skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
http://www.ted.com/talks/lang/eng/dan_gilbert_asks_why_are_w...

"Here's two different futures that I invite you to contemplate, and you can try to simulate them and tell me which one you think you might prefer. One of them is winning the lottery. This is about 314 million dollars. And the other is becoming paraplegic. So, just give it a moment of thought. You probably don't feel like you need a moment of thought.

Interestingly, there are data on these two groups of people, data on how happy they are. And this is exactly what you expected, isn't it? But these aren't the data. I made these up!

These are the data. You failed the pop quiz, and you're hardly five minutes into the lecture Because the fact is that a year after losing the use of their legs, and a year after winning the lotto, lottery winners and paraplegics are equally happy with their lives."

http://www.thisamericanlife.org/Radio_Episode.aspx?sched=123...

Act two (This is a very fascinating story)

"This American Life producer Alex Blumberg talks with Ed Ugel, who had a very unusual dream job: he bought jackpots from lottery winners. When you win the lottery, your prize is often paid out in yearly installments. And Ed would offer winners a lump sum in exchange for their yearly checks. He's talked with thousands of lottery winners, and the vast majority, he says, wish they'd never won. Ed is writing a book about his years in the "lump sum industry" called Money for Nothing: One Man's Journey through the Dark Side of Lottery Millions. It comes out in September 2007."
I gave up after reading 12 and realizing that none of them were even remotely amusing.

Apparently the upper class is confident enough to wear stupid, unfunny t-shirts and get away with it.
isn't that exactly what zfs supports ?
Some Premium Joomla Themes Designing Companies
How big of a problem is bad flagging?
I don't buy it. Isn't the job of some insects like ants to eat dead insects? You often see ants carrying dead beatles and stuff. How do those facts fit in with their "theory"
One of the main points of the feature request page is to separate feature requests from submmissions. You want to do this because most are either duplicates or bad ideas, and yet (like all meta discussion, including this post) tend to get a lot of upvotes. The feature request page serves that purpose even if no one reads it.

I do check it occasionally. I know search is the main thing people want. But explicit "features" are not my top priority now. The top priority is to maintain (or if possible improve) the quality of links and comments. More details here:

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=830485
Ack now hosted on GitHub
Random cautionary anecdote about Thunderbird tabs:

My cat stood on my keyboard and opened an email hundreds of times. This made hundreds of new tabs that would re-open every time I started Thunderbird. As far as I could tell, Thunderbird has no function (yet?) to "Close All Tabs" or "Close All Tabs but this one" and so I just gave up after a while and manually closed them all myself by clicking the [X] one at a time.

If I had known how many there actually were (no real way to tell) I would have written a UI automation script (or extension) to close them all, but instead I spent a good 15 minutes closing the same email again and again. To make matters worse it was actually a very depressing email to boot.
Or maybe you're SO secure, that you can afford to look insecure while being actually secure.

Or maybe you're SO insecure that you try to look like you're so secure that you can afford to look oh god I can't finish this sentence.
To step over the essay and get to your larger point, I think there's a conceptual error in assuming agreement and disagreement are sufficiently symmetric that it'd be reasonable to expect there to be a "solution" to the "problem" you're pointing out.

I think the actual situation is that "agreement" as such is communicated by actions (either cooperation or mimicry) and "disagreement" as such is communicated by talking (eg: 'u r rong and eevil' responses).

When you look at successful ad-hoc or loosely organized groups the common theme is outlets for mimicry or cooperation; eg:

- 'birthers' don't post "i'm so ghey for your evidence and theories" love-notes to each other on the movement leaders' blogs; they indicate "agreement" by taking the message to new venues (cooperation), starting up (or taking over) local 'patriot' organizations (cooperation + mimicry), starting new blogs
advancing the cause (mimicry) and trade strategies / information with each other (cooperation)

- 'raelians' are actually a fairly ad-hoc and decentralized cult as cults go; there's lots of outlets for missionary work (mimicry + cooperation), 'spiritual practice' (mimicry + cooperation), and so on

If the "host" doesn't have outlets for cooperation + mimicry that are both (a) visible to the host and (b) beneficial to the host then whatever agreement it generates will either be invisible or not beneficial or both; in the same way, if you convince people with your controversial blog post the "agreement" you'll see will come in the form of people linking to you (at its most visible) as 'great post by jerf' and more often it's just some invisible-to-you uptick in what % of people have similar takes on the issue you discussed.

This makes a fundraiser for an institute to promote "rationalism" essentially a multiply-pathological case study with predictably poor results.

EDIT: forgot one thing.

"Communication" is a broad thing (most human action is communicative at some level or other). Different message types are best transmitted using different communications types, and I think this is probably unavoidable / not teachable.

When you frame it as: "I communicate messages of type A on medium B and only get back responses of type C, but wish I also got messages of type D" it's a little limiting; the fact of the matter is that perhaps messages of type D are going out in other media, they're just not reaching your attention.

I'm pessimistic in general as to how malleable the message-type and media-type pairing can be; my suspicion is that if you care about getting messages of type D you should first figure out how those messages are communicated -- eg medium E -- and then find a way to work with that constraint in mind.

This probably means that the current internet communications media are:

- productivity enhancers for existing high-passion groups

- allowing new, low-intensity, low-passion groups to get made that otherwise wouldn't happen (cf: shirky's notion of the coasean floor)

- ...not really going to enable the latter to graduate to the former on its own
Your reasoning is wrong. Limiting the frequency of trades (by some mechanism) does not imply more money going to brokers or higher spreads. (It may effect clearing times, certainty over being able to buy quantities in short times & exact prices).

Then the second part is wrong also, as the low frequency traders will lose money, getting on average worse deals. The high frequency traders will make sure you get a worse price, because any price spike you may have fortuitously gotten will be removed. Alternatively you can just reason that the high freq traders are costing money (using resources, making profits) and ergo must be extracting money out of the market.

You'll have to make a much better case for the value for such liquidity.
Signals don't need to be accurate, e.g., spoofed browser agents.
Pink dress shirts have been "in" for 30 years. 100 years for all I know. It's not exactly a fashion statement.
> On the other hand, the Mint guys worked for 3 years, earned $170m

No, they didn't. A substantial chunk of that money is undoubtedly going to their investors.
The problem that I have with this site is that it places emphasis on the numbers. My GPA, SAT, and GRE were all crap compared to my peers. But my college experience wasn't dependent on my numbers. I even wonder how indicative these scores are of future success. I agree with the author that a good college recommendation engine should show schools that you're likely to be most happy at. I realize from a data perspective that that is much harder to compute, but I feel it would be more worthwhile. Plus it seems like they are cutting off a huge portion of the market by focusing on just the numbers. What percentage of people would feel immediately discouraged by going to the site if they knew their average GPA was less than the site average? Or even more horrifying, what percentage of people will be left with the impression that applying to college would be futile in the first place?
It's highly localized. There turn out to be a small number of people who generate large numbers of bad flags. (Bad = flagging something that does not end up getting killed.) Which meant the solution was to be able to turn flagging off for individual users.
I spent a couple of years at Yodlee. Your comment is spot-on. Not only are there huge headaches around creating the scripts/feeds to grab the data, but once you have the data there's a significant challenge of normalizing it so that you have some sort of data consistency. And then you have the issue of constantly having to update the scripts as financial institutions make (often undocumented and unannounced) changes to their data.

The Abobe:Youtube / Yodlee:Mint analogy in the article isn't entirely apt since Yodlee effectively provides not only the technology but the content upon which Mint is built. I'd agree with those who say that Mint's position is tenuous from a business perspective b/c of this (and maybe this is why they opted to make their exit). But I certainly can't take away from the fact that Mint built a fantastic product that blows away any other front-end implementations of this sort.
I'll share something my mom said to me when I was scared of flying as a kid:

"They pilot doesn't want to die either".

That has more-or-less destroyed any fear I have of flying.
It seems (unsurprisingly) that I wouldn't have a good shot at getting into the same undergraduate program, just 10 years later.

Competition seemed pretty darn cutthroat at the time; it must be a nightmare now.
Antique Furniture | VandM - Antique and Vintage Furniture
VandM, formerly Vintage and Modern, is an online marketplace that represents dealers of antique, vintage and modern furniture.
It's been theorized and shown in various studies that a lot of a drug effectiveness due to the placebo effect, so it may be that if you don't think it will help you it's likely not to.
When you post old news, please add the date! This article is interesting, but much of it is obsolete given that the languages and their implementations have evolved quite a bit since 2000.
It really astounds me, the arrogance with which people talk about animals not being conscious. How can they pretend to know what is in the mind of those animals? We can communicate with them. Maybe not as completely as we'd like, but they do get sad and happy.

Anytime someone says something about how stupid animals are, I just think they are stupid because they aren't even able to differentiate between what we know and what we don't know.

If you can't admit I don't know, then you really need to check yourself.
Cooliris | Cooliris
Or maybe you're SO secure, that you can afford to look insecure while being actually secure.

Huh, wearing a pink shirt makes me look insecure? The signal given by the wearing a pink shirt is in the eye of the beholder. If you think less of me because of it, that's your issue, not mine.
Very good points, but I think his conclusion is wrong.

I think the fix will come from the filesystem. A filesystem that automatically mirrors (or distributes ecc code for) files, and checks checksums is the future.
Agreed-- this puzzled me as well. I don't really doubt that the scripting languages are faster in terms of coding time but why not just measure them or at least have a 3rd party confirm the developer's time?

In any other study of workers, I'm pretty sure even the author would feel self-reported data would invalidate the results (especially when all of the "best" scores were self-reported).

e.g. The ten chosen Honda dealerships reported that they can fix a Honda in 10-23 minutes compared to our measurements that Ford dealerships can fix a Ford in about an hour and a half.
That's a really funny cautionary tale. I filed it at https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=517489 so we can think about ways to avoid or mitigate...
The History of Hacking (timeline)
The blog post neglected to provide a link to said app: http://gwt-smalltalk.appspot.com/
Agree.

When I was getting my pilot's license, I learned to be hyper-aware of another airplane that was less than say 1000 feet from me. But the strangest part of those lessons was getting back into my car afterward and getting onto the 417, where I was a couple of feet away from other cars, also going 75mph. I was completely at these other drivers' mercy: I had effectively no time to react to them, and knew from experience that lots of drivers are just plain awful (and this was really before you'd see people driving while texting with one hand and changing their kids' DVD in the other.)

It was very, very scary. Total loss of control — far more than in an airplane, where to a much greater degree if things go sideways, it was probably your fault anyway.

The other interesting thing about the scary drive was how long it stayed scary: maybe ten minutes, tops. After that — business as usual. Didn't even think about it.

It's interesting what we can get used to.
Maybe we should attach lasers to the head of other mosquitos and start a civil war!
When I read the post from pg, I thought, what's the big deal. I hadn't been to that particular street or remember it from one or two travels to Palo Alto, but when I saw your picture, the before and after, I got sad inside. Why do that?

I felt a sense of lost power. Lost depth and age and history. The trees were tall and powerful and wise.

And now they are gone. :( I miss them and I never knew them.
Maybe with the current economy the bank and credit card leads don't pay out as well? And the mortgage stuff is still in total downturn.

Perhaps between the crappy economy and whatever Yodlee is charging for their data, Mint may not be anywhere near profitable. They may have acquired a lot of users, but they have to pay Yodlee for all those users' data, and cover the costs by the fraction of those users who go for the bank/credit card stuff suggested.

During the time I used Mint, none of the financial offers presented were better than my current ones, so I never bit.
Incomes of young in 8-year nose dive
>For all program aspects investigated, the performance variability due to different programmers (as described by the bad/good ratios) is on average about as large or even larger than the variability due to different languages.

Yes, but that doesn't mean the language doesn't matter. If programmer productivity is variable by 10x, and this study shows that the language affects their productivity by less than the difference between programmers, that's still a huge difference.

Using the wrong language can drop the performance of a rockstar programmer down a weight class.
Same here. My biggest whitebread shock was a couple of weeks after my arrival from Argentina. We went to have a coffe after dinner with a friend, and the Starbucks closed on us at 9:00PM!

We ended up drinking our coffees in the parking lot. So much for the Silicon Valley bohemian life...
Now that, I find interesting. I graduated as top of my class, with a 4.8, got a 1490 on my SAT and a 34 on my ACT, and I only got a 310 for academics. What exactly does it take to hit the top end for that thing?
Not really. The dummy features have a practical purpose to help the silicon deal with stress. Its similar to the ridges and lines that car manufacturers are putting on the panels of new cars. The metal is so thin on these panels that they have to put ridges to stop them from bending. The same thing has happened with processors. We have reached a point where the chips are so small that similar ridges have to incorporated to even out stress within the chip.
Setting aside the issue of relying on a recommendation engine with questionable data sources (your Facebook profile, and wherever they scraped their college data from) to influence one of the most important decisions of your life, I wonder how accurate their projections are for where you could get in, based on your grades/scores.

"Your Personal Index is based on your family background, location, interests, extracurriculars, essays, social network, and other related factors. "

I'd really be interested in how they weight family background. This makes a huge difference at some schools, a big difference at others, and so on and so on. Have they ranked colleges in this manner? Are they taking into account the fact that many schools are facing massive budget holes and are thus more likely to accept students who can pay their way? Source: http://thechoice.blogs.nytimes.com/2009/06/09/reed/
This argument is purely hypothetical - purely a thought experiment. Observation on the other hand is that provocative fashion statements being made by younger population more than the older, by blacks more than whites and finally (this is not a personal observation) by people with Histrionic Personality Disorder (http://www.buzzle.com/articles/what-is-abnormal-psychology.h...).

So if there are so many effective separators of provocative vs. regular fashion people - how important can status be?
I wonder where an idea that pg wrote about in an essay (can't seem to find it now) fits in all this: early adopters in fashion, or the trend-setters are usually fringe groups that want to differentiate themselves by being provocative. Most male fashion of today is the gay-fashion of yesterday (tight shirt, pointed leather shoe, etc.). Similarly, many female fashion-ideas (lipstick, stockings, mini-skirt, etc.) originated with prostitutes.
People often spend a significant amount of time worrying about what tomorrow will bring and in turn negatively affect today. This is a dilemma that we all face on a regular basis. We worry about hitting our quota because if not, we will potentially lose our job; we dread an upcoming family event because we are going to be forced to spend time with a "long lost" relative; we are concerned about going on vacation because we have not kept to our diet; we worry that our start-up will not get funded and we will be forced to work at a corporate giant; we fear an upcoming airline flight and do not enjoy our vacation; and we are troubled that a loved one, (or even ourselves), is going to die because of a recent diagnosis of a terminal disease. All of these worries, dreads, concerns, and troubles lead to what I like to call "F-e-a-r"or in other words, False Evidence Appearing Real. I am sure we will agree that we often worry about future events that never turn out to be as bad as we originally thought. So in the time from the initial thought, up and until the event, we have "destroyed" a period of time that could have been significantly more enjoyable. Now there are cases that are inevitable, like the eventual death as a result of a terminal disease, but even with these occurrences, the death component is going to occur when your time is finished on earth, but the life element is up to you. Remember, F-e-a-r is only False Evidence Appearing Real.
Google unredacts its Google Voice FCC response
Google's uncensored letter to the FCC regarding the Google Voice app rejection
The least convenient path is the only valid one.

This should be a law in political discourse.
Two possible failures:

1. Attacker makes one request. I read EvilPacket to suggest the time-limited challenge is a token stuffed into the cookie. Attacker then waits a few seconds before making the change request with the token safely in the cookie.

You should rather load a challenge in the submit form. I do recommend that for user-generated content.

http://usemod.com/cgi-bin/mb.pl?EditHash

2. However, if this page is vulnerable to HTML injection, you can get the hash back by embedding Javascript that creates another iframe or img back to yourself on the attacked page.

http://www.codecouch.com/2008/10/cross-site-scripting-xss-using-iframes/

So, I just find it safer to ask for the user's password.
This technique has been used in PCBs for many decades. You fill in unused parts of the PCB layers with stripes, partly to improve the manufacturing yield, and partly (in ground planes) to "debounce" the circuitry.
I totally agree; it's just the incongruity.

The epic feature request thread seems vestigial: you often responded there 800-900 days ago but haven't for 428 days, I'd guess because HN has outgrown it.
I'd much rather have good programmers on a bad language than bad programmers on a good language.
>because any price spike you may have fortuitously gotten will be removed

this is true, but "fortuitously" doesn't always apply. "price spikes" could be high or low, and could affect you positively or negatively. with out high frequency traders, it's equally likely that you get a fortuitous or unfortuitous spike. what high frequency traders do is even out prices so that they are always "right". they ensure that when you trade, you aren't trading on some random spike and are instead trading at the correct market price. despite what you think, real low to medium frequency traders enjoy having correct market prices at all times, which is what high frequency guys ensure.
just the level of entangled abstraction that C++ can bring to your project is staggering.
People complain about OCaml because it doesn't use parens around function arguments, and { } around blocks. Basically programmers don't like to learn anything new, which is very sad for people who are supposed to be technology-led and love embracing new ideas.
IBM forcing all employees to stop using MS Office
Google ready to unleash spiders and expose your Google Docs
Logs are the New Sexy
The only reason I can't stand switching out of gmail's web based reader is because I can't stand NOT having conversation-style emails.

Does anyone know if TB3 supports this? If not, does any other email client?
yeah, it'd be a simpler menu than Firefox, maybe Close Other Tab, Open in New Window, Close All Tabs. No need for reload, new tab, or bookmarks.
I was actually just going to use gmail screenshots, but I thought the Mac screenshots looked better. I tried to make it generic enough so that it could be just about any email program (minus the title bar buttons I guess).

Appreciate the feedback!
we've seen that weighted gpas are usually taken apart by the colleges and don't matter as much -- it's highly dependent on unweighted gpa, though. if 10 years ago a school had 100 students applying with 4.0s, now there's over 1,000 (and we're seeing this in our dataset; it lines up with what we've been hearing from the colleges).
...signalling that its owner is so rich he can afford to copy the lower class and still get invited to parties.

I don't think this explains why upper middle class suburban kids wear "ghetto" clothes. I think it has more to do with a kind of insecurity about being wealthy, and in particular a fear of being "spoiled."

It kind of reminds me of how a lot of kids I knew in college (myself included) got a kick out of living a bit more rugged than usual--for a while I bragged about not having a pillow, for instance, partly because there seemed to be a competition going on among my friends for who could be most frugal.

(Of course, saving is a good idea and plenty of people have trouble affording college, so it would be silly to begrudge them for that. But there's definitely a kind of signalling going on, too, and I don't think it's as related to peacocks as this post's author claims.)
Rakudo and Perl are separate projects. So I am not sure what you mean.
It's a brilliant move in using collective intelligence. You get better quality CAPTCHAs. You get more accurate digitization on the cheap. I go into more detail on this at http://it.toolbox.com/blogs/future-of-work/google-acquires-r...