skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Why would anyone think that the value of a non-trivial asset could be expressed as a single number?

Let's consider a house. Clearly the amount of money that someone would pay for said house varies from person to person. Which value is "correct"?

Before you jump in with some clever aggregation function, suppose that the owners want to sell said house. Will they agree to the value that your aggregation function produces? (They can choose to delay the sale, so if they don't agree, your function may well deprive someone of the ability to buy said house at a price that its acceptable to said someone.)

Ah, but you say that stock is stock. That's true, but again, different people have different priorities. I probably weight dividend paying history differently than you do. I have different expectations on inflation. I need to go liquid at different times. The end result is that we disagree about the value of the same share of Microsoft stock.
Great idea! I'd love to see some more front-end work on the site. You guys need a logo for sure.
Live Qik Video Stream of Windows 7 Party | My Philly Network
I'd love something like this that could install all the windows tools I use on machines at work: Emacs, Cygwin, Mercurial (TortoiseHG), Sysinternals, Wireshark, iperf, MySQL & PostgreSQL clients (e.g. pgAdminIII/phpPgAdmin) and either WAMP or XAMPP. MediaWiki, TrueCrypt and OCS Inventory would be nice too.
I think real life markets are much different than this experiment because:

1) Repeated trials in the game lets past loosers punish past winners (i.e. Ashley will get more than boos in subsequent trials).

2) Players get to observe the world better in real world than what secret bids in this game allows.

I am still unconvinced that collusion and price fixing is difficult as the title suggests.
gmail?
OPEC, probably the most famous example of a cartel, is notorious for having members "cheat".
It may be a successful blog, but it has nothing to do with journalism. It's hardly a path you can recommend to someone who wants to make a living as a journalist.
The single number does not have to be 100% accurate to be useful. The end result is that though we disagree about the value of the Microsoft stock, it nonetheless has been assigned a price by some invisible hand.
Welcome.

It didn't occur to me just how bad the original looked (really, itreallyworks.tv?) until after it was killed. I thought about running the second submission through a tinyUrl sort of thing just to avoid (quite justified) Domain Name Prejudice.
Return-to-libc Attack
Maybe it was just my system but I actually found Windows 7 to be pretty buggy. It blue screened on me any number of times and finally refused to load completely (despite trying every possible recovery option). Otherwise, it was great, very polished and a pleasure to use but I couldn't take the crashing and I'm now on Ubuntu. It's slightly rougher around the edges but otherwise works at least as well as W7 (and better in some areas).
Bookseller group wants [US government] to investigate retailers' price war
Ask your mom if she knows what RSS is. Then ask her if she's heard of Twitter.
To expand on your last point there: if you do work for a startup, pay attention to everything, and learn from all the things that get done well and all the things that don't. There's a lot to learn and a lot to screw up. For example: Did you hire well? Did you grow the team too slowly or too quickly? Did your development process work well? Did it adapt as your product and team matured? Was the management transparent in the right ways? If the company grew, how did it handle the addition of new employees, new customers to support, and new or larger product offerings? How was your employee retention and burnout? And so on . . .

There are invaluable lessons that you can really only learn by going through those things, and you can still learn them (and perhaps even be more objective about it) when you're not a founder.

And if your startup isn't transparent enough that you can learn those sorts of lessons, you should consider that a major strike against it.
I go to the library for video content approximately: never.

In fact, I don't even go there for books. I know they don't have what I want, and Amazon does. I go there to work.
Client-side filtering is far more powerful. All you need is to copy the filters to your other clients which, in effect, makes your client act as a local server :)
3 Quick Questions with Guy Kawasaki
>startup event conferences in india are a joke man!

True!, i've seen the same things regurgitated each time and imagine a "startup" with more than a dozen products at a time. That's what i saw at some of the conferences, for example the recent SiliconIndia #startupcity.
This kind of 'disentangling' can certainly be grating and tiresome but there isn't any to do here. One mention in the title. One mention in one of the lead-in sentences. That's it. It's just a (mercifully very brief) attempt to be catchy. It may be lame but there really is no analogy to disentangle here. The rest of the verbiage consists of specific technical points. If you find that sort of thing so onerous ('forced to' sounds like the author personally sent you to the Gulag) you likely experience great difficulty and mental fatigue reading most blogs since they tend to be stylistically lax.
Bookseller group should do its homework:

http://www.nytimes.com/2007/06/28/business/worldbusiness/28i...
4 FCC commissioners support open Internet rule
How to use Windows Key in Ubuntu Linux
They'd have to stop the practice of charging for every single minor point release update of their OS.
While the "NoSQL" moniker is catchy, misconceptions are inevitable so long as this category is defined more by what it isn't rather than what it actually is. What is NoSQL all about aside from scalability, performance, key/value access or support for non-relational data? This article doesn't clearly say.
I believe they're owned by the Washington Post now.
If only. A significant fraction of apps use installers.

Regardless, it's much easier to tick checkboxes with Ninite than it is to individually track files down.
To say I'm skeptical is an understatement.
The Khans’ Path in Silicon Valley
I am reminded of my favorite description of behavioral economics: "A field of academic inquiry into what college students will do when faced with making economic choices outside their personal experience."
I'm hoping that Android quickly becomes the "Windows" of the mobile world - available from many manufactures who make a variety of devices to suit people's individual tastes. Plus, having the dominant platform be free and open source is a huge win.
'accidental complexity' = 'essential complexity' / 'your intelligence'

If you need the code watered down into a deluge of little baby steps to satisfy your own definition of "readability", that's fine. I personally don't find useless dissipation of program logic to be readable.
Review of Programming Pearls by Jon Bentley
On that tangent, if you're an OS X user and like myself you can't quite muster the faith to use FileVault for your home folder, Disk Utility (or hdiutil at the terminal prompt) will allow you to create encrypted disk images to stash your sensitive stuff in.
"Client/Server Programming and the World Wide Web" ( Dr. Dobbs Special - Internet & WWW Programming, Dec. 1995 )
http://www.ddj.com/dept/architect/184409740

I wrote a simple CGI program for the above magazine that I believe to be one of the first CGI articles in print. Other CGI articles were present in that issue.

"Interfacing to a FOSSIL Communications Driver" ( C/C++ Users Journal, Jun. 1995 )
http://www.ddj.com/dept/cpp/184403026

I had been playing with BBS's and terminal programs for years, so this was rather fun on a personal level. I received some of my first emails from other parts of the world in response to this article. This article was also especially important to me because there were almost no editorial changes made to it. What you see is pretty much what I wrote.

More recently, a blog post of mine was referred to by the Java Posse on using Launch4j to package Java applications as Windows EXE's:

http://jimlawless.wordpress.com/2009/08/16/java-in-a-windows...
Which project(s) do you think it borrowed from?
The way to think about OS X versions is that the "10" is a marketing prefix, or an 'epoch' number - "10.5.8" should be read as "Mac OS X version 5, point release 8".

It seems that Apple is trying to transition away from "version X (with cute codename Y)" to "Y (with implementation-detail version X)", much like Microsoft has been doing with Office, and Canonical has done with Ubuntu.
> you can still learn them (and perhaps even be more objective about it) when you're not a founder.

I wonder, sometimes, how true that is.

I went into the startup world for exactly that reason: I wanted to start my own company eventually, knew that I didn't have the knowledge or experience to do it immediately, so I figured I'd learn the ropes on somebody else's dime. I picked companies that would give me a lot of responsibility, and ones where I could directly observe what the founders did and why they did it. And I took careful mental notes whenever something worked well or didn't work well, and resolved to do the same thing (or not do it) when I started my own company.

And then I actually did start my own company, and found that I made nearly every mistake that my old bosses had made, I just made them in new ways, and stopped making them a little quicker.

I found there're three main problems with the "learn how to start your own company by working at someone else's company" school of thought:

1.) There are many more ways to fail than there are to succeed. Therefore, if you pick any random strategy out of a random company, and you don't yet know whether the company is failing or succeeding, it's probably a failing strategy. Orson Scott Card once said, "There are a million wrong ways to tell a story, and a thousand right ways." That's probably true of entrepreneurship too, just multiply the numbers by a few orders of magnitude.

2.) If you haven't yet worked at a successful company, you probably don't know how to tell the difference between a successful strategy and a failing one. A lot of the things I respected most about my past employers turned out to be mistakes. For example, one of them was big on code ownership, and seeing how hard coders worked at getting their code running, I thought it was a great way to encourage people to take pride in the code they produce. Another was building a platform for financial apps, and I thought they were geniuses for their strategic insight - after all, they get recurring revenue and their customers can't easily switch away. It was only after I tried building a platform myself that this reached the top of the list for "things startups should never do" - and given the number of YC startups that get funded with their own webapp platforms, I guess lots of other founders haven't yet learned that either.

3.) Many times mistakes don't look like mistakes, because the circumstances that surround them are different. Very occasionally, they aren't mistakes, because the circumstances that surround them are different. For example, while I was building my platform to create casual games, I thought I'd sidestep all the complexity & adoption problems my financial employer had faced, because I was purposely limiting the scope of my platform to games and wasn't trying to have it do everything. I found that no, the platform part really was the problem, and no matter how much I polished it up, that approach just didn't work.
I'm talking about "just ship it", not about Apple, and can I just finally let it slip that everytime someone spells "boy" "b-o-i", I assume they're 15 years old? You know that's from an Avril Livigne song, right?
Wish that was true but in real life collusion is much easier to maintain. For example, a collusion deal usually entails higher prices which means that to benefit of cheating one has to lower prices and make money on volume.

But sometimes it is not as easy to make money on volume. Often you need time and capital investments to increase volume. But if the other colluding companies see you making the capital investments to get higher volume they will know you are planning to cheat and they will drop their agreement as well. At that point you get no sales advantage of cheating and yet you have spent a lot of money making to create the goods for an expected sales increase. Oh, and everyone else in industry hates your guts.

So sometimes in the real world it is much easier for an executive to collude and pocket his/her bonus than to compete.
We wouldn't competition that benefits consumers..
An Internet Advertising Primer
And yet they are completely capable of raising oil prices by merely sending out a press release or two.
This assumes that libraries are fully parallel-installable, which is often not the case in Unix. I think .NET does something like this, though.
Earnings: New Subscribers Boost Netflix’s Profits By 48 Percent
Importance of Architecture
This is amazing and will probably result in Dell selling me a Windows 7 laptop about 6 months ahead of schedule, simply because I was not looking forward to doing a day of setup during which I could get no productive work done.

I seriously wish there was a convenient way to give you whatever the affiliate commission on a new laptop is.
If you found that interesting there is a fascinating generalization of the technique in this paper: http://cseweb.ucsd.edu/~hovav/papers/brss08.html
There is certainly data you don't want to put into a relational model.

There are domains where it is essentially impossible to create a reasonable relational model. For example where a class references many, quite different, classes. In the relational world you need many kinds of different keys to many other tables and the table names. And even then you need to bounce out of the relational world to get the results. In the object world references are uniform.

There are a lot more cases where a reasonable relational model exists but it is not supported by the mature SQL databases. A very large matrix, a highly structured document, source code etc.

And there are more cases than that where it will be no longer be worthwhile to create an SQL model if the nosql databases mature. Such as when when an Object, JSON or XML model needs to exist. I think this is close to 100% of enterprise applications.
That paper is fantastic
I don't know, but I would start here:

[ http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/OSx86#EFI_emulation ]
[ http://www.engadget.com/2008/04/16/osx86-project-not-too-hap... ]
Interesting that 87.5% of the players didn't cheat, and the one that did bid 0.3% of the supposed equilibrium price, but this is somehow supporting the theory put forward.

It reminds me of the RAND corporation experiment, an economist and a mathematician play the game and reach Nash Equilibrium in a handful of moves. Same game played by secretaries and they all co-operate all the time completely defying all of the theories they build up like a house of cards. So in an economy where everyone studies math for decades and has no social skills we have a great tool to predict the economy, but for most of the real world isn't much help.

Sure it can work in certain financial markets with no contact between participants outside the market mechanism and most of the players can be assumed reasonably expert, so it has its uses, but a lot of care needs to be used when trying to take it outside that sort of area because the assumptions break down very badly in most situations.
Can't win I guess, the booksellers group is making the same money on more volume with the retailers taking the loss.

More worrying is there opposition to the digital book price, if this was to close to a physical book price piracy would reign and they wouldn't get anything.

The book industry is lucky in a way because while a illegal download of music is mostly as good as the legal cd, people have a strong affinity with a physical book and getting away from electronic screens to read.
Sorry, I don't think that's sufficient. While it's sure that the political and hence scientific environment in britain was much better than continental europe, the above video makes it clear to me that the primary factors were the high cost of labour and the low cost of energy.
This is just a variation of a very interesting game Douglas Hofstadter describes in Metamagical Themas (extremely highly recommended by the way) in the section on psychological number games. In his game 10 people are allowed to choose "yes" or "no" without knowing what other people chose. If everyone picks "yes" everyone gets $100. If anyone picks "no" then anyone picking "no" gets $10 and everyone else get $0.

He describes inviting 10 of his friends he considers very smart, tells his friends they will be playing with other smart people, then expresses dismay when all his friends pick "no".

My sorry description here doesn't do the story justice. Very worth the time to track down a copy of the book.
While you are correct in principle, if we were talking about taxing, e.g. cars that sold for over 100 000 dollars, it would be silly to argue that it was hurting the homeless more than rich people (I am ignoring potential side-effects of the tax with respect to employment, etc. here, so I'm oversimplifying massively, but I contend that the rough outline of my point is legitimate).

That said, I will immediately concede that the iPhone falls into a somewhat different price bracket than that.
Marc Fleury: Open source, a modern day Marxist Utopia? - fascinating discussion
All very valid points.

I might suggest that the longer you're with a company the easier it is to discern success from failure, at least. Something that looks like a good idea in year one might look terrible by year three or four. I have no idea how that applies to your personal experiences, though. I haven't yet left my first startup-employee experience (after more than 7 years), so perhaps it's too early for me to say I've learned that much, since I haven't really had to put that knowledge to the test (except when it comes to correcting problems and making forward-looking decisions). I certainly feel like I've seen a lot of things done well and a lot of things done not so well, and like I've been around long enough to see many of those decisions play out for a fairly long time. I don't think I would be able to say that if I'd only been here for one or two years.

On some level, though, you personally often have to make mistakes in order to learn from them; as much as we all want to learn from the mistakes of others, it's hard.

So perhaps I'm being overly optimistic and will be doomed to a future of repeating mistakes that I should theoretically know better than to make . . . ask me again in ten years, I guess . . .
the booksellers group is making the same money on more volume

No, the booksellers group represents competitors to these big retailers, who are losing business or profits due to the price competition.
have you looked at thunderbird 3.0b4/ the new search works great
This boils down to asking "I'm going to put you in a room with ten peers. Do you believe at least one of your peers will either be irrational, or believe that a peer (possibly you) would be irrational?"

All ten people reached the correct conclusion!
Food in Sweden gets labeled for emissions
> someone could write a parsing component that would

That's what @require is for.
I disagree. The two apps have wildly different configuration schemes, yes, to wildly different ends, but in this case we're addressing the exact same function in both editors. It's not a question of whether vim's syntax highlighting is better or worse than emacs's ability to run tetris. It's a direct look at which of the two apps makes it easier and more effective to configure the modeline. Now, you might argue that that's not going to be a determining factor for anyone who's choosing between the two—because perhaps they are apples and oranges, but in this case he's simply saying that vim has more vitamin b. So to speak.

In general though I find the apples-and-oranges complaint about vim-emacs comparisons to be disingenuous. You may say, 'Oh, but emacs is much more than a text editor, so it's foolish to compare them directly!' but not everybody who's interested in choosing one or the other would necessarily have any interest in the OS-like capabilities of emacs. That is to say: there is still a very good reason to review emacs purely in its function as a text editor, even if that is not the full extent of its capabilities. Many, if not most, people in the market for a text editor aren't really interested in whether, after several years' learning the ropes, they might run a full Turing Machine in it.
You can suggest new apps to add at the bottom.

Maybe they could deal with too many options by having expandable sections labelled "Developer" or "DBA" etc?
There's a common but often-ignored meta-lesson here - begin by describing what the thing actually does, concretely.

"An exploration in messaging innovation being led by the team responsible for Thunderbird, to explore new ways to use Open Web technologies to create useful, compelling messaging experiences" has near-zero information content and happily eats up the invaluable initial attention and visual spaces. One has to scale up a substantial wall of text before reaching anything specific but not before being invited on a detour into the 'Guiding Principles'. I didn't go down that path but presumably the principles include 'Be vague'.

It may sound like mere grouchy nit-picking but I've found that this type of failure at basic communication in a project's description is often indicative of its future lack of success. The pages of the Chandler project used to be a wonderfully instructive example but even they seem to have cleaned up their act on their current website. A very incomplete list of words and expressions to avoid before clearly stating what a product does -

revolutionary

innovation

vision

open

passionate

watch a video/screencast

Any others?
Here's the opposite of Ninite for new Dell PCs http://www.pcdecrapifier.com/
microchips, freeways, blue jeans, tax revolts, extreme sports, energy efficiency, health clubs, Google searches, Craigslist, iPhones and the Hollywood vision of success

So much bullshit, any intelligent person will have stopped reading immediately. TIME seals its status as the worst newsweekly.

microchips

From wiki:

The idea of an integrated circuit was conceived by a radar scientist working for the Royal Radar Establishment of the British Ministry of Defence, Geoffrey W.A. Dummer (1909-2002), who published it at the Symposium on Progress in Quality Electronic Components in Washington, D.C. on May 7, 1952.[1] He gave many symposia publicly to propagate his ideas.

freeways

Hitler.

blue jeans

Strauss came from California, blue Jeans did not. Again, see wiki.

tax revolts

Fuck you. The Pennsylvania Whisky rebellion is BY FAR the most prominent tax revolt in American history, and it is 1000s of years too late to be considered the inventor of the phenom.

extreme sports

Rome.

energy efficiency

Watt.

health clubs

Rome.

Google searches

Altavista essentially the same, CMU.or Massachusetts, I forget.

Craigslist

Charging zero for an established service is not an innovation.

iPhones

Finland.

Hollywood vision of success

Marx.
War by remote: What do you think?
Hulu have not said anything about charging by 2010. I wish people would stop spreading speculation as news.
Catuaba Bark Extract – Sex Enhancer Or Natural Sleep Herb?
They lost the ability in the 80s really. Too much non-Opec oil around now. And it hurt Opec in the long term as oil usage got much more efficient after the oil shocks

http://www.wtrg.com/opecshare.html
I work with objectstore nearly everyday and wish we were using oracle or db2. I am firmly convinced that you better have a damn good reason (like a big heavily updated graph structure) to forgo the discipline of a normalized relational schema.
Types for Atomicity: Static Checking and Inference for Java