skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Although vastly different in size, NYC and San Francisco are the most closely related cities in the USA when it comes to urban density. It's not that much of a stretch to compare the two. A big difference is that in San Francisco it's very easy to wind up in a bad neighborhood. Some of the worst neighborhoods are right in the middle of the city. In New York, it's hard to wind up in a bad neighborhood, unless you live there. This is a return to NYC for me and it's interesting to see how much safer it is than it was even 10 years ago, when it was already much safer than the 1980s...
If I am at my house, then I like blasting the music as high as possible. Me sometimes getting up and dancing really isn't a problem because it only means that I'm in a good mood and the coding is easier. (Of course I sit back down and code vigorously to make up for lost time afterwards.) However, if I am in a public place, coding can be hard because I don't like hearing people shouting (who does? the shouter?) so I prefer silence in that case, but when you are at home and have the ability, whatever music you like- you should play.

I listen to a lot of hip hop and rap, so I start break dancing and crypt walking. Pretty sweet I know =p
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This was a great read. I guess I have underestimated the intelligence of bears!
http://www.simplynoise.com/

http://www.simplynoise.com/download.html#soundscapes
Anything really (rock to trance), but i will turn it off when i have a really difficult problem that i havnt solved before or if i am learning something new.
Maybe it shouldn't be that surprising that most of the big ideas seem to be behind us in computing. Automobiles have been fundamentally the same for decades (speaking broadly). It could be that new areas of technology are more like explorers finding new lands. The newer finds don't tend to be as big within that area after a while.

Coincidentally, Freeman Dyson recently said that physics has been undergoing such a slowing down. (His daughter was mentioned in the article). He also mentioned that the field of biology is speeding up. (Link to his Charlie Rose interview http://www.charlierose.com/view/interview/10560 (doesn't go into much detail concerning the given point, but it is Freeman Dyson.)
perhaps hackers are sometimes interested in algorithms
the problem isn't that people were too dumb/greedy to notice. it's that they weren't punished for not noticing it. you'd be amazed what a little incentive does to people's willingness to self educate.
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While working I use this strategy to limit my HN reading to compile cycles: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=447077
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Yes, massive abuse is -possible-. But it's just not happen very often, at least as far as I know. When was the last time you heard of someone being blackmailed using information found this way?

The worst cases of information abuse I've heard of in Sweden are medical personel (sp?) reading the journals of famous people, and I think that someone at a telephone company checked who his girlfriend talked/texted with and/or where she was. I'm sure that there's more that we don't hear about, but it appears to be a fairly limited problem.

The biggest problem I see is that we're building a very useful infrastructure for abuse if something like Stasi (hah! was going to write "the Nazis", but stayed my hand in time) should come to power. Then they won't have to spend time building a surveilance apparatus, and can get on with the harassing right away.
Counterpoint:

It took millions of dollars to launch the Lexus brand. Probably hundreds of millions.

When you divide your brand awareness efforts into two distinct parts, you'll effectively cut your marketing budget in half. One of the biggest hurdles new companies face is getting people to know and trust a new brand. Getting them to give you money is even harder.

Admittedly, like Toyota and their existing dealer/repair network, you get some of the "brand split" at no significant extra cost (servers, bandwidth), but the most expensive thing is reaching customers and making them aware of you.
If it really was that blatant, why did it happen? Doesn't the fact that it burst by definition mean that most people did not recognize it?

But Taleb makes a different point: Discounting the apocalypse is exactly what he's arguing against, because this is essentially what LTCM et al were doing with their models. They calculated probabilities to make sure that the estimated payoff was greater than the estimated loss, but they got the distributions wrong. What you should try to do is make sure that the apocalypse can't happen, that you aren't exposed so that one outlier will take you down. Because due to the nature of the system (there is only a sample of one of the world economy) you simply can't gather data that can pin down the wings of the distributions to the precision you need.

According to the models used at the time, the Black Monday 1987 was something like a 30-sigma event. If the distributions truly were gaussian, such an event should never happen in the history of the Universe. So you have a choice between thinking that we just had an incredibly bad luck, or the model is wrong. I'd go with the latter.
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Bach. Any other music causes me to lose focus. Total silence drives me slowly insane. Bach is just perfect.
Well for starters it would make conversions from free to paid that much more confusing and unlikely... I have to switch to a different website to get these other features???? What about all my friends on this website? Uh... wait, what? They're the same people? I'm confused!
>> you're pretty much guaranteed that a search on "seo consultant" will return the best seo consultants.

this is pretty much the only subject where, by definition, the google search gives you the best results.
Cool links guys, I just discovered this site for some nice indie tunes along with some other stuff, all totally free of course http://www.triplejunearthed.com/Charts/
I've never understood why you throttle a motorcycle by twisting the handle. It's not a particularly comfortable or natural motion, and it's relatively easy for external factors (shifting in your seat, a bump, etc.) to affect the amount of gas you're giving the bike.

Seems like it would be a lot better to map the throttle to a thumb trigger, like on a jet ski.

Edit: also, I just remembered those various videos we've all seen at one time or another where someone is riding a motorcycle at low speed, loses his/her balance, and can only manage to hang onto the bike by the right grip. That's a moment when you really don't want the throttle mapped to the grip.
You're right in some of your criticisms -- I had already edited it to remove some of that language.

But do we have no middle ground here?

We agree, for instance, that most people really AREN'T equipped to understand finance as it is practiced. The difference is that you believe there is a class of people whose advice can be relied upon. Taleb thinks not for epistemological reasons. The perverse incentives I mentioned are (for him) barely worth discussing, since they are just corruption rather than self-delusion.

(And when I say corruption, I don't mean they are necessarily evil people; I mean their agenda is now misaligned with the customers').

Anyway, I keep saying "Taleb says" because I am not well versed in these matters. I study it about as much as a layperson can, and all I know is that most of it still seems too complex to predict.
Hi, yep, the website is expected to be released soon.
Quoting you from earlier:

"Normal people", by which I mean myself, want to plug in their iPhone and have all of their stuff synced without ever clicking any button. Drag-n-drop is nice, but even that's more of a hassle than I care to bother with.

If syncing is on by default, having to turn it on doesn't sound like "ever clicking any button".
Snowmobiles work like that, too. My guess is that not having your thumb gripping the bars makes the handlebar grip much less secure, especially since you're not really gripping the throttle with your full fingers since two of them typically are covering the brake.

But it does definitely give you wrist cramp on long rides...
I have to throw a shout out to Tarlton, mum(there is a back tick over the u but I am too lazy to find the letter), and Sanchez is Driven By Demons. They have gotten me through some tough coding sessions and they are all close enough to instrumental without being instrumental to make it work. If you needed to classify it I guess it they would be post-rock.
There is a class of people whose advice can be relied upon. It's up to you to find out who those people are. If your broker is not performing up to snuff, you have the right to fire him. It's just like I have the right to fire my auto mechanic, who knows more about cars than I do, if he's not doing a good job.

As for finance being complex, it's really not.
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It's Mack truck, not Mac truck.
Man, here I was thinking that Apple was branching out yet again.
I loves me some Spicy Redneck, myself. I fear the Stoner Pack though. . .
Hell Im here just a short time but this is at least 3rd discussion of this since I registered:
http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=668087
http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=716219
"For this reason alone he shouldn't be so quickly dismissed."

I'm not sure he'd agree with you. Taleb's books repeatedly stress the importance of survivorship bias. In any population, they'll be someone forecasting just about any conceivable event. No matter how unlikely events turn out to be, somebody is eventually going to be right, and then that person is lauded as a genius for having forecasted correctly. When really they've done no such thing; rather, people have just retrospectively picked out the person who happened to guess right.

I think Taleb would say you shouldn't dismiss him because there's ample evidence throughout history that he's right, not because he happened to guess right this time. Whenever debt levels have risen to what they are now, it's resulted in economic instability and chaotic behavior. It's not just this century: you can find examples back to Roman times.
Exactly. Europe is quite narrow continuous set timezones whereas in the American graph shows the east coast and west coast nicely.
I don't think it is a good choice for the generic web startup with 2~4 levels of activity. If you're pitching the different levels to totally different markets, I could see it. (Example: Heroku versus Big Freaking Enterprise-ku.)

For startups that don't have that severe of a segmentation between the needs of the different tiers, it sounds like a way of time and money. Your maintenance needs just increased proportional to the number of brands. (Easy to implement? gah I shiver at thinking about it.)

Want to do an A/B test? Enjoy writing it four times, and potentially ending up with 4 different optimal choices that you have to maintain for forever.

You also split your link equity -- 4 domains with 1,000 links split between them won't rank nearly as well as 1 domain with 1,000 links pointed at it. Because search is a Winners Take Most game, it won't end up with each of the domains having 25% of what they could have, it will be closer to .01% of what they could have.
I'm sure you realize that whatever happened to your particular machine is not necessarily indicative of all machines from the same manufacturer.
This is sort of un-related, but for fans of coding to ambient music (or anyone for that matter) - if you haven't already, check out "9 Beet Stretch" - http://www.park.nl/park_cms/public/index.php?thisarticle=118 - Beethoven's 9th Symphony stretched out over a 24 hour period. I heard it first on the "Time" episode of Radio Lab (great show). It's a real trip to listen to.
For those who dislike reading/skimming blog posts with gratuitous margins (why do those "design" people insist on doing that on the web?), here is a concise jottit version: http://jottit.com/byqzm/
very true about the post-rock (I listen to Mogwai while coding as well). I'd add movie soundtracks / scores to the list for the same reason. Still a huge fan of the Battlestar Galactica soundtracks, esp season 2, and pretty much anything done by John Murphy (28 Days Later, Miami Vice).
Which is probably why he wasn't paying the rent in the first place.
vocal trance channel on http://www.di.fm Lots of other great channels on there too. Sometimes somafm.com as well.
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Sorry man, I've only been here for one of those but I dont remember it. Guess we just like to talk about these kinds of things?
Let's be friends :D
That is so SCSI!
And no other 'classical' music does it for you at all? You'll excuse me if I find that hard to believe.

Probably because I haven't really listened to Bach (youtube et. al. are blocked for me so I can't go and listen right this instant).
Lots of groove salad and drum n bass. post-rock is great too.
I listen to metal (Mastodon, Neurosis, Isis, Misery Speaks, Cult of Luna) in the day if I'm wired on coffee. Otherwise, I listen to a lot of ambient/IDM (Marconi Union, Signer,Arovane, etc).

Generally if I'm drawing, daydreaming, designing, or what have you I listen to a lot of indie, downtempo, sexy/chill house.

When all else fails, it's Wu Tang all day, son.
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The basics of devising algorithmic strategies come from the field of Market Microstructure in Finance/Economics.

I took a graduate level course on it (math prof. from Stanford).

I found a decent graduate level course syllabus with all the main literature and links to literature in it:

http://pages.stern.nyu.edu/~jhasbrou/Teaching/2006%20Fall%20...

One of the main models is the Kyle model:
Kyle, Albert S., 1985, Continuous auctions and insider trading. Econometrica 53, 1315-1336 (http://www.jstor.org/pss/1913210)
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http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=h267AmRE6iA

Sho nuff.
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Taleb needs to find something new to talk about. In his book Fooled By Randomness, he takes a paragraph and makes it a chapter. Takes a chapter and makes it a book, talking endlessly about black swans, how people who are successful are successful because they got lucky and repeating analogy after analogy to make the same basic point. In this post he makes sweeping statements about debt being bad, based on wisdom from Babylonian times and Roman proverbs:

"David, you must counter this complexity by lowering indebtedness. We have known since Babylonian times that debt is treacherous and allows no room for mistakes: felix qui nihil debet goes the Roman proverb ("happy is he who owes nothing")."

He sounds like Ahmedinejan in his letter to former president Bush advising him to embrace the ways of the prophets of old :)

There are many situations where debt is your friend but like all good things it can be abused. Common Taleb, find something new to talk about! Black Swan is so 2002!
Ask HN: Where/how to start marketing once you've launched?
We recently launched PubliciTweet which is still in a public/private beta. We have a few hundred users signed up but mainly spammers. They've been proven to be great testers since they are fairly heavy users pushing out lots of messages. It's helped greatly to iron out many kinks in the system.

But now we'd like to shift focus on what we deem to be our target customer. This would be marketing firms or musicians/small businesses.

What do you recommend as a starting point for marketing.
just wanted to say: porcupine tree++. i do listen to a lot of post rock (mogwai of course, kinski, explosions in the sky, and post-metal like isis, neurosis, cult of luna).

i'm probably one of the rare developers who listens to a lot of death metal though. the mathematical structure and intensity helps me get into that "flow state".

a really nice set of studio quality headphones is one of those things that i consider a professional necessity.
Old Metallica always does it for me.... actually silence is usually better but I don't get that very often around my workplace.
I like violin, cello and piano. No singing. I can't work when listening to opera, for instance. Italian opera is almost OK, but German opera is too distracting.

Classical composers other than Bach would probably work, but since most of the classical music CD's I have are Bach CD's, I can't say I have tried listening to many other composers, to be honest. I like Mozart, but his music is too "happy". Bach's music is more mature.
Incorporate your facts into a song.

"We the people..."
A lot of punk music, combined with blues and jazz during the coding routines, but turn music off while working on something hard.
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That's insightful! Thanks for your feedback.
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Let me recommend Franz Schubert. I think you'll find he meets your criteria quite well - the Pandora station for Schubert is fantastic.
The primary purpose behind different Brands is to serve different markets, which usually involves providing multiple levels of service.

To skip from A to C, while trying to capture the same market, is largely a recipe for confusion, and extra unnecessary costs (particularly in marketing / positioning).

To complete your example, people who buy a Lexus were about to buy a Mercedes or BMW, not a Toyota.

To add another example, people who fly Jetstar (low cost Australian airline fully owned by premium airline Qantas) weren't about to fly Qantas. They were going to holiday within driving distance of home - the new brand opened the bigger business up to a new market.
"If it really was that blatant, why did it happen? Doesn't the fact that it burst by definition mean that most people did not recognize it?"

Some data, some math, and an interpretation you won't hear every day:

http://quickfacts.census.gov/qfd/states/00000.html

http://photos1.blogger.com/photoInclude/x/blogger/2825/754/1...

There are 127 million housing units in the U.S. At the peak of the bubble, 7 million houses/year were sold. A total of roughly 30 million houses were sold in the boom years of 2002-2007, assuming there's no double-counting (people who sold a house multiple times), which is probably a pessimistic assumption. That means that over half of U.S. households took absolutely no part in the bubble - they just sat tight.

Now look at the inventory numbers from the last two years. They go up rather dramatically. This means there were more sellers than buyers, i.e. a large number of people realized that home prices were selling for more than they thought the house was worth, and quickly put their house on the market to take advantage of this. Sure looks like people recognized the bubble to me, it's just that by definition they can't all get out before it bursts.

My interpretation is that most people did recognize the bubble - it's just that they're not the ones that the New York Times writes stories about. They held onto their home and neither bought nor sold, instead just going about their business. Or they sold at the peak, rented for a bit, and are now buying back in at half price and pocketing a few hundred grand. Smart people tend not to brag about how they just made a killing off other people's stupidity. It prevents people from being stupid again, which limits the opportunities for future killings. Besides, it tends to kill the mood at parties.
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Nah, I think that article is posed wrong. They compare smoking the electronic cigs to not smoking at all. Of course not smoking is better. Much much better. But by blocking them from the market they are denying another use case. For people that already smoke tobacco. I don't know if you smoke tobacco and if so, if you tried ecigs. I do, and I have. And smoking ecigs is much much much better although in a "lesser evil" manner. The e-liquid (what gets vaporized in ecigs) manufacturers should, I believe, purposefully try and try pretty hard to mach the level of toxins and carcinogens in common cigarettes. They don't.
What is readily perceivable is to a net BIG gain. I have used these devices for about 3 months last year. They were wonderful. I would ABSOLUTELY prefer them to regular cigarettes even if they would not have a wonderful potential for quitting smoking altogether which I strongly believe (with arguments) they do. Outright denying that opportunity should be considered criminal in my humble opinion.
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Nicotine makes you feel better for a short while.
The reason you've been feeling bad is because you lack nicotine.
Non smokers are always on the level of 'feeling good', they don't need nicotine to compensate for their lack of nicotine.

Don't start smoking. You don't need it.
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Twitter, when you get down to it, is like IRC where everyone has their own channel. When you "follow" a friend, you are joining their channel.

IRC is decentralised and is an open, free protocol.

I would prefer to keep using IRC but I have started using twitter for the same reason I had to install MSN messenger - to keep in contact with friends who can't or won't use IRC.
since it worked for you, I reused aproximately the same text as my post. Thanks again!
Yes and I love reading those... They are usually much more interesting and insightful
It depends on the context people are interacting with the site.

A blog is "owned" by the author, and comments are from guests who aren't invested enough in the site to register, but who still make up the core of the community.

On a forum, or Metafilter, or Hacker News, the content is produced and owned by every participant who will likely interact over and over and in the process build up their localized reputation and profile on the site as part of their ownership. I think that any of these could be done effectively without registration, but it's not as common.

(I think partly because there are business reasons for registration -- it makes it easier to opt-in people. Even people without the business reasons follow the convention.)
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Silence, I need lot of concentration.
The motorcycle throttle is more comfortable for extended periods.

Jet skis and snowmobiles are generally recreational vehicles, so not held at a constant speed for a long time.
That was awesome. I wish I was understood half of those undertones, but the story was fresh and somehow sexy in a bizarre, sociopathic, way. Thank you for sharing that gnosis :)