skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I don't know about all that. But it appears he's trying to use the same logic on his own ideas that he uses on his people.
How is this brutal on morale? In fact, how is this not what goes on at every company of IBM's size?

The reality is a company the size of IBM is always going to have a turnover of 10% or more so the "lower 10% rule" is just a way of getting rid of those people who can't do the job. The 70% might feel a little demoralized but if they're good employees they'll use that to make themselves better. The upper 20% are the best of the best and deserve to be treated as such.

So to me the 70-20-10 principle just seems like IBM being honest with employees about where they stand and giving them a chance to recognize it and do better if they so choose (some people are happy with average).
It's unfortunate that the article uses the Prisoner's Dilemma as its example, because the Prisoner's Dilemma is actually not the best game model to set up as the opposite of the Invisible Hand. A more appropriate model would be the Tragedy of the Commons, which was proposed by a fellow named Garrett Hardin in an article in a 1968 edition of Science magazine.

If you are interested in formal modeling of coordination problems, an interesting overview can be found in Elinor Ostrom's book Governing the Commons. In chapter one she gives an overview of the Prisoner's Dilemma, the Tragedy of the Commons, and the Logic of Collective Action (Mancur Olson's theory). After reviewing these abstract formal models, she looks at other possible institutional solutions for coordination problems.

Here are some links:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prisoners_dilemma

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tragedy_of_the_Commons

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Logic_of_Collective_Action

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Coordination_game

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_games_in_game_theory
Absolutely. Clusters of failures are just popping bubbles built on incorrect information.

Everyone knows that everyone is after more money, it's a prime motivation. This makes it easy to manipulate if you can make a credible looking "investment".
The wired world was pretty bad at one point too. We had lossy wires, bad AD/DA converters, etc. Connecting to a BBS used to involve initializing hardware, manually dialing a number and then placing a receiver on a specialized piece of hardware.

I feel like we're just still in our technological infancy when it comes to high-bandwidth wireless devices. Many of them aren't robust and we haven't come up with good standards on how to approach things.

Give it a few more years. For now I'll just go with what works, which is usually wires.
As long as the population grows or technology keeps improving, an economy can continue to grow.
I'm not familiar with Campfire. How well does it scale teamwise?
I don't know what the "average" software patent looks like, but as someone who has been through the process, I think the examiners are pretty thorough. Through over a year of communication back and forth we lost our most recent patent attempt because the examiner found enough cases of prior art that were similar enough to what we were doing to fail the "not obvious to person skilled in the art" test. And trust me, we tried to find differences, and they were always able to answer our rebuttals with specific examples.

I'm sure there are good examiners and bad ones. Perhaps this time we just got one who was very thorough, but having looked at a number of software patents in my field, I've yet to see anything that I could consider trivial.
Brilliant, but looks open to potential abuse, particularly when cash reserves are low.
How to sell your company to Microsoft
alternatively, http://www.loadinfo.net/ also has a wide, but somewhat different selection of types of spinners.
I think if you studied it, you'd find that most people who start out with a lot of money, end up with less, not more

I don't have any hard proof to cite right now, but I have a gut (Steven Colbert like) feeling the history of capitalism proves you wrong.

When you have enough money to live off it while it still grows even with only hyper conservative investment, I think most of the time you die with more money then you started with.
The traditional citations here are The Club of Rome and various environmentalist that reject the possibility of sustainable industrial civilization.

The Club of Rome published a famous book in 1968 called The Limits to Growth. They are seen as making a kind of modern day Malthusian argument.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Club_of_Rome

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Limits_to_Growth

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thomas_Robert_Malthus
Yo Ben Huh! I'm really happy for you and I'mma let you finish...but /b/chan is the greatest humor site of all time. OF ALL TIME!
Any quick one-liners or easy-to-understand wisdom that you've gained from the material? The entire subject area looks immensely fascinating, yet very dense at times.
The article is about which matters more: smarts, wealth, hard work, or risk-taking.

Thought experiment: given a dumb person with $10M (say, Britney Spears) and a smart person with $1M (say, Warren Buffett), who is more likely to turn that into $100M within a generation?

I would bet money on the smart person. It's really easy to lose a lot of money if you make the wrong decisions.
I agree with you for the most part but really any business innovation, no matter how smart it is, will be screwed up if you have bad managers. Managers implement business strategy just like construction workers implement home architectural designs. If you have a crappy contractor it doesn't matter how good the blue prints are it's going to screw up your house. Same with bad managers.

So you can't really blame a policy when it gets screwed up by bad management.
The Risks and Benefits of Teaching Purely Functional Programming in First Year
Fine, but obviously the population is going to stop growing.
Of course, the goal should be to eliminate all sources of slowdown from one's web page.

I especially hate seeing progress indicators for things that "used to" be fast, if only they weren't ajaxified. The classic case being the pop-up image browsers, because it's so much more fun to watch a spinning icon than to actually see my images instantly.
Unfortunately, some places still either require this information, or treat it as some sort of reasonable evidence for your identity.

My solution is to give my provider's my mother's maiden name when required, but to deliberately misspell it. This solves the first problem but not the second.
...and in XML :/ eugh
You should use "JVM". But other than that you should get a job as Sun's marketing department.
I tried it. I tried vi, vim, gvim.

I now use a number of editors and IDEs. Vim is not not of them. I launch it once in a while, just so I would not forget how it feels (and would not forget how to :wq). That's all.

As far as the holy flame war on editors, I do not have much to say about it, and will avoid reading much about it.
I don't have time to try out your app, so it's hard to give good advice here. But it seems like it should be a useful feature.

To me, the explanation you provided was a bit hard to understand. Try refining it, and solicit direct feedback from some trusted users.
If a decision proves to have been reckless/short-sighted a few years on, bonuses can be retracted.

Retracting something already given can be difficult, especially if the employee has moved on to another place. There are ways, of course, with "clawback clauses" and similar things, but that seems unnecessarily clunky if I understand them correctly.

Basing bonuses on long term performance after it has had long enough to play out and (at least most of) the consequences known may very well be a good idea though.
This reminds me of http://www.gdgt.com

Although Gdgt's focus is more on gadgets and crowd sourcing all information instead of just reviews.
I got the karma points. And there's nothing wrong with submitting your own stuff anyways.
More on how web performance impacts revenue
I think it's fine. He didn't even submit the link; rms, whose name is Kevin, did.

If something's good, telling people where they can spread the word is perfectly fine. I like it even more when somebody's manually asking rather than placing a set of generic links on the bottom of every article.
Dammit, emacs! :-) A good place to plug xkcd, I think: http://xkcd.com/378/
Hacker News isn't here to make money, and it attracts users because people come for YCombinator. Managing a community is much different when you don't have that, and it's very easy to trip up.
I think the idea behind "hyper-local" as espoused by the EveryBlock guys (who also received a Knight Foundation grant) was that local news lost much of its focus as it increasingly focused on the "big" story. IIRC hyper-local news would include grassroots coverage of things like Little League games, neighborhood crime, etc.
Yep! That's the ticket for me, at least.
Perhaps, also, this is a leading indicator of a decline in the need to kiss the U.S.'s posterior.

I'd say that started roughly 5 years ago. Say, right around early November, 2004.
If I remember correctly, the stats show that the rich get richer as a quintile of income, not as individuals.

That means that the top 20 percent or so is getting way richer as time goes on, but not necessarily that individuals stay in that top 20 percent. In the states at least, they move around from bracket to bracket quite a bit. You might be in the top few for 20 years, then be at the bottom. Or start at the bottom and move into the middle. As stats, the rich get richer, but as people, everybody seems to have the chance to change their lot in life. (or life changes it for them, depending on how you view it)

There are lies, damned lies, and statistics.
It's done at dns level? So technically a private dns linked through a tunnel to the outside could bypass this?

This makes me think we need an international "constitution guidelines", with common sense stuff like don't let a non-judicial institution do this kind of censoring.
I visited fundable.com right now, and it looks like the site is functioning again. What gives?
I prefer the same but it's a pain to line it up manually like this. I usually settle for vim's = operator, but that has the frustrating behavior of using as many tabs as possible (according to your tabstop) until using a few spaces. I can't find any way to change this; anyone know of a vim plugin to circumvent it?
In 2001 Bram Cohen worked on P2P storage system Mojo Nation. After it ran out of money he created BitTorrent. Now a BitTorrent employee suggests that P2P could be used for storage, completing the cycle.
Ask HN: I need to ask a Google employee a question?
Can I e-mail someone a question if you work there. Thanks.
Yes, game theory can get inscrutably complex, even through the initial models are pretty simply to set up and understand.

The basic components of any coordination/cooperation problem are the same: you have actors with preferences, you have a situation with rules that they can't change, and you have outcomes with payoffs/penalties depending on whether the actors choose to cooperate or not.

Most of the problems revolve around how to get people to cooperate, when defection is attractive for some reason. Most of the solutions involve making sure situations are not one-off interactions, that all actors have information about what each other is doing, and that in the case of multiple actors using common resources, you need to have some form of monitoring and enforcement.

If actions are one-off, the temptation to act selfishly is higher than if actors know they are in a long-term situation in which they must choose to cooperate or defect time and time again. In this way information such as reputation can then function as a signaling device to other actors.

Games such as the Prisoner's Dilemma work only when presented as a one-off situation in which both actors have no information about what they other is going to do. So the solution is 1) make sure you're not setting up one-off interactions, and 2) make such actors are in an information rich environment wherein they can make appropriate signals about their intentions and past behavior.

Most of the other games, such as Tragedy of the Commons or Battle of the Sexes, have stable solutions if you repeat them and increase the information available to the actors. The equilibrium solutions are called Nash Equilibriums, after John Nash, the paranoid schizophrenic mathematician featured in the movie A Beautiful Mind.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Forbes_Nash,_Jr.

A bit more than a one-liner, but hopefully this helps a bit.
Good point, my bad! You're absolutely right, there's nothing wrong with promoting good stuff.
Xoopit, a Yahoo! company!, decides to drop support for Gmail to better focus their efforts on Yahoo! Mail!.

Sad for Xoopit, now they're stuck in the Yahoo! ghetto!. At least focusing on Yahoo! Mail! will keep the user count manageable.
While I agree Gmail search can be infuriating, how do you know it's a complexity issue that keeps it this way?
I too have Javascript. Nothing works, I get an error 500 every time.

Note: this is not browser-related:

$ curl -I http://www.goalbot.org/plan/start/sleep/

HTTP/1.1 500 INTERNAL SERVER ERROR

[...]
I don't work for Google, but if you're in Los Angeles, the Santa Monica Googlers meet for happy hour every Friday at Warszawa (http://maps.google.com/maps/place?cid=10466761866034864418&#...).
They would be. I don't think it's just that Paul is famous here and Scott Adams isn't, though certainly there's always a pro-YC bias present. Part of it is also that Paul's essays have a very clear style about them, and they've got a confidence about what they're saying. So combine something convincing along with a community inclined to like the something and you get overwhelming support.

That's why I was astonished the first time I read MeFi's commentary on a Graham essay. There, the community is much more critical, and it's more built to support multiple viewpoints. There was some interesting criticism that I found myself agreeing with a lot, and there were a few people that really hated both his essays and the YCombinator crowd. While I can't say I agree with their vitriol in full, it reminded me that even a bright, argumentative community has blind spots.
I like reading things about various editors now and then, and it certainly serves an educational purpose.

However, this does not require the spamming of "editor" advocacy posts (where "editor" has meant "vim") recently.
Yes, lasted 3 weeks.
I got a 500 error by clicking one of the example links below the entry box...
This seems like a rather odd thing to do, and here's why.

1. We can already represent the image exactly (but non-sparsely) as a sum of cosine waves. If you restrict the frequencies to an appropriate lattice, there's exactly one way to do this and it's given by the Fourier transform.

2. Fourier transformation is orthogonal. Therefore, at least in the least-squares sense, the amount of error in the image is the same as the amount of error in the coefficients of those cosines.

3. So if you want the best approximation of the image by N cosine waves, and (like nklein) your notion of "best" is RMS error, then what you do is to Fourier transform the image, zero all but the N largest values, and you're done.

(This is rather like what JPEG compression does to each block of an image.)

So what this approach buys you is the ability to have a slightly wider range of values for the frequencies. Maybe that helps, but it doesn't seem all that likely; and even if it does, I bet you'd do better by beginning with the Fourier transform approach and then doing a simpler optimization process on the coefficients and frequencies and phases.

Of course, if the real point was to have some fun and learn about genetic algorithms for optimization, fair enough!
you people talk as if capitalism is some force of the universe allowed to act freely. capitalism is engineered by humans. the core of this engineering is the federal reserve. starting with alan greenspan, this became an exercise in malengineering. greenspan, and now bernanke, have continually increased the amount of liquidity in the system to game it for short-term growth.

a crash is something unpredictable. the failure of an economy based on rampant currency abuse is not at all unpredictable...indeed austrian economists would tell you the failure is assured
then you my friend need to check out http://clicker.com
Every employee is rated on a scale from 1 to 5, with five being the highest. No one gets a five. If you get a 1 or a 2, you’re quickly shown the door. Related to that are the steady departures of early founders and executives. Two of them, Adam D’Angelo and Dustin Moskovitz, were Zuckerberg’s high-school and college friends, respectively. They weren’t forced out, but they burned out or realized they weren’t right for their jobs.

Wow, what complete horseshit. Adam and Dustin were two of the most talented people Facebook had - they were the key to the engineering culture that made Facebook work in the first place. Half of Facebook's infrastructure and featureset either wouldn't exist or scale if it weren't for Adam's efforts, and Dustin was the guy who always rallied the troops...

I really hope people don't take this article at face value. This reporter/blogger/whatever he calls himself is obviously trying to prime the pump for scoops and leaks, or to get someone to show up at his shitty conference, or something like that.
More WebGL progress, now with video
A simple WebGL demo that is confirmed to work in the Firefox nightly trunk build.
That is most definitely like a typical software patent.
As Marx correctly understood, capitalism is best likened to a force of nature: it doesn't have any moral basis and can have both morally positive and negative consequences. This is why we need governments to keep capitalism in check: unchecked capitalism also leads to activities we find morally unacceptable. Like evolution favors only those traits that add reproductive value, capitalism favors only those activities that increase capital. This may mean obtaining a monopoly, deceiving customers and competitors, employing slaves and generally any other activity we disapprove. In a fully rational market, the customers would not accepts those practices, but as Keynes said: the market can stay irrational longer than you can stay solvent. Moreover, capitalist principles cause an important part of the customers not to care about the immoral consequences: they don't see them because the market isn't transparent or because they do not want to see them. We therefore cannot trust the market to merely expose the positive sides of capitalism. Failures, even clusters of failures, are to be expected and can only be avoided by government intervention. As long as a government lauds the free market and has the irrational expectation that the market will straighten itself, we will continue to suffer the consequences of unchecked capitalism.
Let's not forget those Hedgefoxes and Foxhogs who have a large, singular world view, but aren't blinded by it.
I can imagine infrastructure alone would be a lifetime of awesome projects at FB.
I thought of something like this based on license plates a while back. Drivers would send messages (kudos or kurses?) to a license plate's inbox. Anyone could check the inbox, but you'd have to know the plate.

I think it'd have to do speech recognition though, because texting-while-driving would probably be irresponsible to encourage.

I couldn't figure out how to make it practical or monetizable, but it'd be fun to have something to scream at while driving now and then :)
I want to start a job search site that allows for rich profiles that can subtly communicate someone's design sense, style and personality.

You would have the option of uploading various formats and building a portfolio of your work. This could be a suite of screenshots, embedded videos, or other such work that would allow employers to get a sense of what it is you do and how you do it instead f just matching keywords.

The closest thing I have seen to this is (was) SnapTalent - and their fate is largely why I am not working on this already. They did not have the necessary understanding of the HR industry and neither do I - but I think there's a definite need for this type of service. I'm sick of trying to represent myself in plain text - I don't think or work in plain text.
Ask HN: Amazon Flexible Payments vs Paypal for an ecommerce site?
Anyone know what are the main features that distinguish Amazon Flexible Payments Service from Paypal Website Payments Standard?

I'm looking at both of these options for a payment gateway for an ecommerce site I'm developing.

Would appreciate any advice on this decision.

My site would have very few monthly sales so I've been looking for gateways that would avoid the need for me to pay monthly fees or open a merchant account with a bank.
Jack Welsh was doing this during his time at GE. The bottom 10% of the workforce would be let go every year.

It's simply an alternative employment strategy to Google's attempts at early optimization (making it hard as hell to get in) which they even concede produces a lot of false negatives.
Not everyone knows Objective-C/Cocoa, or wants to go through apple's shitty app process.
That may be so, but apple will never let you ship an app they haven't approved. They have very specific language forbidding VM's and interpreted languages. So you may be able to dodge Objective C (like the Mono/Unity folks have) but you're not getting out of Apple's approval process.
Another option could benefit renters, but would be hard to pull off.

For renters without a down payment, or that don't qualify for a loan can rent a property, and an additional amount will be added to rent. If they fulfill the terms of the lease, the good credit from the payments and the cash from the overpayment of rent will be applied to purchasing the home.

Rent would be kept low with the promise of purchase after a given period. But if the renter breaks the lease, the owner keeps the full accumulated rent (so removing the discount).
RBR Productions
> To say software patents are invalid or software can't be patented really puts software programmers at a
disadvantage relative to other fields of science and
innovation. Why should pharmaceutical companies, civil
engineers, mechanical engineers, and all other disciplines
have the right to patent their inventions -- but not
software engineers?

One thing to keep in mind is that, say, mechanical engineers works aren't covered by copyright. They need to apply, pay, and only get it for a short period of time. The advantage they get is that it's general...

Right now, software developers have both, which doesn't seem fair to me.

Besides, right now copyright is way stronger than patents... Though I don't think this should be the case (I'd like to have, say, 5-10 year copyright).
The vast majority of economists thought that such a crash couldn't happen. They thought that it was impossible because we are so much smarter now than we were back in the 1920's.
Charles Simonyi, Software Giant Turned Space Tourist, on Space Exploration
I am working on the exact same thing and have a cool domain to go with it. Sounds like you are much farther along than I am - would you like to talk about combining our resources/ideas? Steve.Johnson.Public@gmail.com
What's to stop a spammer from joining said group and emailing everyone about a great deal in country X to export 1 million dollars? I don't think the concept is without merit, I do like it to an extent - just wondering how you would manage it?
I prefer http://preloaders.net/
Nice. Because yet another discussion of "what's a real language" is exactly what every tech-focused site's really missing.
If you're loading an image that's 100k+ you want a preloader on there so people know what's going on.

It's not going to magically appear instantly because you've compressed the image to shit and removed the preloader.