backyard, I'm curious about wider opinions from residents of more mature startup scenes.
Use OAuth. http://oauth.net/

That's what I'm using on FragTweet.com. To be clear, the service has to let you use it, but its still better than storing passwords. You get an authorization token from the target service that lets you authenticate as that user for certain actions which you can then store. At any time the user can deactivate the token through the service's control panel. Very slick, although not quite finished.
while clicking around this reminds me of early google, however after a few results - I can already strongly suggest ways to game the system, first it ranks to heavy off of keywords in the domain name etc..
Man Not Superman: What Happens When You Date Lois Lane
In terms of relevance there seems to be a tie between gigablast and cuil (according to my highly unscientific study). And google search is still better. And I like cuil's design more.
I use it as an alternative when google does not give me what I'm looking for.

It's small enough that it doesn't pay off to game it, but I'm sure that if it would take off (pun intended) that the 'war' would be on pretty quickly.
I thought Hotmail was the #1 email provider
How is it zero sum? I'd make you a bet that right now, more people are living happily than ever did in the past. The bar constantly rises.
AI predicts poker bets to three decimals places
Well, if he didn't, then why would he complain about cutbacks?

I'm not trying to pick on him or anything, it's just that he's quoted. But if your salary is increased from $150,000 to $200,000 and then you're asked to cut it down to $150,000, well, if you didn't approve of it in the first place the chances are that you'd be ok with going back.

We often don't get to make those choices as individuals, but usually no one complains about their salary increasing. It's also totally possible that he's protesting on other people's behalf as I doubt he's hurting as a successful book author and probably one of their more well paid professors.

But generally speaking, when a company is having fat years, people generally want a piece of it. I don't mean any disrespect to Professor Dershowitz. It's just that most people act like he acts - it's human nature. It's annoying when fat years are here and we don't get a cut. It's annoying when lean years come and people want us to make concessions. I feel that way too. It's completely devoid of reality, but it's an interesting part of our psychology.
Apple Withdraws Threats Against Wiki Site | Electronic Frontier Foundation
Accordig to Wikipedia:

"Bamboo is the fastest-growing plant on Earth; it has been measured surging skyward as fast as 121 cm (47.6 inches) in a 24-hour period,[6] and can also reach maximal growth rate exceeding one meter (39 inches) per hour for short periods of time.
[...]
bamboos grow to full height and girth in a single growing season of 3-4 months. During this first year the young shoots strike skyward supported by photosynthesis from the rest of the clump with no time to sprout their own branches and leaves. Over the next year the pulpy wall of each culm slowly dries and hardens, sprouting branches and leaves during the second year from juvenile sheathes that form from each node. Over the following year the culm hardens still further shedding its juvenile sheaths and commencing its life as a fully mature culm. Over the next 2-5 years depending on species, fungus and mould begin to form on the outside of the culm, eventually penetrating and overcoming the culm so that by around 5 - 8 years depending on species and climate the culms begin to collapse and decay. This brief life means culms are ready for harvest and suitable for use in construction from 3 - 7 years."

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bamboo#Growth
In '08 they did a double blind study comparing gigablast with google and two thirds of the users preferred gigablast.

It's a dated study of course, and I can't find a reference for it (which doesn't help) but it impressed me quite a bit.

edit: found a link: http://www.searchenginejournal.com/gigablast-better-than-goo...

I misremembered the percentage though, not 66 but 55.
Are you saying that products like the iphone are crap? Sure, you can buy the cheapest thing possible from walmart and save money, and sure, it'll break faster than a a higher-quality product. Its called choice. Even the high quality stuff coming out of china, like an iphone, is made much more inexpensively than we could make them in the states.
You have to admire his accomplishment, but the presentation grates on me -- the fonts are pretty unreadable and it all seems very rough around the edges. Even if the standard were up to Google's, I wouldn't use it for that reason alone.
I believe in ideal conditions, even without CO2 doping, bamboo can grow at something like a foot a day. And stone bamboo is routinely used as scaffolding around buildings in parts of Asia.

Bamboo also tends to flower and die off every X years. But genetic engineering might be able to help with that.

I think genetic engineering which will specify the shape of a house is quite for away, far more away then the "fix" for the dye off. But these willow houses are shaped by grafting and bending and I think you can do the same with bamboo. But I'm not sure, bamboo is a grass so maybe you can't.
I don't see how this is a problem exclusive to a GSM carrier. Who says there has to be a SIM card? Couldn't the information be on a chip soldered to a board?
Cheat Sheets and Reference Guides for Web Professionals
Falling Out of Orbitz
This applies to the food industry as well, like how we get our meat. We'd be better off if the things we buy were responsibly produced and priced. It's hard to know what we can do about it besides voting with our dollars and educating others.
But that isn't true. 10 years ago were you having less fun on the original Playstation than you have on a PS3 now? What about 10 years before that on the Sega Megadrive?

The upgrade treadmill is just fashion and marketing.
IPv6 Fuzzing and Testing
Ah, PHP, how I loathe you...
The longest solar eclipse of the century
Thank You Vancouver The City Gave a Lane of the Burrard Bridge to Cyclists
Robo-Ethicists Want to Revamp Asimov’s 3 Laws
I find it rather corny that a page promoting use of HTML Canvas uses Flash itself to represent textual headings on the page.

(Noticed it when scrolling with the mouse wheel suddenly malfunctioned as the cursor hit the space right to a sub-heading.)
This Message will Self-Destruct: New Tool Makes Online Postings Disappear
it doesn't seem to be a very good comparison, and rather more like "I think Scala does something that is probably clever which i'm not familiar with, but I like how Fan does XYZ with this example"
Homework before buying digital camera:Flavors of Photography
I wasn't trying to inflate the importance of my argument. I was offering a guess of a possible range, given that there aren't any statistics. That's a common thing to do, and I would do it again.

If I had to guess, I'd probably say about 5% of the US population in toto has heard of DRM and could define it to a reasonable approximation. (That's about 15 million people.)

You chose to take the higher number in my range for me to "prove." I called you on it.

There are about 5.8 million people in the tech industry in the US. I've worked in some pretty big tech shops (and some small ones) in the US. Almost everyone I've worked with has heard of DRM, no matter what they think of it.

But assuming even only 10% of them have heard of DRM (an extremely low estimate) that'd be 580,000 people right there.

That's not proof, as there can't be any such thing in this case.
Well not quite spot on. It did mention that these people were willing to do what ever to get away from the hellish alternative they were born into. But if you blinked you missed it, you missed the most important point:

People are doing this voluntarily. Rumors of forced labor are greatly exaggerated. Perhaps somewhere in Burma but in China and India and other places, people do this hard work because the alternative is harder. This is how you work your way up from a very low starting point.

England wasn't always a workers' paradise either. Wages in China will rise.
If you are trading based on research and conviction then this sort of predatory behavior should only minimal effect. I.e. if you think a company has good prospects for the future, then you probably expect the price of the stock to go up a significant percent. The sort of games described in the paper only alter the price by a small percent over a short period of time. Does it really matter if you buy the stock at 20.00 or 20.10 if you think the price is going to go up to 30.00?
Cool open source software to manage your digital comics and a basic summary of the state of digital comics.
Actually, I must agree with the parent. While the iphone is really great and stuff, you can bet that everything that's not absolutely necessary and even a bit more has been engineered out of it, in the name of cost-efficiency. Otherwise it would be very expensive and unsuitable for mass production. Because it is a product of mass production, the iphone is definitely not a unique, luxury item even though it's very well designed and marketed as a high-endish phone. The average middle class consumer doesn't really have a lot of choice in this matter, there are differences in quality and price but middle class people can't really afford any product that hasn't been engineered for mass production.
A very interesting article. As a manager, I always tried to schedule meetings with my people first thing in the morning for precisely this reason (though I could not have articulated it in these terms before.)

One other option for his dilemma about "grabbing coffee" is simply to reschedule. It may not always work, but you can often minimize that interruption by pushing it to the end of the day or having it coincide with lunch where there is at least some small interruption anyway. It is hardly a perfect option, but it may often be the best.
It's obvious the birth lottery isn't "fair". It's just as obvious that fairness is irrelevant.
Burgernomics: Big Mac index analysis
Great writeup, thanks! I'm confused by your conclusion, though: "I wish I would have identified Rackspace initially as the platform of choice."

From the results of the contest, I would have concluded that the platform of choice was CUDA. Do you think otherwise? Is there a reason you'd choose to use a flotilla of Rackspace servers for a problem like this rather than a graphics card? If you are going to be programming in C anyway, it seems like a much simpler approach.
In my opinion, there's one critical thing which is keeping Linux out of the non-nerd workstation market, and that's X11.

In my opinion, that one thing is Unix.

The Unix model is full of philosophical details which are appealing to programmers, but which have been thoroughly discredited in the end user space: the minimization and generalization of APIs, the minimization and generalization of the notion of what a "file" is, the process or task based model of interaction, etc.

An end user OS needs to be document-centric instead of task-centric. It needs to have a spatial file manager, and support for that needs to be built into the filesystem. It needs a UI spec that is set in stone and backed up with usability research. The I/O patterns for a file on disk, the display, mouse, and sound card are all different; to get the most out of each the OS needs to provide for each specifically.

These things are precisely what made the original Macintosh such a revolution: the designers at Apple were willing to completely rethink what an OS is and should do. These days not even Apple is so bold, as its OS is basically a reskinned Unix. (Of course, consumer electronics and not computers are their new primary market and where they focus the most innovation.)
The disparity between the real cost of gadgetry today as compared to the 1970s and 80s is immense.

Gee I wonder why that is.. something about semi.. conducto... can't quite put my finger on it.
Pop culture disagrees. 22 years ago, Dark Helmet: Out of order? FUCK! Even in the future, nothing works!

I'd bet when you think of old stuff, you think of a singer sewing machine or a '57 chevy, stuff that withstood the test of time. well the world was full of crap then too, most of it broke and got thrown away. My toys are more than 20 years old. they are cheap plastic. they aren't even painted, just a few sucky stickers. Our microwave when i was a kid would make parts of food smoke while leaving other parts frozen solid. Consumer electronics? i think timex made it's reputation by being a slightly less crappy watch.

You name it. You can certainly find 1 example of a stellar product that lasts for years and years. There are hundreds of that products peers in the landfill.
The WHO's figures are that in 2002, in the US, about 7400 people died of "nutritional deficiencies", broken down into 4300 deaths from "protein-energy malnutrition" and 2500 deaths from "iron-deficiency anaemia". That's a total death rate of 2.5 per 100 000 population that year. It's not one of the major causes of death, it's less common than suicide and far less common than diabetes, and it is indeed much more common in many other countries (the rate in Cameroon, for example, is five times higher) but it's a little higher than the estimates for more socialist countries like Canada, Sweden, Japan, and especially Finland. (But not France.)

If that rate were typical over our lifetimes, which seems optimistic (surely the rate was much higher in 1932, and for that matter in 2009) that would add up to a few hundred thousand deaths by starvation over the last 80 years.

These rates don't include deaths in which malnutrition was only a contributing factor. Malnutrition grossly increases the risk of death from infectious diseases, for example.

If you think that out of those hundreds of thousands of deaths, not a single one was caused by anything other than mental illness, you are the one with the mental illness. In fact, I think that just by posting your comment, you have demonstrated that you are really out of touch with the reality of what's happening in what I assume is your own country. You need to adjust your estimates of your own competence downward by a few orders of magnitude in order to have a chance of having an opinion that is worth something. Right now you're living in a dream world.

Figures from the World Health Organization Global Burden of Disease report from 2004:

http://www.who.int/topics/global_burden_of_disease/en/

(There's a spreadsheet floating around there somewhere with the per-country stats, although I'm not having any luck finding a link to it.)
This is exactly why we have a Don't Bug Tom (my co-founder) Rule.
Well it may be true until you tenure, then you can do whatever you want.
This was interesting:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hydrocephaly#Exceptional_case

One interesting case involving a person with past hydrocephalus was a 44-year old French man, whose brain had been reduced to little more than a thin sheet of actual brain tissue, due to the buildup of fluid in his skull. The man, who had a shunt inserted into his head to drain away fluid (which was removed when he was 14), went to a hospital after he had been experiencing mild weakness in his left leg.

In July 2007, Fox News quoted Dr. Lionel Feuillet of Hôpital de la Timone in Marseille as saying: "The images were most unusual... the brain was virtually absent."[9] When doctors learned of the man's medical history, they performed a computed tomography (CT) scan and magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) scan, and were astonished to see "massive enlargement" of the lateral ventricles in the skull. Intelligence tests showed the man had an IQ of 75, below the average score of 100 but not considered mentally retarded or disabled, either.
Really, really interesting. Totally agree. As activity around Woobius has picked up recently, I've been struggling with exactly this problem. My cofounder happily schedules meetings with various potential clients or contacts or other useful people to meet, and they tend to break up my day in disastrous ways. I do indeed find that often, a meeting in the early afternoon (say 1-2pm) can blow up my entire day (at least in terms of turning a day that could have been chock full with super-productive work into one that only contributes a few bits of real work here or there).

I like the tip about working from dinner to 3am, too, but doesn't that blow away any chance whatsoever of social life? If you have a significant other, I imagine that's a clear no-go. Also, if you plan to attend the odd networking event, you won't (or at least, a networking event will basically cost you a whole working day, which seems pretty disastrous). How do you deal with those sociable activities when you're on the dinner-3am schedule?
It's not connected to anything. ":memory:" means "something that is as in-memory as a hash".
Web 2.0 Collage Knows Where You've Been
According to this person, the security forces use these paint balls to single out protestors, who they believe should be arrested. Sharp shooters are positioned in nearby locations (where they cannot be seen by the demonstrators) and launch paint balls at selected targets,

If anyone else has played Paintball here, sharp-shooting to that sort of needed level of accuracy is pretty much impossible. Just looking at that picture makes me laugh at how a sharp-shooter would "snipe" a select person in that crowd. It's possible to jack up the FPS on a gun to shoot hot (and shoot further), but even then it's not really possible to guarantee a hit, given how a paintball is aerodynamically pitiful compared to an actual bullet.

Anyone else who has played paintball here can confirm that paint can easily fly several feet off its intended trajectory in as short as 40 yards. In a crowd, just 6 inches would be enough to mark the wrong person.

So if they're trying to target a unique person in a crowd who is supposedly going to be arrested? Highly unlikely. I could definitely seem them shooting hot to disperse crowds though, paintballs sting quite nicely without a good layer of clothing.
Using Ruby and Python on Web Clients
The paradox of overconfidence is that it may be necessary for an entrepreneur.

I think this is true. A lot of brilliant people don't start their own business not for lack of ability or ambition or hunger but because we have such a detailed and clear view of ALL the things that go wrong.

That's why pg's essays explaining just how little downside there is to failure when you're young are so great.
The obvious difference between this project and CD rippers (a device to which they compare themselves many times on the site) is that the CD ripper is basically "fire-and-forget", while this seems to be an intensely manual process. The site quotes a scan rate of 600-1000 pages an hour, which means it will take roughly 30 minutes of uninterrupted work to "rip" a typical novel.

Until the process is completely automated (and I don't see why it couldn't be), it seems like too much time invested for too little payoff.
Why would I spend my time and money building a valuable social network for some other company? - if I did per chance get something going on ning - I would immediately find investors and get it out of their hands,

- Boon pickens spent millions promoting his pickensplan - then built a network on ning with over million members - all for not?. .
It's worse than that. The cheapest thing possible from walmart is still better than average, and probably better than the best from 20 years ago. Plastic drinking cups now were anodized aluminum. 10 times the price, and make you crazy. Find a (new) t-shirt from 1989 and wash it 50 times. how much did that color change? how many holes are in it? Bet that walmart shirt is holding up fairly well.

I'm not a walmart fan, Old stuff just sucks. It can be fascinating and intriguing and cool, but a difference engine looses to a pentium core 2 duo. You can go buy a car for $20k right now, that is faster, safer, and more fuel efficent than anything sold in the 1970's.

time == tech. tech wins.
Seems like the last bit of news was from 2005:

http://gigablast.com/press.html

I wonder what he's been doing for the last 4 years?
While the story had some decent points to it, the ending was a really horrible cop out and cowardly way to accuse the young man of stealing an iPhone. Even if it is true.
You haven't got any idea whether particular successful people coming out of Harvard deserve their success (well, I grant you GWB).
Presumably the people poorer than them also feel the same way?

If you look at the numbers - at what percent of people pay what percent of the total collect from income tax - the inescapable conclusion is that a lot of people aren't pulling their weight, and those aren't the highest earners...
This is an argument that has quite a bit of nuance to it. I'd argue that the iPhone is a luxury item for certain definitions of luxury, that in fact it is more luxurious than something like a diamond necklace if you use a utilitarian definition of luxury.
Exactly. Staff cuts like that would have been a much better example than the loss of what most would consider a luxury.
Right on. I have always felt X was a horrible idea. OS X's Quartz, on the other hand, is a thing of beauty.

Is Google going to use X for the Chrome OS or will they roll their own?

EDIT: spelling.
Indeed. It's easy to think that things were manufactured better in the good old days (whenever that was) when anything that didn't survive is out of sight and therefore out of mind.

While it's quite possible that several specific things were manufactured objectively better at some point in the past, basing judgments about the past solely on nostalgia and the few pieces that are still holding up well is not the foundation of a strong argument.