skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
> So the theory is someone is going to hire a teenager for less than minimum wage to begin with but then will give them wonderful opportunities later on.

It's a lot like the "theory" that someone fresh out of college becomes more valuable after a couple of years of experience. Or, at the very least, has demonstrated how she is better than the typical college grad.

Is hristov a counter-example to these theories? Has his/her actual or percieved value been completely constant over time, regardless of how s\he's spent that time?

If it has, why is it absurd to think that time spent working might have some effect on one's value as a worker? Or is it that teenagers are different?
I guess it's more likely about the culture and family values rather than the economic facts when it comes to countries those called to have meditterenean culture (Spain, Greece, Italy and a bunch more). ie. in Turkey a guy is simply not expected to move out until marriage.
One month too late for whom? is there another product in the market, or is it too late for your own needs?
Everyone says more eyeballs are always better. Ignore them. If people like what you are doing, they will find you. Do not spend anytime thinking about PR

I hear of startups launching in March and having 100,000 users by August. How do you do this without some marketing, even if your product is free?
Interesting that they're opening up a financial analysis arm to serve hedge funds. When they determine a terrorist attack is imminent, will they give the hedge funds a heads up before the markets crash?

(I doubt that's the intention, but somehow a conspiracy theory alert went off in my head, sorry.)
That blue used for backgrounds (i.e. the login box) is a bit too saturated and dark. Coupled with the dark blue text, they fail in colour contrast checks http://skitch.com/dylanfm/b6nj6/colour-contrast-analyser .
I suggest knocking it back to something like #B5D2E4. The greens for answered questions are a bit dark too and could be changed to #afff4b for accepted answers and #D1FF7E for answered. Here's a screenshot with those colours firebugged in http://skitch.com/dylanfm/b6nk3/biztravel .
Interesting papers, but based on what I've skimmed and remember I don't think that they compare desktop grade disks with server grade disks.
I think getting a masters really separates the wheat from the chaff, education wise.

It's part of an elite.
Am I alone in thinking companies shouldn't hide that there is a paid version? Take a look at Evernote (http://evernote.com/). The front page doesn't mention that there is a free and a paid version except for a subtle "Premium" link in the top right corner. I think they should be upfront with users and show the features of the free and paid versions side by side.
Stats is where it's going to be at. And Gauss is your friend. He makes it hard for lotsa certification junkies to flood the market.

A masters in stats is really something.
That'd be great. I'm in Australia (near Sydney). Keen to hear from anyone interested in doing something like this.
That's probably true, good observation.
No, I guessed it from a decade's worth of familiarity with the Economist's editorial flavor, their regular coverage of bioengineering trends, and a number of other contextual factors. Please consider similar possibilities next time someone disagrees with you, instead of denigrating their character.
I found Palantr very interesting but the article uncovers The US agencies incompetency with zillion of dollars in Research?
I wasn't talking about me; my point was, by being reasonable, you're going to have a hard time picking fights with security researchers.

Incidentally: you'd be surprised how many "names" in the industry are ex-NSA.
Impromptu is scheme. It only runs on osx. Sadly i can do nothing close to what the creator can.
Sex!!??? On the Internet??!!! Well I never!
How profound.
Actually, the things houses have to 'interface' with are so standardized you don't even think about it. Appliances, plumbing fixtures, computers, furniture. Everything is standard sizes, so they fit through doors, plug in and hook up properly.

Lumber dimensions, electrical connections, even door sizes are standardized.
"Perl with different syntax" is a prolix way of saying "better". ;)
I still don't understand why php is so frowned upon here. Easy and quick implementation and a low learning curve.
Good article. Maybe you should edit the title to get more reads, though.
I can top that. I shot an email to Rentoid, an Aussie startup in Melbourne, after it came up on HN yesterday and here is auto responder message I got back.

--

Thanks for your curiosity!

We don't get nearly as many questions as you might imagine at rentoid. We reckon it's because our site is pretty easy to use and hasn't got a million confusing things on every page, or maybe people think we won't answer the query and some computer will.

Sure it's an automated response this time, but a real, living, breathing, person who hasn't nearly had enough sunlight will respond to your question within a day or so. We figure if you cared enough to ask something, we should care enough to respond personally.

If your question is super-urgent give Steve a call on [private number] or Luke on [private number].

Cheers,
The Rentoid team.

--

Me likes a company with first names and mobile numbers :-)
This is really exciting news; traditionally the carriers have been a bit closed in nature, and this represents a healthy step forward for people like myself who use and enjoy Loopt. Look forward to seeing this technology progress!
How does this compare with the real Auto-Tune plugin? Auto-Tune Evo is a $399 piece of software. Aren't they doing something foolish in selling the same technology for a fraction of the price? I'm sure there are fewer features in the iPhone app, but for some modest uses, it seems it could easily be used in lieu of the full-priced software.
I think the color scheme looks really nice, I prefer it to stackoverflow. Just my opinion though.
Well, good for the court, but I have a rather different take on this.

As far as I can tell, based on the information given, the "hackers" (no, I don't like this use of the word, either) didn't steal money from the woman. The bank did.

Consider: Do I care how much money my bank gives to someone who is using my identity? Not much, really. Of course, I'm generally in favor of my bank guarding its resources prudently, but, really, $26,000 is a drop in the bucket compared to the assets most banks have. If my bank wants to give $26,000 to some random person who happens along, well then, I think they're stupid, but it's not a huge problem with me.

However, for the bank to claim that my account balance has been reduced by $26,000 as a result of their stupidity, well, that is a problem. Giving out money to random people is dumb, but covering their stupidity by taking money from me -- that is theft.

The conceptual error occurs when you say that the "hackers" withdrew money from my account. No, only I am authorized to do that. These people obtained money from the bank by means of fraud, but the fact that my identity info was used, is not relevant to my account balance.

Another way to think about it is that the bank does not have a box somewhere with my name on it. Instead, a savings account (for example) is a loan from me to the bank, on which the bank pays me interest. The account balance is the amount the bank owes me. So, the bank got stupid and gave some money to some nasty person. Does that affect how much they owe me? Nope. Is the fact that the bank thought they were partially repaying my loan, relevant to how much they owe me? Nope.

A final thought: suppose the tables were turned. I owe the bank money (I have a mortgage). Suppose someone came to my door and said, "Hi! I'm from your bank, and, for your convenience, I'll take your mortgage payment." And I'm stupid, so I stuff a wad of bills into this person's hand. Now suppose that this person is not really from the bank. Does their action affect my mortgage balance? Of course not. Further, in this situation, would any reasonable person claim that my visitor stole from the bank? Of course, not, they stole from me. If I refuse to pay back my mortgage now, then I am the one ripping off the bank, not my visitor.

I conclude that, again, the problem this woman has, is not that some "hacker" stole her money; it is that the bank stole her money.

UPDATE: Started reading the article again. The more I read, the more ridiculous the thinking appears. Look at the first sentence: "An Illinois district court has allowed a couple to sue their bank on the novel grounds that it may have failed to sufficiently secure their account, ...." Dumb. I think they should sue the bank for taking their money and wrecking their credit without cause. Why should the bank's security have anything to do with them?
Same here, painfully so. Also, I tried the libertarian one and the statements were so vague as to seem useless. Ran out of patience.
"You want leaders, go military."

There are as many bad "leaders" in the military as in any other organization. Viewing military experience as providing some kind of extra leadership credentials is naive. Veterans like to think this is true. There is no real evidence it is. (feel free to provide some).

Your list provides a handful of characteristics good leaders have, irrespective of field of activity. Such leaders exist in all fields where competition among groups of people exists. Military history is full of incidences where rigid, dogmatic commanders led their men to disaster, alongside many instances where inspired leadership made a difference.

As btilly pointed out above, the military "leadership" style depends on a command and control organization where orders are (ultimately) obeyed even when they seem senseless.("take that hill", the charge of the Lighr Brigade). Hardly good training to lead a group of free thinking professionals.

At least in the software industry the best leaders by and large don't have military experience. For good reason. Leading people who can "vote with their feet" anytime is a very different kettle of fish from leading a group of people who are duty bound to obey you even at the cost of their lives. Good hackers in particular don't "take" well to military style command.

"You want leaders, go military." makes about as much sense as "You want leaders, go politics.".

In both fields there are good leaders and bad leaders and there is a "ruthless weeding out process". (As a reductio ad absurdum argument) A case could be made that people who've been successful in politics (sure, frontline only, if you want it that way - in this case people who've stood for elections and been elected to office) are much better placed to lead a team than people who've been successful in the military. After all they know how to listen to people, harmonize interests, evolve a consensus, communicate decisions and so on.

"A good military resume will almost without exception create the following person:"

replace military with "sports" or "community organizer" and the list remains unchanged wrt to the leadership qualities required (though their expression will change depending on the filed of activity).

The key word in your sentence is "good" not "military".

"A good X resume will exhibit leadership qualities" where X is any group activity with a competitive element.
Who Else Want to Know About Versatile and Effective Judo Techniques
TED Talks should have ratings too, and we should be able to sort by rating.
The assumption is we somehow have the objective truths.
As far as your last line is concerned I can see it happening clearly in India.
Just as an FYI, auto-playing slideshows bug the heck out of me. I'm probably not the only one who feels that way.
I work there, in software development. I think I work hard, but certainly not death march hard, or any harder than someone working at another random startup might. Not fourty hours a week, but certainly not eighty, either.
I agree with you. But the questions that the opponents of this theory are asking is "What about a few thousand who will die in the unrest that will invoke?"
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You know, that isn't a problem. My dad and my mum lived at home in Europe for quite a while, while they were finishing degrees and all that. It seems to be a North American thing to move out when you're not even finished university.
Don't miss the book link. I read this book in August, and it was the best explanation I've seen yet of how Scheme really works.

http://www.t3x.org/nmh/books2.html
Not all of us are software engineers. I work in the legal field. My office is 60% women. SoCal women.
I see what you mean.. In fact, I wasn't actually aware that the proliferation of .in sites was so large that they might be termed spammy/seedy.. I for one have never actually seen the seedier ones!
send me an email: icey at icey dot net

I'm going to try to organize something.
Seven years. Wow. That really makes me wonder how many folks die while treatments that might save them are still working their way through the FDA. And how many treatments don't exist at all -- just think, this thing could be on the third or fourth iteration by now!

I don't mind information, but that's just silly. People should be able to decide for themselves when to use experimental treatments, based on their own level of risk tolerence.
You have no idea how much I wish I could do this. Just testing my code from PHP 5.2 to 5.3 and there are several serious problems now that I get to find workarounds for, all while maintaining backward compatibility too.

How is it that a minor upgrade changes functions and their behaviour so much that it breaks existing PHP5-compatible code? WTF is wrong with the PHP developers?

If I didn't have so much code (whole product with contracts to support) invested in PHP, I would switch in a heartbeat and never look back.
Code-breaking quantum algorithm run on a silicon chip
How UK Government spun 136 people into 7m illegal file sharers
Why College Costs Rise, Even in a Recession
Welcome to the Library - Say Goodbye to the Books
The term is just so damned vague. If I buy a stock and think the price will go down, is that "negative thinking"? If I'm miserable where I work, would it be "positive thinking" to tell myself that I like it there?

My current understanding is that "positive thinking" is a lot like "having an open mind": social gamesmanship where you say "I disagree with you" but in a way designed to make the other person look bad, at least in the eyes of people who don't both to find out what the words are supposed to mean.
Very helpful! A web app recently jumped into my hobby project hopper, and the last thing I can remember of web work is CGI--and it's all new and shiny the way I remember it, too. I knew that was a bad sign, I knew I was so out of touch that I didn't even know what questions to ask . . . but I didn't realize a whole generation had come and gone without me.

I've got to start paying more attention.
My friend's brother works in software development as well, I hear about the work-life there a lot. It seems completely spoiled and perfect.
Decorators are an odd case -- I find that they make code dramatically clearer at the call-site, but that the decorator definitions get hairy fast (and get worse the more life-saving they are). They ended up being one of the best macro systems ever devised (they're applied at compile-time!).
Python 3 smokes Perl.

http://shootout.alioth.debian.org/u32q/benchmark.php?test=al...

And most people are using 2.x which is even faster.

http://shootout.alioth.debian.org/u32q/benchmark.php?test=al...
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This idea of expressing interesting and useful things as mathematical operations sounds to me like it really gets to the essence of what we do. It not only gets the basic feel of our work across to a normal person very succinctly, it also gets across something of why we like it. The conversation can proceed to details and interesting examples, or not, but either way, the person has learned something truly important.

Fantastic.
Thanks :) I tried to fix it, but I guess it's too late.
Have you read this book?

http://www.amazon.com/Hot-Zone-Terrifying-True-Story/dp/0385...
There are two ways of constructing a software design: One way is to make it so simple that there are obviously no deficiencies, and the other way is to make it so complicated that there are no obvious deficiencies. The first method is far more difficult. - C. A. R. Hoare

But I prefer Adams related formulation for usability:

... their fundamental design flaws are completely hidden by their superficial design flaws.
The assumption is that we have some objective truths. I don't think any sane, well-intentioned person would question that the U.S. declaration of independence was signed on July 4, 1776.
I'm always a bit puzzled by these claims of unreadable perl. Go find me perl I can't read: http://search.cpan.org/ . Where is it?
he said if (competitive) { requires perfection from human opponent }

you brought up a game where the condition does not apply. "competitive" in an understood word: can a computer tie consistently against what we agree is a moderately skilled player?
> the ones he needs already exist for python but not for perl

Rather unlikely.
Title is silly. The wonderful thing about statistics is that if you have a truly random sample of 1176 people you can extrapolate from 136 people to seven million (plus or minus a certain error bar which I'm too lazy to figure out right now).

The other points are somewhat valid, but by the usual standards of political misuse of statistics this is pretty small beer.
This is what I don't get. They're buying 18 electronic readers. How many students are there? How many students could concurrently use books before?
It bothers me that there's exactly one political position on the list of available topics, and that Mr. Aaronson seems to spend a fair amount of time dissing it on his blog.

Intentional or not, this is not the kind of message you want to send if you're serious about promoting consistent rational thinking.
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"I'm always a bit puzzled by these claims of unreadable perl."

unreadable for the claimants not for you.

"Go find me perl I can't read .. Where is it?"

Any language, no matter how obscure, will have some practitioners who can read any code written in it.

I am sure someone can say this about APL "What do you mean APL is unreadable? I can read any APL code fragment".

To repeat, they are saying they can't read it not that you can't. Don't take it personally. Use what works for you.
History of the Super Soaker
There's much wisdom in this article, but one counter-point is that motivation often comes after you start. A related idea is that "inspiration strikes he who is at the typewriter" (a writer's saying).

But perhaps this counter-point is more appropriate for the chronically unproductive, rather than the chronically productive that article targets.
That's winning at the special olympics. They are both so slow you'd never use either for cpu constrained tasks.
Given how long bacteria have been on earth, and how they live from ice to desert to even nucler waste, and how fast they evolve and freely swap DNA, how has not a single one of them already evolved the ability to consume more kinds of matter?

Answer: No free lunch, every advantage carries a cost. Any "super" bug we come up with will enter a world with vicious competitors who've been with us since long before the dinosaurs.
Joel, I would like to set up a StackOverflow for Graphic Design questions. Could I get access to the beta to do this?
Yeah, I was immediately screaming the same thing. Arguing that "only" a tiny subset of a population is involved with a survey as a basis for rejecting its results is just plain ignorance.

The other stuff in the article does seem dodgy though, like arbitrarily tacking on 50% to reflect an assumed-but-unmeasured bias in the input sample. Ridiculous.

Still, the title is innumerate, sensationalist junk, and the poster should be ashamed.
MRSA is pretty close to sending us back in time, a time before penicillin, it wasn't a good time, but obviously we survived.

We got super lucky with HIV because you have to exchange bodily fluids to catch it. If it ever becomes as easy to catch as the common cold, we're screwed.

And while the marginal danger may increase with research, the marginal utility will also increase, in fact it will increase faster. We'll discover more cures then diseases.
And yes, regulation is a blunt weapon which stops not only the bad, but also the good.
As others have pointed out, the questions are somewhat confusingly vague, but what bothered me the most was that it's rather dull if it finds no inconsistencies in your answers --- it's like a baldly philosophical opinion poll.
Ebola kills far too quickly to ever become a pandemic. For a pandemic a virus needs to kill you slowly so you can spread it a lot. Like the 1918 flu.
I agree a small truly random sample can often be reliably extrapolated - but in this case the 136>7m figure was based on research paid for by the BMI (who lobbied heavily against file-sharing) in a report still not fully published, based on two numbers of which one differs from the official ONS number without explanation. The fact that the lobbyist organisation paid for the original report was obscured by misattributing the source, which also seems dubious to me.

I don't doubt that political misuse of statistics is common, but it should always be called out.
Nokia releases Ovi SDK beta for Symbian and Maemo
The Nike + iPod app runs in the background. Does that not count as a third part application?
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Wow. This goes against everything I've ever been taught about how to manage your muscles during endurance activities (In my case hiking, cycling, and Nordic skiing), yet, jibes with my experience. And here I thought there was something seriously wrong with me.
So is it 45 or 79?