skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Another comment I can't upvote enough.

This is, indeed, an excellent article and, I would suggest, a must-read for anyone with an analytical mind.

Please do so and form your own understanding before reading the rest of my comment.

What I find fascinating adn distressing is the reliance on potentially meaningless statistics to determine relative safety of cars. (Fortunately, today, one can query quite a bit of data at http://www-fars.nhtsa.dot.gov though there may still be a GIGO).

Specifically, I'm uncomfortable with denominators used in such statistics, as they appear to assume consistent driving patterns within a certain "class" of cars. (Is there a study which shows this?) For example, the denominator of units of a model in operation is deceptive, if one model is driven far more than another, or, perhaps, rather, that one model is overwhelmingly favored by those who drive more less.

I have, admittedly, begged defining what driving "more" or "less" means. It seems that miles traveled is commonly accepted, but overall time spent traveling may be equally, if not more, meaningful. Sadly, this latter information isn't readily available, contributing to the GIGO problem. Even person-mile data are elusive.

Since the "nonmotorist" number of fatalities shown by the FARS front page ("Sub Total2") is around one sixth the total, this could easily mask differences in safety between models, since, presumably, car safety features are, first and foremost, for the protection of the occupants, not nonmotorists (or motorcyclists).

Back to the (sub-)topic at hand, my biggest take-away is that the Pinto was not defective or inherently unsafe, as it did not burst into flames on its own, nor is a cost-benefit analysis (which requires putting a price tag on human injury and death when it comes to safety features) reprehensible. Instead, such an analysis is necessary and beneficial.

The most important concept here is risk. How systems behave "in the wild," especially when human users/operators are part of these systems, is far from a certainty. This is the uncertainty is the basis of the polish vs. ship tension, as well as, apparently, the basis for negligence jurisprudence.

That I consider the whole Pinto debacle to be primarily about imposed versus consented risk on the part of the purchaser might make this whole sub-thread irrelevant to the OP's topic, but I think a contrast would be instructive in any case.

Regardless, I personally do not believe it is up to an engineer to make a risk analysis. Rather, I am a firm believer in more "sunshine" on such information, despite the current practice of graffitying products with warning labels.
It's not a rehash. Dare uses "Worse is better" as a jumping off point to examine why Ted Nelson's Xanadu failed while the much less capable WWW succeeded. He says Xanadu was much too complex to even get out the door.

I remember visiting the Xanadu project sometime in the 80's. It was a bunch of hackers in an old house in Menlo Park, CA. I came away with the feeling that it wasnt going to succeed because it was too complex. I remember in particular the requirement for bidirectional links and thinking that it was going to require too much cooperation to maintain them. Think, every time someone linked to your site, you now had an outbound link to maintain. Did that mean that if you moved a page, you would have to update a thousand outbound links or a billion browser caches?
Another long term strategy would be to live in a sustainable way on this planet. Perhaps we could crack that first. The sun is good for another 5 billion years.
Your point is obvious: Twitter could very well be the next Google.

But back to the original article, all I have to say is that Google sure has changed a lot since those early days. ;)
Thanks! (erlog in his other projects looks good too.)
"PageRank is computed by solving an equation of 500 million variables and two billion terms."

Does it take 500 million variables to compute my Pagerank of 3 when there are only 32 sites that link to it? How many of those 500 million variables are 0 or null?
When I viewed it there were about 50 spammed comments. That was a cute worm attack. ;)
Wow, he wrote that in four days. King was a man in unbelievable talent to be sure, but it certainly shows that someone can produce something amazing in a short period if they have convictions and a bunch of free time.
US/USSR(Russia now) had sent probes to venus, mars and moon for last 30-40 years. but only now we have info on widespread water availability.

maybe sensors have improved, computing power has increased, but ISRO did it indegeniously and using a low cost model, but needed 2 decades to achieve something great.

if humans can share space technology, we could have been couple of decades ahead in space technology

it would be great if we could atleast have a "2020 a space odyssey"

I dont want to die a earthling
Your joke makes the opposite claim that he does at the end of his post. With no data either way, I guess we all default to our biases.
Summary (it is all a little meta for me): the reddit link above started as a fairly innocuous reddit thread comparing the sizes of the two books "Javascript - The Definitive Guide" and "Javascript - The Good Parts" - the Good Parts being a good deal smaller as the linked photograph illustrates.

Some wise guy decided to have a little joke, and posted a comment instructing people to copy and paste a snippet of Javascript on their URL location bar. A lot of people (presumably "web programmers") did as instructed. That little snippet posts a comment on that same thread, instructing the next person to do the same. That entire reddit thread is overrun with those script generated comments.

Social lesson: we are fked as far as security is concerned, if that reddit thread is any indication: even programmers would sheep-like do as they are instructed. I suppose that was the "lesson" the wise guy had in mind.

Some good samaritan posted another Javascript snippet to clean up the reddit thread - automatically downvote the spam comments or hide them.
It depends. We can't say for sure manned spaceflight doesn't catch people's imagination because since the early 70's we really don't send people anywhere interesting.

Er can't blame people: the ISS is as exciting as camping on your backyard. It may solve some problems and help develop some technologies important for future space travelers, but it's difficult to call it space exploration when you don't explore anything.

The state of science education also doesn't help either. Most people cannot appreciate how devilishly hard is to keep a presence in LEO.

As for keeping a presence on the Moon, it is important because we have to perfect a lot of protocols before we can pretend to be ready for a trip to Mars and, if anything goes wrong, rescue is a week away.

Even if you have to process a couple tons of rocks to get a liter of water, it would be cheaper than to send it from Earth and by landing a couple automated water factories before any humans venture there could also reduce the risks (and costs) further as they wouldn't have to carry a lot of water.
jkh was the lead for the FreeBSD project before he went to Apple.
MLK's "Letter" is great. I had to read it for an english course in my freshman year. And to his credit, Ferris highlighted very good sections. He may not have actually created any novel content, but he definitely made the letter more skimmable.
Not to mention the problem of search has already been mostly solved by yahoo ,webcrawler, and altavista. It's good enough.
From your previous posts, I recall that you are an art student. I assume that means you're still in college. I think you'll find that as you continue on in your area, the competition grows significantly. As you move into larger pools, you'll encounter more people who can do what you do, but are willing to work harder.
"I remember in particular the requirement for bidirectional links and thinking that it was going to require too much cooperation to maintain them."

Although, partially, we are now starting to see this with "trackbacks" and "pages that link to this page". Of course, things would be much more complicated if this was a requirement instead of an option.

IMHO, for something to be successful in the "real world" it should have as few hard requirements as feasible, and as many applications as possible.
I think that the problem is the term "hard work".

I've spend a tremendous amount of time learning those fields that I enjoy and am successful at. But a lot of that time has felt more like 'play' or 'exploration' or curiosity than 'hard work'.

Hard evokes doggedly trying a thousand elements with only the hope that they might create light.

I am sure that Tesla spent at least as much time and energy as Edison in pursuing his field. It also seems he brought more play and imagination to it. And Tesla's inventions were the big ones that made electricity practical - the electric motor, the generator, alternating current, etc.

I think that argument isn't so spending time and energy but rather against thinking that merely putting forth time energy is enough....
Memorable passwords don't need to be simple, dictionary, or insecure.

MySonPlaysLittleLeague is a password that someone can easily remember, but few people get pointed in the direction of good sentence passwords, and most password policies indirectly limit the use of sentence passwords with character limits or number and punctuation requirements.
If think you replace "smartest" with "most successful", the point he's trying to make does not change.
The rhino book is still an invaluable reference.

I own both, I've read both, but the rhino book is the one sitting on my desk 24x7.
The problem with your comment is that nine out of ten times, it's actually correct.
At first I thought it was the picture that was causing all those posts because I didn't think people were really dumb enough to paste javascript in their browser when they don't even know what it does (especially on the programming reddit...)

Way to prove my belief wrong!
Pagerank is a funny algorithm, think of it as a problem in gravitation, every page affects the pagerank of every other page.

You compute the equilibrium and then normalize the results.

There are a bunch of optimizations that you can apply in order to speed things up bit it is still quite computationally expensive.
I used a password manager and synchronize my desktop with my PDA.

Check out

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Password_manager
Reminds me of the save this picture as foo.js shit bricks attacks on 4chan.
The issue with providing an answer that is a meaningful response is that one can in fact guess and often get it right. Second, most sites that use these secret answers (favorite color, first car, ...) don't have a mechanism to lock out after a certain number of incorrect attempts.

My first car is likely something like x78uyipoqA.

Call me paranoid!
Agreed. That's actually what I was trying to say. It's an ancient relic of JavaScript's implementation of the class system.
Just out of interest, are you Indian? In which case is this the source of what appears to be some offence?
WebMB failed?
Interestingly, this is what the New York Times itself has to say on the matter (and I think it's at least commendable that they acknowledge their shortcomings on what, in the very least, was a newsworthy story):

http://www.nytimes.com/2009/09/27/opinion/27pubed.html?_r=2&...

"But for days, as more videos were posted and government authorities rushed to distance themselves from Acorn, The Times stood still. Its slow reflexes — closely following its slow response to a controversy that forced the resignation of Van Jones, a White House adviser — suggested that it has trouble dealing with stories arising from the polemical world of talk radio, cable television and partisan blogs. Some stories, lacking facts, never catch fire. But others do, and a newspaper like The Times needs to be alert to them or wind up looking clueless or, worse, partisan itself."

I, too, hope that there will be more disclosure on the story as they are fairly serious allegations and it would be helpful to know the sample sizes of the report - but what I find surprising is how non-curious those like the NYT were - and they're admitting as much.

They seem to have entirely ignored the story or attacked those doing the reporting as opposed to digging up facts for themselves. This reinforces the point not only that we need more investigations like this but that we can't rely on traditional media outlets for these stories. As the NYT notes, sure, sometimes these stories just turn out to be unsubstantiated polemics - but that doesn't necessarily make them wrong.
True, but they hold something that is generally recognized as a mark of intelligence. Whether or not it is actually a mark of intelligence is irrelevant to his point.
I would never not use a prototype in production code, but prototypes are a different topic that I wanted to avoid for this article. I'm just trying to explain "this".

Also, your code isn't right. You're calling myHotDog.getCondiments instead of passing a reference to setTimeout.
A hobby business is not a business, it's a hobby and hobbies cost money.

If you plan on this being a business you have to figure out first how much turnover you have to make to make a go of it, and if $13 / month for a bank is a make-or-break decision then I would suggest you look long and hard at whether or not this is a feasible endeavor.

For sure it is possible that you'll be doing this expense out-of-pocket for a while, but then you just put all these expenses against your future revenues.

A typical small business, including all overhead, such as administration, tax filings, equipment and so on will cost you at least $200 / month, so if your projected profits when this thing is up and running are lower than that you really should reconsider your plans.

This is not meant to demoralize you, I just think that if you doubt about spending $13/month that you have other issues than choosing the right bank.

I chose mine for reliability, easy access to international banking, the fact that my balance is insured to a serious amount and so on, the 'costs per transaction' and 'monthly fees' were the least of the considerations.

The recent crisis has born out the wisdom of that decision, by going with a large but cooperative bank they were hit very little by the affairs that caused their main competitor to now be mostly state property.
I mean you can probably buy it off iTunes for 99 cents to a $1.29

Did you know that iTunes store does not exist in many places outside America?
Integrated circuits working at 125K thanks to excitons
It is probably true that people who scholastic reputation will try to make up for it in other ways. However the problem is that there may be too much authority placed in these usual standards of achievements.

Philip forgets that people with academic credentials like himself are being smug when they complain about others. If your academic credentials represent you so well, why should it bother you if someone is simply acting?

Another disingenuous behavior he describes is hiding that you went to a reputable school like Harvard.

The reason people are afraid of living up to "artificially higher" expectations is because their school's reputation really is artificially high. What these type of people want is to have the "Harvard" reputation when it suits them, and the average Joe culpability should they ever fail. They want to further perpetuate the image of superiority that Harvard/Stanford entails without letting the public correct their perception that going to one of these top schools does not make you a Godly Genius.
What I personally find interesting about the story is the execution and optimization to get such remarkable margins in what should be a commoditized business:

"We built software with computational algorithms to determine what the optimal number of boxes to have in the warehouse is and what the sizes of those boxes should be. Should we stock five different kinds of boxes to ship product in? Twenty kinds? Fifty kinds? And what size should those boxes be? Right now, it's 23 box sizes, given what we sell, in order to minimize the cost of dunnage (those little plastic air-filled bags or peanuts), the cost of corrugated boxes, and the cost of shipping. We rerun the simulation every quarter. Using the right box probably adds close to 1 margin point."

1% is incredible - that works out to being 890K+/year (though that might depend on what their "null" case is/was).
Is there a "next Google", I don't think so
Actually, I would imagine the odds are worse than that. Not all startups give away their product for free, and I'm guessing the failure rate is higher for those that do.

But I don't see the problem with that. Software companies that want to change the world have to be free, at least initially. If somebody wants to swing for the fences, I don't think anybody should stop them. It's not the business model I would choose, but I certainly admire those that do.
Nobody thought so when Google started!
I would have to assume that people knew better, knew what it would do, and ran the JS anyways as a joke.
What they're doing seems incredibly awesome. The prices still seems high though.

I can't see how these would be used for a city-wide or enterprise-wide project at $500+ per unit.

Then again I shouldn't be surprised at what governments are willing to spend.
Probably many knew what it would do, so that's why they ran it, as a prank/joke.
The National Parks: America s Best Idea
Pacific time today 12pm now, 4pm, 8pm, 10pm.

The sumptuously filmed history of America national parks begins in 1851...
The site I launched last February expanded to its first ten thousand users in a month. My friend and I put no work into it after launching it, because we didn't think it was interesting, but I'm able to raise attention to things pretty quickly. (Even without putting in effort, some money was made—we opened up a shitty Cafepress account and put a link on, and sold a handful of shirts and mousepads.)

This month, as an experiment, I started a blog without any publicizing, to see how well I could grow something without any promotion. Three weeks in I have over a hundred readers and am currently growing at the rate of seven or eight readers a day. Now I'm experimenting with a collective, because I want to see how well I can divert those readers towards other people if I care to.

I know it's out of fashion to say this, but I believe in the long tail. I'm able to publish anything I can imagine without consulting other people first, and if I can find a thousand people to buy whatever it is I'm making, then perhaps I'm not yet rich, but I'm financially free to do what I like. I've still got three years, and I'm utterly confident of finding an audience.

I think you'll find that as you continue on in your area, the competition grows significantly.

I'm curious. Competition with who? I don't know anybody who writes the way I do, or makes things look the way I do, or plays music how I do, or takes photos the way I do. Art's a great field in that there's no competition unless you go the route of searching for grants and entering contests, and I dislike both. I'd never live a lifestyle that relied on the good will of a panel of judges—though if it comes down to it, I can compete.
"I would remind you that extremism in the defense of liberty is no vice! And let me remind you also that moderation in the pursuit of justice is no virtue!"
"work hard" and "keep learning" should be separated out. There are several people that will do one but not the other. I'd argue too that they have different effects on success: over the long-term, "keep learning" is much more important, but you need a minimum level of both to succeed.
I think it'd be interesting if they included times for unladen-swallow as well. I'm going to guess that pypy is currently further along than u-s, but I haven't done any comparison myself.
I great interpretation of Malcolm Gladwell's 10000 hours that I came across somewhere is "Don't be concerned with practicing 10000 hours at something - be concerned with finding something you enjoy so much that you don't notice when the 10000 hours have passed"
Yes. B/c you are headquartered in Cali, where 100% of your employees are physically located (and where they work; telecommuting doesn't count).

EDIT: BUT if you are running a sole proprietorship (i.e., D.B.A. "fake company name"), then the fee is much less ($100-$150 for the DBA registration).
Not a "next Google", but certainly another site that'll be as big as Google.

As I've said before, my money is on Facebook. People my age use it like it's the Internet. To them, that's all there is. And they click its ads.
Indeed, his point about name-brand universities is entirely backed up, albeit in a slightly ironic fashion, by his namedropping.
Fast mutable collections for Haskell: more benchmarks
> I'm sure there's an easy way around this but I just set it aside because it's not a priority for me.

What part of your experience/knowledge with govts, particularly CA's, suggests that "get around" will be easy?

CA will go after you if you earn options/start a company in CA, move out, and then sell.
If you're looking for a company to work for, you might enjoy:

http://www.codesourcery.com/

...depending on your interests.
Facebook VP talk: “Pushing The Digital Envelope”
I have two entities at the moment, both Georgia LLCs.

Here is some of the rational for why and what I feel this buys me. This, unfortunately does not tell the OP which bank offers a small biz account for less than $13/month but does relate to "what you should be thinking about" instead of what "color-of-the-bike-shed decision" as patio11 points out.

1 - I'm not looking for investment and don't need to worry about having a corp structure suited to investors. If that later changes, I'll get hit with some restructuring costs, but I think I've minimize those costs (thats a discussion for a different post). So an LLC will do and Delaware not required for investment structure purposes.

2 - Delaware is well regarded, aside from investor issues noted above, as its court system is "predictable and efficient" for many types of business litigation. Thats a good reason to choose it, right? I'd say not good enough for an unfunded startup not anticipating investment. Choosing Delaware for it being predictable and efficient in litigation assumes you may one day find yourself in litigation. Have you ever been in litigation? I have. The first thing I learned is you want home court advantage (the second thing I learned is everyone lies, but thats a different discussion). For litigation you want your home town lawyer that you can drive down the street and talk to, not a faceless law firm in a state where you don't live. And in the worst case that you have to do some/all of the legal work yourself, you want to be able to drive down the street and file papers on your own. You can't guarantee jurisdiction being in your favor simply by being incorporated where you live but its a big factor.

3 - Income Tax. One way or another, you will get taxed when you take money out of your entity. There are various strategies to minimize this and its timing, but unless you're a resident of Texas or Florida (are there others?), you are on the hook for taxes in your state of residence.

The above tells me:

A - I should form my LLC in Georgia.

B - open my bank accounts in Georgia

C - ensure all my contracts with my clients unambiguously state the legal jurisdiction is in my home town in Georgia.

This buys me a lot of simplicity and peace of mind. For banking, I do get less than $13 a month, mine is free with a balance of over $300. My bank is a small solid old local bank that you all have never heard of and no, you probably don't want to use them if you don't live here. They always answer the phone within two rings and its always a real person. Most of the time, the conversation starts off with something like "Hi Jon, are you calling from China? I just saw your momma yesterday." ;)
Dear Apple: Fix the App Store with a Measure of Credibility