skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
If you're really serious about learning the science, the best way is to use a textbook. Back in my days, the most recommended one was "Economics" by Paul Samuelson and William Nordhaus, I believe. In fact, it's been in print since 1948, so that it's probably the most successful economic textbooks of all time.

However, it seems to have lost some traction in recent years. My impression is that "Principles of Economics" by N. Gregory Mankiw took its place. If Mankiw's "Principles" is written as clearly as his Macroeconomics textbook, it's certainly worth to start with it.

Of course, both are quite expensive and -- depending on your math education -- demanding. So, as a test whether textbooks are something you could like, you may like to start with the free textbook by R. Preston McAfee's "Introduction to Economic Analysis". It's available here:

http://www.introecon.com/

As an alternative, you may like to look for smaller textbooks that mix formal and applied economics. They may be demanding but also somewhat practical. The later part may make it easier to get the former part. As a disadvantage, they don't provide much overview. Among those I've read and can recommend, are:

* "Managerial Economics" by Ian Dobbs, and

* "Games for Business and Economics" by Roy Gardner.

Of course, if you're interested in something more entertaining and less formal, there are quite a few books that have been published after the success of "Freakonomics" by Steven Levitt and Stephen J. Dubner.

Unfortunately, none of them are really introductions to the field. They all try to make the point that economics, in general, is interesting by presenting random collections of interesting ideas or stories. Most of them also concentrate on the author's own research which is hardly a good start.

That said, they are still entertaining to read. So, you may like to look at the following ones:

* "The Undercover Economist" by Tim Harford

* "Naked Economics" by Charles Wheelan

I've read the first one and he covers a rather broad selection of topics. I didn't read the second one but the reviews at Amazon made me put it on my wish-list.

So, Henry Hazlitt's book is still unique and worth reading, since it covers one of the more basic idea of economics without using any formal means. Just beware that it's outdated (since it's been written much research has gone into the problem of market failure), and that it's somewhat opinionated.

Of course, the later is a general problem in economics: researchers usually assume a rather simple utility function of public decision makers, namely to maximize public welfare. This is hardly the only possible one, just the only one people can agree upon.
indeed, I don't doubt that once we can do parallelism on par with the biological world in neural network models (which are probably already available or being researched) many of these studies will be thought of as ill considered funding streams. Not so sure about chemical processors - I still expect the pay off from this research to be fantastically beneficial for all sorts of domains.
Ask HN: Learning PHP, reluctantly, for a lisp hacker
I hear awful things about PHP as a language and have barely touched it, but it looks like I might need to get my hands dirty and learn it in enough detail to make architectural choices that will haunt my team for a while.

My closest point of reference is Django/Python, and professionally I've spent the most time in C# and personally in Common Lisp (of course recently exploring Clojure).

I enjoyed Cal Henderson's book Building Scalable Web Sites, which is PHP-based but not too PHP-specific.

With that background, let me ask for the community's judgment and experience:

Is there a recommended experienced programmer's guide to PHP with limitations, gotchas, and quirks?

Hacker preferences on IDE's, free or not?

Tools like remote debuggers? Lint equivalent?

Maps of the community, libraries, and available resources?

Tradeoffs of Modern frameworks, especially on the ORM side - what's the closest thing to Hibernate?

Security, testing, performance best practices guides?

Possibilities and limits for integration with C, JVM, .Net, and dynamic languages' existing libraries?

Also, using HaXe and compiling to PHP - is it a mature technology and the cure-all it appears? Are there gotchas?
Why MDA Is Like Waterfall Process And Is Doomed To Suffer The Same Fate
Shareflow: It's Google Wave, But Available Now - ReadWriteEnterprise
It's hard to come up with a plausible alternative to the "idiot" theory.

I suppose that, given that the only way the AP is likely to survive is by government fiat, this could be a perverse form of lobbying. It's a publicity stunt.

Step A: Try to demonstrate that all the headlines on the web were originally written by you.

Step B: Argue that this makes your organization indispensable -- when you go out of business, trains and buses will stop running, the sun will stand still in the sky, cancer will never be cured.

Step C: To draw attention to your argument: Scream, shout, jump on chairs, sue everyone in sight. When none of this works: Decry the lawlessness of society, demand protection.

Step D: ???

Step E: Government action!

The smartest members of the music industry (but not, alas, the influential ones) have said for years that the realistic way forward is a blanket licensing scheme: Each of us gets the right to download and play whatever we want, and in return we're legally obligated to pay an annual fee to some ASCAP-like organization that divides the money up among music publishers. Now, I like this idea, but the obvious downside is: Who is a music publisher, and how do we figure out how to divide the money? You've got to come up with some kind of ground rules. There's going to be a lot of people working the refs. Perhaps the AP has concluded that such a scheme is their only hope and is trying to make sure they're positioned to argue that the ground rules should favor them.

Or, you know, there's the idiot theory. Still might be the best one, really. Occam's Razor and all that.

The thing which really makes AP sound like a mental patient is all this raving about the "wrapper" technology that will magically track down uses of their content on the web. But I'm not necessarily convinced they they really believe in the Easter Bunny, phlogiston, or digital watermarks for plain text. Perhaps this talk about magical "wrappers" is just a face-saving attempt to say "we will find you if you quote our material" without having to say "...and we will use Google to do it, of course, just like everyone else does. Of course, our publicly-stated belief is that Google is an unethical leech and that they should be paying us money every time they return a search containing some of our writing. But of course we won't be paying anyone else for the writing that we find using Google, because we're special and besides we don't have any money."

Actually, that explanation still sounds like the raving of a mental patient. It all keeps coming back to the idiot theory.
It's not about what it is. It's about how would you feel if someone else would use it. Especially when it is clearly forbidden.
It comes pre-packaged and set up, with integration for the market (of questionable value) and Motorola emulators (fantastic - the more test targets the better).

Downloading Eclipse+ADT separately wasn't too hard last time I did it, but it's always nice to have steps removed. Most handset/java (Android, RIM, J2ME) developers I know have several Eclipse installations on their machine anyway to stop plugin conflicts so having one more is no big deal.

(EDIT: They have also removed Linux support, which seems to be an odd decision to say the least.)
MDA will only fail if it's approached from a "the model must be complete" perspective. MDA isn't really a process and IMHO fits nicely with Agile processes.
How To Sell Your Brand:Sports Celebrity Endorsement
Not to mention that 105% of the pain of coding for series 60 Nokia devices is the (extensive, sprawling, frequently redundant) library rather than the core language.

(Then you get to pick more pain to go on top, such as which versions of network connection management are you going to support?)
This is going a long way toward forcing the issues of copyright, software licenses, and music DRM. People are able to relate to this issue much better because it has a good physical metaphor.
Hacking outlook - using raw COM interop
Also applies to Windows mail
"They" is best, but "he" is more terse. Perhaps we should coopt another vowel and use "E". "I" is I, "U" is you, "E" is he/they. My work here is done...
Cloaking against earthquakes
"I make my living as a writer, editor, and photographer, and realize that everyone creating content needs an income. "

LOL. Hence, the entire legal system needs to be horrifically twisted to meet these people's 'needs'.
Maybe common facts or stories (eg "MJ dies") could free or cheaper than exclusive content.
Fases del embarazo
Getting started with the SciPy (Scientific Python) library
Lactancia materna
I've observed the same things. Articulated very well, not sure who this person is, but very insightful.
Do we need stock exchanges exclusive for Value Investors?
fail? ;-)
That's really not what he was saying though, was it?
It's a move of desperation. Papers sign multi-year, mutli-thousand (or hundred thousand, depending on the paper's size) contracts to use AP content, and many of them have been considering canceling their contracts to save money.

http://www.newspaperdeathwatch.com/star-tribune-ditches-ap-o...

The AP has to do something or will find itself completely irrelevant. While they produce graphics and quite a bit of the foreign news published in this country, most domestic stories come from their member papers. Fewer member papers = less value for members = death spiral for AP.

They have to do something to add value for their member papers. Leading the charge to an industry-wide pay wall actually makes some sense, as they are in the unique position to unify the 1,400 papers that belong to the organization.

That's not to say it will work. Technologically, it seems retarded on its face. Economically, I have no idea how they'll enforce it. But suing users has kept the music industry in business - for now at least - so who knows, maybe suing aggregators and bloggers will keep the AP in business.

RIAA - Meet the Associated Press.
Thank you. That was very helpful :)
Another simply awful British company on the back foot at the moment over human rights violations due to the mining of a precious mineral is Vedanta. They bought a mountain and planned to demolish it in the search for Bauxite, despite the fact it is the ancestral home and most sacred place for the Dongria Kondh tribe. Luckily Survival International have been on the case from the start and this Monday a rep from the DK will be arriving in London to protest at Vedanta's AGM.

http://www.survival-international.org/news/4783

check them out - probably my favourite charity of all time
Gold nanotubes boost DVD storage
Submit to HN Browser Plugin
I am wondering whether or not there is a plugin for any browser so you can immediately submit an article you find to HN. Thanks.
see 'a beautiful mind'.

We are pattern recognizers, feed us random noise and we'll see patterns.

DNA is not exactly random noise, but for this purpose it is probably close enough.
car or motorcycle mechanic
Robin Hobb’s The Dragon Keeper: A review
Alexandria university, Faculty of Engineering website hacked
They also have code snippets and Application Creation wizards. I think the later will be useful what with the api still being unstable(pmi pkg disappearing between 1.0 to 1.5 etc).
Singletons and their problems in Python
Sounds like backpacking. Great fun, if you're in that frame of mind or want to be.
Choosing a non-relational database; why we migrated from MySQL to MongoDB
I wasn't thinking of Romeo and Juliet but the cosmic bacground noise has it in there, if only I remembered the offset...

Finding "killroy was here" in your own DNA would surely make you wonder though :)
Nobody is going to take the time to go through a complex credit card transaction in order to pay a dime or a quarter to read a newspaper.

If the transaction is anything easier than a credit card transaction to process, it's not gonna be secure. There might be some attempt at some "no bother" microtransactions systems, until people start getting microbills from Kiev for 3,780,000 nickles for micro-porn. Ooops. I figure these microtrasaction system got about 6 months before Ukrainian hackers have figured out how to buy BMWs with nickles
Sapir-Whorf has recently had a resurgence, with the most prominent being the work of Lera Boroditsky:

http://www-psych.stanford.edu/~lera/papers/
"What feels like a fair price for a copy of a web page, on the other hand, is nothing. They’re just ones and zeroes."

Really? Mac OSX is just ones and zeros. Does Gruber think that, along with all other forms of commercial software or anything else that can be digitized, be free?
Open sourcing will destroy your business model if you focus on Competitor instead of Customer.
docs.php.net is exhaustive, especially for a lisp hacker.
Because these decisions are made in pieces by a society, not by a few idealists in binary. That's just like saying, "Why not stop listening to ASCAP music?" It's almost impossible to avoid AP content at the moment and will remain so for the near future. And that's the problem with behemoths in many cases -- they're not nearly as sensitive to market pressures and so often end up being idiotic while society changes around them.
Silicon Valley Survivor: Cisco CEO John Chambers Projects Strong Growth
> The next experiment, and the one after that, never referred to Mr. Young.

I read this years ago, and it left me with the impression that most science is cargo cult science (90% of everything?). It's a delight to read people with ridiculous levels of integrity - like Chomsky or Feynman. It's a shame that integrity seems to require Socratic heroism.
Did anyone else assume that Stevens referred to Robert Stevens (http://www.kohala.com/start/)? Sadly, it does not.
The title is misleading: there will definitely be more linux exploits.
Oh sorry. Yes, you're correct. "off by a minute" meant that it would read 7:00/miles (~8.6 MPH) rather than 6:00/miles (10.0 MPH) for pace.
No, unless you start giving away the product for free.
You may enjoy photos of my friend's shop: flat6.com
Beauty is in the eye of the beholder and if one considers that PHP started as a templating language and has evolved in what it is to-day the 'awfulness' goes away.

For a person with C# background it offers the advantage of extending the language if you need to. For IDE I use Netbeans. For frameworks I use CodeIgniter and CakePHP. For ORM I use Doctrine. For CMS I use Drupal. For one two night projects I use Wordpress.

There is so much in PHP in the web that it would be hard to keep yourself from re-discovering the wheel!
I've seen ve/ver/vis ( http://en.allexperts.com/e/v/ve/ve_%28pronoun%29.htm ), but doubt it'll ever take off.

They/them/their seems the most likely.
Cable Lengths Algo
I need an algo to do the following:

(01) You have a number of cable drums of length L each.

(02) You need to cut lengths of cables from these drums say, n1xL1,n2xL2,n3xL3, where n is the number of cables and L is their length.

(03) You need to minimize waste.

Does anyone one of a solution? Any mathematics papers?
And GCC 4.0 is incompatible with STL.
Why on silverlight, why not on project gutenberg ?
I guess I'm going to go a little bit activist here, but this story makes me think that strategically, now is a good time for people who believe more things should be in the public domain. As media companies and publishers do what they can to hang on to the last grasps of industries which are passing them by, they may start to do things which seem pretty ridiculous, as is seen here. Out of this ridculousness may come a little bit more open-mindedness on the part of the general public toward content belonging in the public domain.
Girl born with half a brain retains full vision
That's by far the best comment in this whole thread.

Interaction online is purely cerebral, even the more kinky versions of it. The ultimate in platonic contemplation, just you, your computer and your internet connection.

It makes you wonder what the long term effects of the www are.
Love Aaj Kal Movie Reviews, Wallpapers
If a significant number of users were using iTunes to sync 3rd party devices and a future update to iTunes inadvertently broke that syncing, who do you think the consumer would blame?
ask W.H.G. ...if I were to guess, the real answer might have to do something with control for power. Speaking of integrity, power and Gutenberg: "Understanding Power" is quite a book.
Chomsky espouses some pretty strange political views.
Outsourcing the Mind
I discovered that 5th one while doodling in high school. It blew my mind at the time (and it can be extended to dimensions other than 2).
This is What Treatment For Yeast Infection Entails
I heard of a movement to introduce hu/hum as in human, which makes sense, but really the idea of using "he" to be gender neutral doesn't bother me. Maybe it's because I'm a sexist, bourgeois pig?
Maybe I don't read enough flame wars but I feel like hatred is a bit of a strong word. I'm thoroughly unimpressed with almost all of Microsoft's software, but I really don't see the point of any 'hate'. Perhaps this is Linus' point :)
Can a biologically accurate brain be built from a supercomputer?
“If someone can build multibillion-dollar businesses out of keywords, we can build multihundred-million businesses out of headlines.”

Wow, what a truly epic misunderstanding of what search engines do.

The thinking goes: Google is just a business built out of keywords. They come up with the best keywords, and we fork over cash to them for that. AP has got some slick headlines which are even better than keywords, because they have more words. Also, we produce them, not steal them from other people like Google, which must be an even better business!

I also have to say, the whole rights-managed link framework sounds like the biggest pie-in-the-sky project I've ever heard. Some consultant really sold them on something that is going to be quite lucrative (for the consultant obviously).
In both of your wealthy and thrifty baker examples, you seem to think that the $250 is stuck under his mattress, and needs to be pried out ASAP to do any good.

More likely:
1) it's being invested in some business activity, which loses that capital in order to pay for a broken window
OR
2) he's earning interest on it, negating most of the time difference in your thrifty banker example

Lastly, even if it were under his mattress, putting that money back in circulation increases the amount of money in the market chasing goods, which increases everyone's prices by a small amount.

As to your serial killer counterexample, I think the correct analogy is "if it's harmful to the serial killer to die of a heart attack, it's equally harmful for the nation to die of heart attacks."
Feels a lot like a variation on the Knapsack problem, which is known to be NPC-Complete.

If that's true (and I haven't verified it - that's your problem) then you can use any of the variations on the greedy algorithm to get a reasonably good solution.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Knapsack_problem
Goodbye, Linux Hacker.
Of course it doesn't! He touched on the reason -- the way your product works is not a business. If a car manufacturer open sourced all of its data -- everything about the car, everything about the equipment they use to build the car, etc, then nothing would happen. A competitor might co-opt some of that information to improve their business, but no one who would have purchased a car from them would use the information to build a car themselves.

I know the analogy isn't perfect because of hardware overhead and whatever, but it basically holds -- the customers who spend money have only a tiny overlap with customers who want to install and change your code.
IMO they are both pretty terrible.
> Google indexes the internet in near real time.

Technically Google only index's top sites in near real time. CNN might be walked many times a day, but if you think that every blog or torrent site gets walked even close to a fraction as often then your mistaken.
using HaXe and compiling to PHP - is it a mature technology and the cure-all it appears?

There are three reasons to use PHP. One is that it's very simple to deploy because there aren't a lot of layers between you and Apache's C code, and those layers have been exhaustively tested.

The second is that it is very easy to learn and there are lots of people who can tinker with it. It's generally easy for another PHP programmer to get your code running. It's generally easy for them to read and understand your code. It's a standard, and it's a simple standard. (A bit too simple, for problems far outside its sweet spot -- but that's what other platforms are for.)

The third is that you want to integrate closely with one of the toolkits or frameworks that have already been written in PHP.

HaXe breaks all of these features. I see no reason to use it on a production project. If your problem is truly unsuitable for PHP you should use something else. (You have a choice; this is server-side code.) If you can't bring yourself to write code without fancy language features that are missing from PHP you should find another project or another job. You are doing yourself no favors by trying to paper over the issue, whatever it is.
Hey I'm no fan of Windows, but I really don't see what's so wrong with having a 2-3GB virtual machine around on an external hard drive or something so you can sync your iPod. Perhaps if you're that against Windows on some sort of fundamental level then the iPod is not an appropriate product for you? Or maybe it's time to get a Mac mini for a media center or something and it's problem solved from another angle.
<quote>
One time I sat down in a bath where there was a beautiful girl sitting with a guy who didn’t seem to know her. Right away I began thinking, “Gee! How am I gonna get started talking to this beautiful nude babe?”

I’m trying to figure out what to say, when the guy says to her, I’m, uh, studying massage. Could I practice on you?
</quote> :)
More info on these rockets:

http://www.spectrum.ieee.org/aerospace/space-flight/rockets-...
-F#

-Microsoft speach

-Parts of Microsoft Office

-Most of their C++ compiler

-The tech behind Windows Streaming Media

-TabletPC OS research

-Parts of the technology behind Bing

Along with alot of other things
Read this article:
http://www.microsoft.com/presspass/exec/rick/04-16svalley.ms...