skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
OK, but how to develop the algorithms without some representative data? Google just matches ads with keywords, its not particularly clever with semantics - it just knows how often an ad gets clicked.
"Failing to predict the future does not prove something is not scientific."
Good point, thanks.
Oh. You took my response to the story literally? I was responding to the way in which the "hard-working professional man" was painted as a victim. Would you say uppity restaurants that focus more on the presentation of the food and the ambience than the bland quality of their fare are to be faulted for positioning themselves thusly? If people see fit to pay for the snob value, more power to them..

'Pester power' is a well-known soft spot exploited by marketing droids. Personally, I feel this is a shady trick. but IMO, this doesn't make them evil. Kids being a soft target is all the more reason to try and take a personal involvement in educating your kids, and not letting the ridiculously marketing-driven society do it for you. (not you personally, jacquesm..)
Before Apple introduced the iPhone
He can provide for his family, but can't ... say "no, go away ..."? This is obviously a contrived example: sure, it's a contrived example; mostly the effect of advertising is more subtle than that. This is only a problem for Russell's piece if (1) he's claiming that his example is realistic and/or (2) the more subtle effect is usually in the other direction. I don't think either is true.

the average advertisement/sale caters to the average consumer: Very likely. I'm failing to see how you get from there to saying that those advertisers and salespeople aren't trying to make their targets sillier and stupider. Does being an "average consumer" somehow confer immunity to being fooled or manipulated?

than what? Than they would have been without the advertising, of course.

holier-than-thou: I'm wondering whether you mean by this something different from what I would. To me, calling someone h-t-t means saying that they think too highly of their own virtue; that they're either trying to promote themselves or criticizing other people for faults they have themselves. I don't see that in Russell's piece, nor in the attitude of other later people who dislike advertising. (Nor, in case this is what you mean, does it look to me as if Russell thinks that he himself has especially strong "sales resistance" or that he should be admired for it if so. Though I wouldn't call that "holier-than-thou" in this context even if he did.)

How do you objectively define ...: of course I don't, or at any rate I don't claim the ability to know for sure whether any particular action is going to work out well. But if that's a reason for never saying anything of the form "X seems to me not to be in Y's best interests", then I don't see how anyone can ever say anything of that form, and that seems like, well, rather a nuisance.

the current financial crisis is caused ...: you're talking about the Community Reinvestment Act, yes? If so, then I'm afraid you have been taken in by propaganda: (1) most subprime loans were not made by lenders subject to the CRA, and (2) CRA loans did not produce a whole lot of foreclosures. See, e.g., http://www.businessweek.com/investing/insights/blog/archives... and the other things linked from there.
Usually about 5 minutes before my real alarm goes off...
Wait a second... :-) gaius is completely right about the memory issues with Java and this is the major difference between Java and C++ nowadays.

But what you see in the shootout tables is irrelevant for applications that hold a lot of data in memory. These numbers comprise almost exclusively the JVMs own memory as the benchmark problems use almost no data. If you load gigs of data into memory the 15MB or so JVM baseline memory consumption becomes negligible.

My own experience is that Java uses about twice as much memory as C++ does. Where a lot of strings are used, Java's choice of UTF-16 for representing strings has a big effect on top of using references instead of values everywhere.

C#'s value types can help a lot to reduce memory consumption by the way.
Yeah, I've done the standard "nice make -j 4 bzImage" and noticed no detectable slowdown in normal browsing tasks, window movement, chromium/flashplayer etc. It does feel snappier as CK was going for but since I know I'm running bfs I'm somewhat afraid of confirmation bias.
So you're basically just opening a bunch of silly links in tabs? No attempt to aggregate the data or give me anything useful?

This was like when I made the Google All In One Page that had iframes opening to Gmail and Google Cal and Google Search. It's pointless.
You should sumbit that link on its own.

An insightful look into a dying business model, built on complete disrespect for the customer, and being replaced by internet based businesses that provide better service and lower prices.
IPhone: Bad For Carriers' Bottom Lines?
Is it bad if I just flag techcrunch articles because the headline sounds stupid?

If I actually read too many of them I think I'll start flagging based on the source, and that's worse.
No, for the resulting inefficiency of the economy as a whole. How you choose to divide the blame between salesman and customer is your own business, of course.

I don't see how this makes the economy inefficient. Could you elaborate? And in this particular analogy, the purchasing decision was clearly the buyer's, so the worst you could say about the seller was that he was pushy and obnoxious. I can't see why one would 'blame' him for the inefficient economy.

Statistics can say that with over 99% confidence.

That's disingenuous. What I meant was, based on the story of the pushy piano purveyor alone, without knowing what use was made of the instrument, you can't really say it was a useless purchase. Serendipity happens.
Japan engaged in quantitative easing for a decade and never had inflation.

Correct. Instead they had the "Lost Decade" of economic stagnation, as it is known there (and here). It's actually been much longer than a decade now (it started in the early nineties). A few weeks ago it cost the governing party, which has been in power for 53 of the last 54 years, control of the government.

Money follows the law of supply and demand as much as anything else. When the supply of it (relative to the supply of goods and services) goes up, the price (value) of it goes down: inflation. So one of two things has to happen: either the Fed lets that money stay in circulation, triggering a boom in the short term followed by inflation in the long term, or they start sopping it up and "burning" it, which will trigger a downturn.

Think about it this way: if all we had to do was to trun on the printing presses to make economic magic happen, why wouldn't we do it all the time? Inflation is the worst form of taxation, because it causes such massive economic distortion, as we've recently seen in the housing market. The Fed pumped up the money supply and people watched their home's valuation go up 10% or more a year. They then made bad economic decisions based on the false idea that it was real. And now we have the current mess.
The goals of sales people and producers are generally not aligned with the goals of consumers. In an ideal world all consumption would be 'pull'.

Consumers would be informed about the available products in a neutral way, would know about the ins and outs of all the products they could choose from and would have an idea of the long-term benefits of the products if purchased.

Clearly, we do not live in an ideal world.

Most consumption of 'primary needs goods' is still on 'pull' basis, at least it is in most parts of the world.

But even there advertising is shaping consumers decisions more and more. Branding and marketing are gaining a bigger foothold than ever before even when it comes to buying everyday needs items such as drinking water, bread, rice, clothing and so on.

For other goods 'regular consumption goods and luxury goods' the situation is even more extreme.

> That's circular. How do you define what objectively benefits someone?

It's not circular, it is recursive ;)

But the recursion bottoms out where you run out of funds to buy something that you really need. Most income spent on useless stuff (for instance to feed addictions) goes at the expense of a real need (for instance to feed or clothe children). By having individuals compete with companies that have meanwhile spent upwards of a century honing their skills we are creating a completely uneven battle.

Nobody is able to make their decisions about what they need with any degree of impartiality.

The best way to describe 'to benefit someone' is to say that their lives have a maximized sense of happiness.

So all other things being equal, if you buy the 'wrong' car because a salesman pushed it down your throat somehow then your happiness will not be as high as it would have been had you gone through with what would have been the most rational decision.

If you look for a definition of what is in the common best interest I would suggest you look everywhere but to your government, almost by definition it does not have the common best interest at heart. In theory it does, in practice I don't think there is a single government on earth that would be able to make that claim and withstand an investigation into the veracity of that claim.

Maybe I'm old and cynical, but where ever I've lived I did not have the feeling the government had my interests in general at heart.
Very interesting, thanks!

From reading a little bit of T90 documentation, SSE looks pretty different from the Cray vector stuff. It's little more than the kind of (x & (!x + 0x01010101)) kind of stuff you're talking about above, except with somewhat larger registers and a wider variety of instructions.
That sounds oddly similar to my morning routine. Except my 3 year old is a dog, and not quite as vocal.
I did not say that markets should be less free. Neither are they free nor is it desirable to return to some kind of soviet state capitalism (it was only called communism but the means of production never were it the hands of the workers which is the prerequisite of communism).

Nowadays the market is not free at all, it's ruled by a few oligopolies in most industries. You must be blind not to acknowledge that. The creation of corporations was the last nail in the coffin of the free market.

A market can only be free where all people can take part in it and not only a few decide who gets the money. Btw.: The abolitionists attempted to abolish wage slavery as well but it's still prevalent.

It's also absurd to sever the economics from the business and startups part. Also web programming in open source projects is just pure communism. So just saying we don't talk about economics here is like talking about cars without ever mentioning the engines.

Like with cars we have to rethink the way we build engines. With cars it's the hybrid/electric model, with capitalism it's something else. We just can't go on like that. The economy break down has just been postponed. It will happen sooner or later.

Ignoring or censoring that fact won't make it disappear.

To be honest: The current set up of startups begging a few VCs for money is neither sustainable nor does it make much sense. Just look at most startups. Either they disappear, they get swallowed and more or less left to rot or the VCs fire the founders. Or of course they go bankrupt. Is this what people are working for? I doubt that.

I guess sooner or later crowdfunding will take over and VCs will disappear. Maybe sooner than later as the financial system can finally break down any day.
On OS X pbcopy and pbpaste are useful for working with clipboard data. Copy data from a web-page or whatever, manipulate it on the command-line to get what you want. Putting reasonably large files in the clipboard can be useful too.

For example:

curl http://news.bbc.co.uk/ | pbcopy # copies a web-page to clipboard

Depending on what you are doing it can be very useful:

pbpaste | sort | pbcopy # sort the contents of the clipboard.

Another useful feature of OS X is open, which uses the finder to open a file:

open file.pdf

open music.mp3
City Hall in New York tries out a robotic groundskeeper
WhatEVER. Working until 7, then several more hours after the kids go to bed, and half a day on Saturday, doesn't fit any definition of "balance" that interests me. Also, you've carved out a couple of hours a day for your kids, but what about your wife? Those hours after the kids go to bed are our best quality time alone.
Ur/Web: The Ur Programming Language Family
As a non-American this is interesting to me (and possibly others) for a couple of reasons:
* American politics has a large bearing on my life. America's decisions about finance, foreign policy, fuel, war etc. affect us all. So it's nice to see that the current President is able to eloquently deliver a speech, and it's reassuring to think that he has the talents to be able to speak sensibly and convincingly in tense negotiations with a hypothetocal enraged Iranian President.
* Presumably most of the start-up type people here are going to be doing some selling at some point - there's a lot to be learned from speeches of this quality.

Would I like to see random speeches from the Ukrainian President on here? If it's a good speech and I can take something from it then why not?
That was a very long, boring, and buzzword-pumped way of saying: "Apple should let you stream stuff from the iTunes Store".
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Business Networking Loudoun County
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I don't see how this makes the economy inefficient. Could you elaborate?

Deals are supposed to create value. For example, if a house is worth $2M to the seller and $3M to the buyer, there's $1M potential surplus to be captured. A deal at $2.5M makes that makes that surplus real, in effect giving $500K to each. If a potential deal doesn't create net value - if the buyer doesn't receive enough benefit from the good, or the seller spends too much manufacturing it - the total wealth in the economy goes down as a result, even though the buyer OR the seller might win personally.

Serendipity happens.

Yes, and statistics can tell us what credence to assign to the chance of it happening. I certainly see no reason to assign 50% or similar credence to serendipity in the described case, or indeed any credence high enough to dominate the certain loss of value. Do you?
No, what he's saying is that our economic system isn't natural, it was designed. He's just delineating nature and culture, a la Terence McKenna.
> I was responding to the way in which the "hard-working professional man" was painted as a victim.

Well, he is. He is pushed to buy something he neither wants nor needs but runs out of a will to resist. This happens every day at the doorsteps of tens of thousands of older people that get salespeople to visit them at their homes.

> Would you say uppity restaurants that focus more on the presentation of the food and the ambience than the bland quality of their fare are to be faulted for positioning themselves thusly?

I take it that they do not go door-to-door or have people standing in the street in front of their restaurant to push people in the doorway. If the choice is truly free then it's fine with me.

> If people see fit to pay for the snob value, more power to them..

We are in agreement on that.

> Personally, I feel this is a shady trick.

Personally, I feel it is criminal.

> but IMO, this doesn't make them evil.

And we disagree on that.

> Kids being a soft target is all the more reason to try and take a personal involvement in educating your kids, and not letting the ridiculously marketing-driven society do it for you.

As the proud father of a 15 year old son I could go on for days about the enormity of the assault on young impressionable minds. It goes so far that I feel some sympathy for those parents that eventually give up.
No, please don't. There are already about 10,000 spammy 'social media gurus' to every 1 real twitter user.

I'm yet to see any compelling evidence that this has any effect on anything except the signal to noise ratio of what is already a very noisy space.

Interaction of individuals with businesses in social networking sites tends to fall under the category of 'brand loyalty', as in, people already like the brand, and therefore are willing to publicly associate themselves with it. If you already have that kind of brand loyalty, then you don't need 'social media' as a marketing tool - your customers will probably do it for you with very little encouragement.

I think the real business opportunity of sites like Twitter and Facebook is becoming a self-styled 'social marketing' guru and then following 10 million people. That's what everybody else seems to be doing.
5 Habits To Skyrocket Your Energy
So it's like a IM chat client where you have to announce to a central server your IP and who you are and what you'll accept.

I sense security issues in the making.
Motorola V6 MAXX 3G UNLOCKED
Motorazr Maxx V6 If you are looking for something out of the ordinary then this will certainly sate your desire to stick out of the crowd. The Ferrari emblem is on the exterior glass and makes a bold statement to everyone who sees it. When the phone is switched on or off, there is sound effect of the car’s roar. More capable features include high-speed connections and a great mix of glass. External touch controls allow you to get in touch easier than you could have imagined.
Have you done sales?

In my experience your "targets" in consumer sales are comprised to two categories: Smart people, where you drop the act and give them the data they want (they probably wont buy unless you do a fine job at NLP or "Liking") and the rest. With "the rest" it is recommended as "best practice" to use the techniques of NLP, Reciprocation, Consistency, Social Proof (the salesman's favourite), Authority, Liking and Scarcity.
ALL of these tricks are tricks. They are all ways that make the target more likely to buy the product without improving the product.
You can play on someone's emotional weaknesses to make them buy shit. Fact. There is no "they're not being forced to buy". If you know the tricks and they don't you will be able to influence them.

Hell, I might even be able sell to you (someone smart) if I could place you in a Consistency trap and you're on a first date with someone you're trying to impress.

These are the kind of sales the article is talking about and I completely agree with the writer. They don't generate wealth and they probably don't improve the economy.
Obviously there are scammers out there, but the average advertisement/sale caters to the average consumer

If a person needs or even just wants a thing, then they just go out and buy it. The purpose of advertising is to persuade people to buy things they don't need and had no preexisting want for. The latter is the interesting case. Sometimes advertising can be used for good to inform people that new solutions to their problems are available, e.g. a new technology (no-one wanted say a microwave oven before they were invented). But often it's not.
New Online Monopoly Game is Streets Ahead
I'm the consumer in question. Example: I went to the gas station - they had a promotional discount carwash. The windows on my car were filthy, so I went.

I got upsold to an inside cleaning as well. It certainly needed the cleaning, but if I didn't have to tell someone, "No thanks" (implying that I'm OK with the very dirty carpets in the car), I wouldn't have paid for the more expensive wash. If I really didn't want the inside cleaning, it wouldn't have affected me, but I was just conflicted enough to be vulnerable to the sale. Did the sales guy do me any favors?
Lots of sunlight in the face, then about 20 minutes later an alarm to unwrap the last bits of stupor
Slight tangent: why does Android use a VM, but not a standard JVM?

As said in this article: [C/C++ is better than Java when] very small footprint is required (these days that does not include most phones). You can get JVMs that run well in a few hundred KB.

The situations where a VM, but not a JVM are sensible seem to be totally squashed between C/C++ on one side and the JVM on the other.

There was some theory that it was to do with licencing (http://www.betaversion.org/~stefano/linotype/news/110/) but the argument got a bit obscure for me. Something along the lines of Google couldn't officially call it Java because it wouldn't meet the licencing requirements of the test suite.

But not being able to call it "JavaTM" seems like a small price compared with having an incompatible VM.
I'd like to hear you name the nonprofit and some of the metrics they use; it'd be great to be able to share good examples.
Sleep in a room with a window facing east, get up when the alarm goes off, drink a cold glass of water, take some deep breaths, hop on the computer and drink a cup of coffee, then go for a run. By the time I'm back from my run, I'm "very awake".
1. I check e-mail once a day(could probably move to a weekly schedule although I don't think I could ever attain Knuth like batching prowess).

2. I turn off cell phone when working on something important.
At the moment, no. The DB access is hard-coded to use SQLite, and some SQLite-specific features are used.
When I was a teenager, my parents and I were in a piano store, and I remarked that I could tell that the expensive pianos had better sound quality than the cheap ones. This fact seemed to help the salesman close the deal.

Of course, ungrateful wretch that I was, I hardly played the piano after it arrived. Maybe they should have bought a more expensive model. :-)
Bernanke and crew said the financial problems were limited to Subprime loans. They were very wrong.
Now they are saying they will be able to manage inflation by soaking up all that new money when the economy gets better.

Do you believe them?
English does not seem to have a single word that means "Good Deed" (like how Sin means "Bad Deed").

"Obligation"?
True, False And Nil Objects In Ruby
As PG points out, lists are an especially low-risk literary device.

Socratic dialogue requires you to write dialogue, which only some people have the ear for. It can also tend to be long-winded and indirect, like real dialogue.

Extended metaphors, like cantilevered structures, will eventually break. Usually sooner rather than later. When I started writing the zoo comment, I had no idea the damn thing was going to sustain itself across a whole essay; I figured it would reach a length of two sentences and then need to be edited down to one or zero, which is the fate of most newborn metaphors.

Anthropomorphism is another form of extended metaphor, except that it is especially likely to overreach badly. You can end up making big logical mistakes, because the human brain is very forgiving of anything that lets it exercise its built-in machinery for understanding humans. We love that. So history is rife with epic-level anthrocentric fallacies that lasted for hundreds or thousands of years. (How can the Earth be so much older than humans? How can life have been designed, if not by an independent consciousness that likes to build things? Of course the sun orbits us, and not the other way around!)

The typical FAQ is terribly disorganized and unbalanced, even more so than the list. (To achieve a FAQ that is actually readable, you must carefully compose your FAQ. Do not make the natural mistake of thinking that throwing all your FAQs into a pile will produce a readable FAQ. ;)

And, while narratives work well, only a tiny percentage of anecdotes are of any use as entertainment:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=n7KQ4vkiNUk&feature=relat...

[This link is to anecdote professional Ira Glass. I recommend watching the whole series on YouTube but do not miss segment three:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-hidvElQ0xE&feature=relat...

which is not exactly on topic but is too excellent not to plug.]