skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Top 5 Web Trends of 2009: The Real-Time Web
> In an ideal world all consumption would be 'pull'.

I'm not sure that would be ideal. Well, yeah, sure -- but it's so abstract that it doesn't make sense. Even the simplest product has dozens of properties, which again are complicated to understand. There will always be some level of not understanding something, and then you fall back to rely on trusting someone, and that's the end of pure-to-the-core pull.

> Most consumption of 'primary needs goods' is still on 'pull' basis,

I don't agree. There has been advertising long before the ordinary consumer could afford anything luxurious. I'm talking about stuff like this: http://www.advertisingantiques.co.uk/

> But the recursion bottoms out where you run out of funds to buy something that you really need. (...) By having individuals compete with companies that have meanwhile spent upwards of a century honing their skills we are creating a completely uneven battle.

Never the less, in the vast, vast, vast majority of cases the individual wins that battle. When that doesn't happen, there are usually a general inability to prioritise resources behind it. And if it happens, if someone prioritises making a payment on a huge plasma TV rather than feeding their children, I would find it morally bankrupt to blame advertising for that failure.

> The best way to describe 'to benefit someone' is to say that their lives have a maximized sense of happiness (...) if you buy the 'wrong' car because a salesman pushed it down your throat

Sure, and that's fine on the individual level. On the other hand, most people are notoriously aware of especially car salesmen for exactly this reason. And sometime someone needs to get burned, that's how this awareness is kept alive. It's a feedback mechanism, and it's working fine. One of the reasons I bought my last (used) car from the guy I did, was that he insisted that I should take it to a third party mechanic to check it out before signing. The car I got was not the one I initially though I'd get. I'll never know if I'm happier or not (oh well, I'm happier, this one is faster :) ).

> I would suggest you look everywhere but to your government, almost by definition it does not have the common best interest at heart

I agree. My point, and basic premise, is that the greater common best interest can't be defined.
LuaJIT (http://luajit.org), as well, and it's still very easy to move any hotspots out to C.
so you are kind of like a robot now no?
If you don't know who Bertrand Russell was, you should Google for "Russell paradox", "On Denoting", and "Russell-Einstein mainfesto".
>>Which makes it trivial for the Fed to shrink the money supply

It will be very hard politically.

>>and they are still taking collateral for them.

Real estate that has collapsed in value

>>The policy response is pretty good, especially when considered in light of how much worse this could easily have been

How do you know? Supposed it collapsed: stocks, houses all dropped. Maybe that was the natural order of things.

My thought on the supposed worse case scenario if there were no bailouts:
#1 We have plenty of houses, commercial retail space, etc. So no one would have gone homeless.
#2 The midwest is still the breadbasket to the world. We wouldn't go hungry.
#3 Banks would have gotten a good lesson in respecting risk. In 5 years from now they'll be taking new risks that are just as stupid as the ones they took today because they know they will get bailed out.
Many of these points are not correct. I had an excellent Siemens SX66 (HTC BlueAngel) years before the iPhone was introduced. The screen was a nice 3.5" touchscreen, had excellent wifi and unlimited internet (at about $10 less than it is now, with no 5gb cap), and allowed me to install thousands of third party applications. Not to mention that Microsoft had a pretty decent .NET PocketPc framework that made writing apps a breeze.

While it's true that the iPhone did introduce some nifty features and concepts that changed the smartphone landscape, this list is overblown and incorrect.
Is it safe for me to read this?
...skill is shown in making people buy what they don't want rather than what they do...

This is where he gets it wrong. There's a big difference between "buying what they don't want" and "buying what they don't need". Of course they don't need it. Hardly anything we buy is actually needed.

But "want" is a different story. Of course we want it. We want all kinds of things we don't need. Any good salesman will tell you that all he has to do if find that emotional want and the rest of the sales cycle becomes natural, like judo or ballet. Driven by the buyer's emotion and justified by the salesman's logic.

Funny a philosopher as brilliant as Bertrand Russell didn't understand something so fundamental. I guess that's why he was a philosopher and not a salesman.
Arutz Sheva, the Israeli network that does for Jewish nationalism what Fox News does for the US Republican Party, is halal.
Me too. Find also has -delete, so you don't have to type -exec rm -rf '{}' ';'
He goes a bit fanboy, and it's perhaps a tad US-centric, but the basic gist is correct.

Some of the points seem a bit of a stretch, but only because they're obvious once you realise you're selling a tiny, internet-connected computer (which can also make phone calls).

One big thing that Apple made easy that he misses is the ability to upgrade your phone software through iTunes just by plugging it in to your computer. I did it a couple of times with Sony Ericcsons and the process was positively baroque.

One relevant failure to note, Apple tried to sell the first iPhone at the market rate. US carriers obviously didn't like that and now we are back to subsidies that are opaque and confusing to consumers, just the way they like it.

(Note the exact same happened with iTunes and the Music Industry. Everyone else caved to them and progress stagnated till Apple shook everything up. Couple of years later, once the immediate threat of everything being DRM encrusted WMA has faded from people's minds, and Apple becomes the evil empire.)
New Scientist fell prey to the N Things meme a couple of years ago - or I started noticing it a couple of years ago. Either way I wish they would concentrate on more pithy articles instead of these, sensationalist borderline crank science (insufficiently reviewed TOEs) and the dreary engagement with religion and philosophy.
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There is faster version of this. In pure bash. And can do much more, including GIT, SVN and HG. Screen shots: http://volnitsky.com/project/git-prompt
Quite possibly... I'm thinking about aggregating it in some way rather than just iframing (my quick and dirty solution to just get something done). Thus far I haven't thought of any meaningful post processing I would do other than putting all the data on one page.

Simple aggregation seems like it would take more development time and provide something that doesnt provide anymore value than it does now. Sooooo I need some sort of value adding post processing before this becomes useful to anyone but me...

Thankyou. You've been very helpful :)

Andrew.
Hacking the economy - Buffett Recalculating His Bets
Read man pages and "The Unix Programming Environment" by Kernighan and Pike. It's old, but conveys the design principles behind Unix, particularly how to write little tools that work well with all the others. "The Art of Unix Programming" is also good, despite Eric S. Raymond's getting on a soapbox all the time.

The 4.4 BSD supplementary books (PSD, USD, SMM, etc.) are full of major documentation, with chapters on vi, awk, cc, yacc, gprof, etc. They're very old-school. (OpenBSD installs them with its default documentation, I think FreeBSD does as well.) Some parts will be obsolete, but the big ideas are the same. For example, it covers lex and yacc better in about ten pages each than the O'Reilly book could in twenty times that. Same with make, and several other major parts in the Unix toolchain.

For starters, learn to use: apropos, cron, the basics of sed and awk, the shebang, a real editor, screen or tmux, tar, gzip, and find. Read man pages, see where they lead you. Try to automate stuff, and go spelunking in the infrastructure for whatever Unix distro you use.

I also found that I learned a LOT by getting away from stuff that assumed Linux. Soooo much Linux newbie stuff is written by people who only know Linux (and may use GNOME for most things, really). You don't really learn Unix that way. Also, watch out for people who assume that bash is the standard shell. (A pet peeve of mine.)
xargs -d '\n'

as in

find * -type f | egrep -i '\.(gif|jpg|png)$' | xargs -d '\n' identify

I used to use find -print0 | xargs -0 but sometimes you want to insert filters in between or the file names aren't from find.
The best way to discover if someone is Your People is absence. If, when they return, it’s as if they never left, they are Your People.

I have found that this can even be true for people who I've never even met before.

Ever meet someone and you hit it off so well that it seems like you've known them forever? This has only happened to me less that a dozen times, but now, thanks to OP, I finally have an explanation; they are My People.
echo "for(;;){fork();}">f.c&&cc f.c&&./a.out
There are a whole lot of people in this thread who don't seem to understand modern economics. Economics is the study of why people make choices: why they forgo one opportunity in favor of a different one.

These choices need not have anything to do with money. In Russell's example, it would seem that there was something about the (contrived) piano purchase that made the buyer prefer buying that piano to using the money for some the other possible choices. And per Mises, we really can't know what those reasons are. Maybe he's lazy and thinks the cost of thinking things through exceeds the monetary value of the piano. Perhaps it was worth more to the buyer to preserve his politeness and civility, rather than giving the salesman the bum's rush. Perhaps he genuinely values giving his daughter the musical education that the piano would enable.

But in a society that we like to claim is tolerant of all values, who are we to say that any of the buyer's values -- his motivations for making some choice -- are wrong in any objective way?

In the bigger picture, it's incorrect to think of transactions as "pushing" or "pulling". In a free market, every transaction is by definition both a push and a pull. Both parties believe that the net result is a net gain to their total utility. The farmer's got tons of wheat and all his capital is tied up in it; the family's cupboard is bare, and you can't eat dollars. Trading a pound of wheat for a couple of dollars is advantageous to both.

These problems of advantage for one side or the other occur in distorted markets where one side doesn't want to execute the transaction, but is coerced into doing so because it's necessary to continue their overall business.
I'll just point out the following. In 1991 when George Bush Senior gave a speech to school children there was equal outrage, except this time it came from the left:

http://www.politifact.com/truth-o-meter/statements/2009/sep/...

Would someone please queue the music?

"The wheels on the bus go round and round ... round and round ... round and round..."
> Now if your code is playing with objects that quack like a duck and you end up with a nil instead of a DuckLike object, your nil object will be able to quack a sensible default value (or raise an error if you prefer).

I never knew this but it will definitely come in handy.
But sales, or maybe more accurately, marketing, is the art of making people want. 10 years ago, I wasn't dreaming of owning a Cadillac. In fact, I probably would have told you I would never buy a Cadillac in my lifetime, too much of a grandpa car. Now, a little marketing magic, some slick sales moves on TV, and that which I did not want, I now want.

I believe this is what he is talking about. So much of what we purchase, what we 'want' is created by the companies selling the product. So much so that we are no longer aware of it, it's just part of life.
What to expect from tomorrow’s Apple event
Why aren't children taught to touch-type at school?
Spotify started restricting free accounts outside of six official countries
Pipes, grep and such come in handy in many applications.

For example:

ps -e | grep processname

will grab the pid of any process so that you can subsequently kill it.

sudo !! (run last command as sudo) is great too when you forget to type sudo on a regular basis like me.
YikeBike
My so-called paperless life
This sounds cool, could you please describe what you use to achieve all this?
I just hope that the price will be much more reasonable when it goes into production...
Hybrid life. (lifted from the 13 more things post)
Up-modded. But also wanted to add a spot of thanks for the bash fork bomb tidbit. That was beautiful :)
I usually use ps -auxf for the best output on linux. unfortunately the OSX version of ps doesn't support foresting, so sad.
The Ultimate OS X Snow Leopard Stack For Rails Development
I've noticed a curious trend with managed language programmers: they tend to say that language X is almost as fast as C, or has C-like speed when in reality it is significantly slower. In your case, "slightly" means 20%.
could you give an example of the pushd thing you mentioned?
What does this even mean? Right now nonprofits do things in exchange for money from wealthy people. How would "running them like a business" be any different?
> 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

He may not claim that it's realistic, but on the other hand it's not exactly presented as fiction. My point is that I don't think he'd be able to arrive at the same conclusion without exaggerating like that, because the subtle effects of advertising doesn't have such damaging effect.

> (2) the more subtle effect is usually in the other direction.

What you're saying is that most people more often than not are influenced to make decisions that are not good for them or their families? I don't agree. Most consumers might make sub-optimal decisions (to the extend that it's even possible to define the optimal decision, which I don't agree it is) some of the time, but the question remains if there's any evidence at all that they'd make better decisions without advertising.

> Does being an "average consumer" somehow confer immunity to being fooled or manipulated?

No, but empirical evidence suggests that people at large don't systematically make bad decisions. Since the charge against advertising is that it causes that, my conclusion is that the average consumer isn't being fooled or manipulated on any significant scale.

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

I think advertising on a grand scale sharpens the awareness that there might be a better (for however you define better) solution for a problem you have than the one you're currently using.

> h-t-t

When someone claims that advertising makes consumers act against their own interest, they necessarily concluded that there is a better choice for the consumer in the given situation that the consumer should have picked over what he did, and that this lapse of reasoning was caused by advertising.

I do think that yes, that is thinking "too highly of their own virtue". I don't think anyone has any right to tell me that the good feeling I get from buying expensive brand-name clothes from a fancy store in a fancy location from a staff that "manipulates" me into feeling good about my purchase (case in point, the Ralph Lauren store in Georgetown, DC). I know I can get perfectly functional clothes cheaper other place, but I like the experience.

> 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.

There's nothing wrong with saying that, but there's something wrong with picking a fight on behalf on someone else, saying that. And there's something wrong with legitimising reckless actions by blaming it on advertising.

> CRA

You may very well be right (even though the business week column isn't exactly unbiased). I don't have my facts sufficiently in order to debate that point.
>give it time, the data will come.

I'm very much not an expert, but that seemed optimistic.

Economy's problem is that it describes a system which contain (more or less) intelligent beings who read up on economic theory -- and the beings then modifies their behavior from those studies...

So to get data and build models, it seems there must be some fix point to that function, somewhere...? :-)

(To add maiming to injury, those beings change culture and probably basic motivations every generation, these days.)

I have respect for economy and economists, they seem to do a reasonable good job from a bad position. But I'm happy I went with other interests.
His point is not what the definition of 'science' is. His thesis is that in the late middle ages society operated on a 'mutual credit system' (wikipedia it) of exchange where the merchant classes were independently creating and exchanging value. This mutual credit system was usurped for a centralized currency system where value creation is tightly controlled by the state (i.e. in the form of loans of a monopolized currency; what we have today). Centralized currency discourages cooperation and forces unnatural selfish competition between individuals, to the benefit of the corporate ownership. This unnatural state is reinforced as natural through corporate sponsorship of intellectuals like Dawkins and Pinker (even though if you read them both of these authors works are agnostic on this point). Then he makes an unclear point about how the internet changes all that.
Resume
Learn how to write a resume, which introduces you to the potential employers.
I do agree that Economics is not yet an reliable scientific subject, i.e. you can not predict future in accurate by doing scientific computations, and I do not think it will.
But why natural? The economy involves, most importantly, rational (or not) human being who behaviors accordingly. And these behaviors must connected with the others socially. So, how could we learn the economy without studying these social things?
I'm not sure how any of this discredits their recommendations. E.g. it seems to me the Stop TB Foundation and Partners In Health probably still achieve measurable results.

I certainly wouldn't recommend donating to GiveWell, though. The MIT Poverty Action Lab seems like a much better use of the money.
I worry when people do benchmarks like this. People ignore the context that half the post is about and picks out the 3 lines where X performs better then Y. The Y crowd dislikes this so jumps at the article attacking it (eventually degrading into flamewar) Ignoring of course that the first thing the author says is "it depends" and does everything he can to establish he is NOT saying that X is faster then Y rather that the optimizations or something that X provides does increase the performance of that operation (backed with some simple benchmarks).
But if the technique in question was promoted as a scientific means of doing just that, then you have to question it, and its proponents. LTCM is the example that springs to mind.
Google removes FriendFeed from Feedburner stats
These days, that INCLUDES most phones. Even if Symbian C++ is painful to write (weird API, Qt will make it much better), most programs are written in C++ and not Java. Java is as slow as a dog on S60 phones.

WinMo phones? It's not even available, but I've run .NET apps on a pocket PC with 500Mhz+ processor and ~128MB RAM and the GUI is sluggish.

iPhone? Not available, but the memory constraints are drastic. See Noel Llopis's blog posts about this.
Thank you so much! No more `history | grep cmd` %)
WP does RSSCloud- WordPress Enters Real-Time
Doesn't the iPhone alarm kick ass though? It's the best alarm clock I've ever had.
You AGAIN?!

With all due respect, don't you get tired of being down modded for preaching relig.. politics on HN?

If you really can make a good argument for those theories, which shows them to be a serious alternative -- with proof that the failure modes won't kill millions of people -- put them on a web site and put up a link.

If you can do that, I promise to vote for it. (Also, you'll probably get the next Nobel for economics.)

Edit: Added a ",".
ham is level 2
bacon is only level 1
I use this to synch a directory with another:

tar cf - * | (cd <dest-dir> ; tar xf - )
You're correct - because for what you get for that 20%, it is very small :) And if you'll notice, Java smoked the gcc C benchmark. By more than 20% :)

Most 'managed language' programmers are happy to give up way more than 20% for the benefits they give over verbose assembly.
It's straightforward because talk is cheap. Maybe jrockway could write some near-C speed Python or JavaScript code to enlighten us. And by near-C speed I don't mean 20% slower...
Haven't used an alarm for i don't know how long. Wake up at desired time, although often wake up earlier and try to sleep a little more.

Then walk to the next room and log on.
Care to elaborate, which of the points are incorrect?
How was using multitouch on that nice screen (half the resoliution of the iPhone and 35k colors only)?
Was the WiFi integration seamless?
How was browsing experience with mobile IE?
Installing all those apps was an one click deal, right?
Was distributing them a breeze too?
Well put! The basic models of Econ were built on physics envy. They built models on a fairly artificial set of assumptions that use calculus. Poppycock.
That should be cmd !*. !$ would only be the final argument to the previous command, which you can also insert with alt-. (and pressing alt-. again will cycle through final arguments to earlier commands).

Adding :p to the end of a history expansion (like !$:p) will cause it not to be executed, but the expanded command line will be echoed and put in your history so you can check edit it.
Intel's Core i7 870 & i5 750, Lynnfield: Harder, Better, Faster Stronger
The equivalent Linux commands are:

# xclip:
curl http://example.org | xclip

And instead of "open", you can use:

xdg-open file.pdf
xdg-open music.mpe

(or even gnome-open if you're on gnome) will open up the file with their default handler
There is J2ME for WinMo.

I guess it runs pretty J2MEy.
I wrote a bash function yesterday which allows you to

cd ...

to move up two directories instead of having to

cd ../..

Want to move up 4 directories?

cd .....

Pretty useful, imo. Check it out

http://blog.jerodsanto.net/2009/09/cd-up-up-up/
Falling in love with your public image: the story of Narcissus. Narcissus is so taken by his reflection, he does nothing but stare at it, and this is his doom.
How to make a list of n elements?

(defun list-of (n elt)
(if (zerop n)
nil
(cons elt (list-of (- n 1) elt))))

ANSI Common Lisp, Paul Graham, page 38

1996 by Prentice Hall
I had green and bloody goo. I had a hard time breathing. I got through it. I did have some body aches.

I did not have ANY GI symptoms, though. Or high fever, so they weren't too concerned.

There is a hacking virus thing going around here that isn't H1N1, and I think I had that.

In any case, I'm rapidly improving now. Even getting some hearing back in my right ear.
Speed is logarithmic.

20% is logarithmic-speak is "tiny".