skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Also in this space are LendingClub, who don't do auctions but have a similar model of letting people buy portions of other people's loans. They claim an effective APY of just under 10%; I've invested a (very small) sum with them as an experiment and so far am on track to hit that APY (after 2 months).
Its not just the business world. Most of our academic system is built around carrots and sticks. Exams and tests are the primary basis that determine our academic success. Creativity is the last thing that will help you in a timed exam. You have to get to the correct answer in a short amount of time. It is very mechanical.

The same system of measuring competence seeps into the corporate world. Job interviews, especially technical interviews are very similar to the exams, maybe worse.
My definition of "overflow" is along the lines of "value is too big to be represented by said type". If they had been using integers, ok. But they're using floats, and floats can hold numbers bigger than that.

It all boils down to what type you consider the entries have, opposed to what Google considers.
The algorithm probably first decides how to do the math and then does the math.

EDIT: single-precision does behave this way:

-bash-3.2$ cat precision.c
#include <stdio.h>
int main() {
float f1 = 999999999999999;
float f2 = 999999999999997;
printf("%f\n", f1 - f2);
return 0;
}
-bash-3.2$ gcc precision.c
-bash-3.2$ ./a.out
0.000000

I am saying that if it's not consistent with single-precision across multiple inputs, there's probably code that looks at the numbers involved and decides what kind of numeric type to use to do the calculations. In this case, single-precision floating-point happens to be a bad choice.

Second edit: replacing the 7 with a 6 still prints 0. The parent is right: something else is going on here. I like the theory espoused elsewhere in this discussion that it's a result of some truncation to avoid returning nonzero when the result should be zero.
Desmond?
While it might be a fun game (more fun for Evan than for the rest of us, I'm sure) and I'm sure it's a great publicity stunt for Wired, I'm not sure what it's supposed to prove.

Playing hide-and-seek with a vanishingly small number of Wired readers who actually bothered to memorize what this guy looks like is very different from playing hide-and-seek with the police.
Can't wait til we come full circle and get back to client/server computing ;).

The next big hype cycle: OS as an OS.
Actually I would say it's the other way around.
It made me think of "egregious". (Probably not great)
Ah, sorry about that. I'll delete this one.
...or PyPy, for that matter.
As does the google calculator widget:

http://www.google.com/ig/directory?hl=en&url=www.google....
One advice to anybody who hasn't spent much time thinking about these things deeply before. Don't do this alone. Have somebody with whom you can discuss (not on computer). Your mind can become like a shifting sand and you won't have any sort of hold to understand the world. Which can be extremely disconcerting.

You have a world view that you have acquired/formed based on certain assumptions that you may have never questioned. Once you start questioning them, you won't stop at any assumption, and you go into a sort of mental abyss, especially, if you have never believed in God.

One consolation is that however hopeless it may feel when you go there, you'll probably come out and get back to your usual self.
"the output if you dump that into the search field, versus if you click on a label name, don't match if you have more than about 30 messages in that label. Go try it."

The output is different because it only shows me 20 rows per page when I search on label:label, versus 100 rows if I click the label, but the results are the same. Were you seeing something more broken that the number of results per page?

FWIW, I've tried it on a few labels, none having fewer than 10,000 messages in them.
A scanner camera article previously on HN: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=649150
Perhaps we can have a "public domain license," then. Attaching it to a project would go something like: "This software is in the public domain, as that term is defined under USC yadda-yadda. If your local law does not define the term similarly, then consider the conditions of USC yadda-yadda to be the terms of the license of this software to you."
We're a .NET shop. I'm actually a huge fan of the .NET stack, the IDE and everything.
I pretty much disagree with everything you list.
There are only unrealistic expectations if you foster them by going around and spouting off about how smart you are.

It is only difficult to deal with average people if you believe yourself to be above them and look down on them.

You only annoy people by asking questions at inappropriate times, if you were really that much smarter then you would know when to ask and when to shut it.

I don't know how you would measure the acceptance of traditions but off the cuff Stanford, MIT and other places where high IQ people tend to congregate seem to enjoy their traditions as much or more than more middling schools.

Sounds like a personal problem.

Nope regular joes find work boring too, just look at all the pulp fantasy stuff made to distract the common man.

The main problem with a high IQ seems to be it is easier to fall in to a narcissist trap of thinking you are somehow different from the common man just because you can add a little faster.
A letter to tomorrow
Again though, that comes back to my original point: Is it the duty of a corporation to question the direction of the court in decisions of law?

In other words, does google have a moral obligation, as defined by the state, to defend your privacy against the state? To what end? The plaintiff in this case seems intent on establishing a precedent that will effectively elevate corporations to be equal to that of government in enforcing legal constructs.

That doesn't seem like a reality I'd really like to see.
http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=782985
Packaging boxes printing
These guys appear to be having a hell of a lot of fun. Their technique of wrapping a stack from Amazon EC2 through Hadoop all the way up into Clojure, was the kind of thing I wondered about being possible, so it's pretty awesome to hear it is being done and done well by someone. The idea of iterating with Clojure in a REPL on a small dataset to develop or refine an algorithm, then pressing a button and see how it does running on some large dataset on EC2, sounds sublime.

Even if they never release any of the glue code that makes all this happen, just knowing it is possible is very encouraging.
The thread pool approach allows you to exploit much finer grain parallelism than explicitly fork/joining your own threads. So, an application that makes good use of this would probably have hundreds, if not thousands, of discrete work tasks (which I normally call "units of work," but Apple calls "blocks.")

What a thread pool infrastructure buys us is the separation of tasks (the bundle of information passed around the queues) from their execution context (in this case, a kernel thread). It puts a level of abstraction between what is executed and how that's executed.

At the risk of belaboring a point, this is an old idea - this is traditional multithreading. Java has a library for doing it, as does C++ (in Boost). A library for this kind of parallelism was, in fact, the first C++ library, written by Stroustrup. Even the Linux kernel uses this technique internally (by which I mean it's not exposed to applications at the user level). Cilk (the MIT project that spawned the company Cilk Arts which was recently acquired by Intel) is probably the best known example of providing language-level abstractions for this technique. (I reccomend their paper "The Implemention of the Cilk-5 Multithreaded Language": http://supertech.csail.mit.edu/papers/cilk5.pdf)

By pointing out that this is an old idea, I don't mean to denigrate what Apple has done. Execution matters, and from the looks of it, they've executed this well - they've got something working at the language and kernel level, which is non-trivial.
The RIAA, as much as it pains me to say this, is acting within the letter of the law, in that I would not call their suit frivolous. Immoral and unethical sure, but not frivolous.

They've put forward a case that explains that a particular person has broken an existing law and caused them damages of x amount, and the court has agreed with them in most cases.
Very interesting, but I wish that there was more information on the time scales involved.

How long does it take to grow one of these? How long will they last?
llvm-gcc?
Sounds more like a fault of the application than the OS. M$ in the title seems to be there for page views
Yet the example you gave would have been successful had it not been for outraged civilians mounting a boycott.

How many issues are being exploited that don't warrant such public outrage? My guess is more than a few.
Thanks for the share.

You may also want to edit out the "#comment-62670" from the URL (unless pointing to the comment was on purpose).
Wikipedia to Add Layer of Editing to Articles
Not at all. Especially, if you also offer an export feature. Trapping the user's data in your product is not nice.
The consensus seems to be that it's going to be difficult to scale traditional CMOS devices below the 22nm node. At those dimensions, you can't dissipate the heat produced by electrons tunneling through the gate dielectric. Beyond 22nm, it will probably be necessary to use novel gate designs, multiple gates, or start stacking multiple layers of traditional CMOS devices atop one another. There are a lot of ideas right now, but no one knows exactly where the industry will go yet once CMOS is played out.

If you want to see where semiconductors are going, the best place to start is the International Technology Roadmap for Semiconductors, (http://www.itrs.net/) which the industry compiles every couple of years to help coordinate R&D.
> the server connection pool was exhausted

Why ? Did you TCP-flooded SMTP server after you connected ?

Have you considered that it might be very simple to track you down since you'd be one of few people who got the tickets that day through this channel ?
I like Lisp too, but there's nothing especially accurate about it's arithmetic that you can't get in other civilized languages.
Essay in the Times on this address:

http://www.nytimes.com/2009/04/26/books/review/Bissell-t.htm...

Nicer (IMHO) WSJ format of Foster's address without the extraneous stylistic emphases found in the Marginalia version:

http://online.wsj.com/article/SB122178211966454607.html

"lords of our tiny skull-sized kingdoms, alone at the center of all creation"

It may seem inconsistent but I find it nicely complements Will Ferrell's commencement speech at Harvard:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iVu8jfhcO9k
My thought is that it is "dirty" to not allow your customer to easily export their data from your project.

If a customer chooses to use a competing product, and you make it hard for them to do so in order to keep them, you've already gone from being a help to being a barrier to your customer.

If someone else comes along and removes your artificially erected barrier at their expense, so be it. Perhaps next time, it would pay to work with your customers, and not against them.
Sci-fi author Charles Stross slams US politics
You confused Patri Friedman with David Friedman.

David Friedman wrote the spectulative guide to anarcho-capitalism, Machinery of Freedom where as Patri Friedman, who was influenced by David's ideas, head the seasteading movement.

Interestingly enough, where as David Friedman, wrote in opposition to his father, the eminent economist Milton Friedman, Patri Friedman explictly implemented his father's ideas and expanded upon it.
Apple has been shipping forks of GCC forever. In the future they won't have to fork clang because they own it.
http://www.joelonsoftware.com/articles/fog0000000052.html
Gmail's search works well. Except when you need substring search or fuzzy search, in which case it absolutely sucks.

Most of the things in Gmail are done very well but non-exact search really needs improvement.
This essay came up yesterday in response to a short PG essay. http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=781583

The WSJ one is certainly easier to read and doesn't lose much but the almost excessive stylistic emphasis is what Wallace does; I'll talk the unabridged version. I do wonder if Wallace himself edited the essay for publication or if it was edited externally.
What is annoying you? http://annoying-us.r09.railsrumble.com
Check whether you would be violating the Terms of Use of the competitor's product (e.g. by screen-scraping their site). Of course, if you are small you are less likely to be sued so you might want to take the risk.
Agreed, probably the most powerful line in the entire article:

The first three years of Fog Creek were like this. We tried in vain to find the magical sales and marketing formula that would make our software successful.
94.7fm KRNK – Give us Feedback? Then "#YouFail" | On Portland
As with most compacting collecting languages memory allocation is a space check and a pointer increment. In C++ new has to do quite a bit more. It is about Java but C# is capable of the same.
http://www.ibm.com/developerworks/java/library/j-jtp09275.ht...

Also note that C++'s memory model is "single threaded" new must grab a global lock where as C#'s memory allocator is designed with threads in mind so no locking overhead.
http://gigamonkeys.com/book/numbers-characters-and-strings.h...

One of the reasons Lisp is a nice language for math is its numbers behave more like true mathematical numbers than the approximations of numbers that are easy to implement in finite computer hardware. For instance, integers in Common Lisp can be almost arbitrarily large rather than being limited by the size of a machine word.3 And dividing two integers results in an exact ratio, not a truncated value. And since ratios are represented as pairs of arbitrarily sized integers, ratios can represent arbitrarily precise fractions.4

On the other hand, for high-performance numeric programming, you may be willing to trade the exactitude of rationals for the speed offered by using the hardware's underlying floating-point operations. So, Common Lisp also offers several types of floating-point numbers, which are mapped by the implementation to the appropriate hardware-supported floating-point representations.5 Floats are also used to represent the results of a computation whose true mathematical value would be an irrational number.

Finally, Common Lisp supports complex numbers--the numbers that result from doing things such as taking square roots and logarithms of negative numbers. The Common Lisp standard even goes so far as to specify the principal values and branch cuts for irrational and transcendental functions on the complex domain.
Chris Lattner's first paragraph here talks about that a bit, although it doesn't give a timeframe for when the gcc implementation will make its way back to the main distribution:

http://lists.cs.uiuc.edu/pipermail/cfe-dev/2008-August/00267...

Although, there's a comment by Johannes Fortmann here that says that the code has been available in an svn repository since at least September 5, 2008:

http://mooseyard.com/Jens/2008/08/blocksclosures-for-c/

"If you check out the llvm-gcc svn trunk, you’ll find all the code there (you can even build your own llvm-gcc with working blocks)."
They are investing in heavily in llvm which they hope to replace gcc with in the future.
This is a common feature of how humans work and it is backed by volumes of research.

Motivation consists of two types: internal (or intrinsic) and external. External is what you do because somebody will reward you, usually with money. Internal is what you do because you love to do it.

In this particular respect, motivation in most people is a zero sum game. If you do something because you love it, and then someone starts paying you for it, the degree to which you do it because you love it must decrease.

That's why many people who love to do something so much they decide to go get paid for it gradually find themselves not liking at all what they used to love to do.
Humans are not rational when it comes to money. There are many studies that illustrate this. For example, if you give someone a choice between a candy bar and $1.00, they will choose the candy bar with greater frequency than if you give them $1.00 and offer them the choice of buying a candy bar for $1.00. It's not rational -- you end up the same in either study, but it's the way we work. In this case, being paid $5.00 per hour turns WoW from something you want to do to a job you get paid to do, and you think about it differently.

Psychologists explain it by saying that external rewards reduce intrinsic motivation. An article from the Boston Globe is here: http://www.csse.uwa.edu.au/~pk/motivation.html "If a reward - money, awards, praise, or winning a contest - comes to be seen as the reason one is engaging in an activity, that activity will be viewed as less enjoyable in its own right." Wikipedia also has an interesting article about this: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Overjustification_effect
You're right. But if they do find him, it will prove something.
You can get some ideas from the previous contest winners: http://www.twilio.com/contest/netbook/
You know what, if that would be in their 'terms of service' then they can go jump of a cliff. To lock in your users data may be in your terms of service but that does not mean it will stand up in court. Portability is pretty much a given, whether you're the phone company or a web site it should not matter.

Any website that wants to play nice opens up their users contents at their request and competes on quality, not lock in to make sure as few users as possible make use of it.
That would actually pretty close to the MIT license, in practice. There are major benefits to not inventing yet-another-license, and using something that everyone is already familiar with.
Good example of a classic problem: businesses that forget about customer service. I'm with you. If you want to improve your business, you should accept (and even actively seek) negative feedback.
Multitasking Muddles Brains
I dont know about researhing the human brain in order to win a million. I'm an MBA, not a CNS PHD. But us startup entrepreneurs sure know about incorporating the research of consumer behavior in order to earn a million from our innovative business ideas.
Marginalia received a DMCA takedown notice for their original copy of the speech:

http://www.marginalia.org/log/archives/2009/05/so-very-sorry...

But in the comments on their apology page at the link above, there's a reference to a book in which the address was published with Wallace's permission, as well an interesting note about an edit that Wallace made to the speech before publishing it:

An essay on April 26 about David Foster Wallace’s commencement address at Kenyon College in 2005, which has now appeared in book form as "This Is Water," misstated the speech’s publishing history. It was included in the collection "The Best American Nonrequired Reading 2006"; it is not the case that Wallace, who died in September, "never published" the address.

The essay may also have left the incorrect impression that both of the following sentences in the speech were omitted from the text of "This Is Water": "It is not the least bit coincidental that adults who commit suicide with firearms almost always shoot themselves in: the head. They shoot the terrible master." In fact, only the second sentence was left out.
Cool shot of him working on Blackberry source code: http://www.sentex.net/~mwandel/tech/scanner_pix.html
Time machine is great, except for the fact that it Denial-of-Services my machine every time it does a back up. It reminds me of the late 1999-2000 when the Anti-Virus programs for windows (Norton/Symantec) would do a full system scan on a desktop and make it useless for an hour. That, and my 18 month old top-of-line spends an inordinate amount of time with the spinning beach ball. And crashes when I plug in a 30" monitor 20% of the time.

I'm hoping that a scorched-earth fresh install of 10.6 will either eliminate the amazing flakyness or alternatively point me to a hardware problem.
So - if evolution does not have a purpose - let's make it our mission, as human beings, to seek for truth in life and for life in a world more resilient to the randomness of the universe.
A 'practical' application of some neuroscience principles makes for an interesting article.

Poor application of the word 'hacks' in a link bait title makes for an annoyed me.
How do people feel about Angelsoft? Is what Angelsoft offers through Open Deals different from pay-to-pitch?
It's worth noting that this article is from September 2004.

49.7 days is 2^32 milliseconds. Although this used to cause issues with Win98, they claimed to be using 2000, so it was probably an application-related bug rather than anything Microsoft should be blamed for.
This,the after taste, plus the negative health effect of artificial sweeteners is more than enough reason for me to steer clear of diet. While the calories may be cut, I would rather cut down on my soda intake and get the real thing.
Well, every one of their customers' sites has an exposed data file. So, I would just be taking their URL and reading the data. Then, I'd just parse it and drop it in to our product (as well as copying images over, but those images belong to the customer).
Not at all, as long as you provide an easy and open way to export your data for your users (and potentially your competitors) to use.
I think you are mixing up a couple of things that have absolutely nothing to do with IQ (or intelligence).

Unrealistic expectations of what you can accomplish points to a lack of self-knowledge.

Difficulty in dealing with average people is a social skills issue, but 'average' and 'below average' people might have that same problem.

More likely to question things and annoy people in the process is again a social skills issue, really clever people can work out lots of stuff without having to ask for it, and when they do it's a matter of timing, tact and packaging.

Less likely to accept traditions again has nothing to do with IQ, but if you are smart you may be better able to argue for yourself why you do not wish to follow traditions. To be in other peoples face for not accepting traditions would be another social skills issue.

Less likely to enjoy the simple pleasures in life is not at all limited to people with high IQ.

Less likely to find a job as an employee rewarding depends on what you define as an employee. If you think a full professor at a university is an 'unrewarding' position because you are an employee then you probably have other issues.

Seriously, I can't see any of those problems related to having a high IQ per se.
"... and will probably fill them all."

You have absolutely no information to base this statement upon.

There are plenty of seats on all the flights we have looked at. September is just an empty month for airlines. We are not utilizing some scarce important resource, which is what you are incorrectly suggesting.
"In an ideal world, everybody would provide their users the same rights they received from the copyright holder."

Assertion without proof.
Accidental Anal Sex: In UK, 7% of men, 10% of women - Study
Accidental Anal Sex? -- 7% of men, 10% of women in UK -- physicians mail survey: "to determine whether accidental anal intercourse occurs in heterosexual relationships" -- alcohol IS involved