skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Andy Bechtolsheim: Memory Technologies for Data Intensive Computing
The interesting thing to notice here, is that the biggest impact of all that improvement in hardware, when you look at it in a web context actually goes towards increased execution speed of javascript.

Most of the other advantages only come out when playing computer games or something like that.
"With the job market like it is, Wall Street doesn't need to pay huge bonuses to retain key people."

Excuse the trollish appearance of this remark, but it's something that I've been wondering about for a long time...

The world to me seems to be brimming with talented people - more than enough to fill trading firms many times over.

What makes these individuals so special to warrant such huge salaries? If it's not survivorship bias, then what is it?

It could be that I just don't want to admit the reality, but if it is, please tell me why I'm wrong (preferably if you're impartial to the financial world).
Submitted and occasionally killed several times so far. Let it die.

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=898753

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=900222

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=903431
The Slate article struck me as a tongue-in-cheek dig at the Obama administration. For example:

"Drupal's defenders are eerily reminiscent of those movement Democrats who were constantly knocking at your front door in the summer of 2008."

or

"If Drupal were a piece of legislation, it would be the farm bill"

No one should take comments like that as a serious criticism of Drupal or the Whitehouse's use of Drupal; it's poking fun at Obama supporters. It's a joke.
They're already dropping the ball, especially when it comes to search quality. There is a marked decrease in quality of results in the last couple of months.
See also: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=881278
I'm in a similar situation:

1. Podcasts - Venture Voice and The Moth are two easy recommends. You could try to get old Radio GoDaddy podcasts back when they had entrepreneurs on.

2. Audio Books - Audible.com/Amazon/Library/etc. are great sources. I've managed to listen to quite a few.

3. Satellite radio: I got a cheap XM set and rigged it up to my car a couple months back. I haven't listened to terrestrial radio since. Just about any music you'd want, plus news from all kinds of sources.

Edit to add Satellite radio
TwitterPeek, A Twitter-Only Handset
Ah, that makes sense. My apologies for misinterpreting your first post.
It's interesting that you got modded down that ruthlessly, for one I'm quite interested what you have to say, secondly that is not unthinkable at all. It didn't take long for the web to replace the majority of information retrieval systems that we had up to then, and that's roughly 15 years ago.

Now of course we do have the web, so the bar is a lot higher but I don't think it is an impossibility that a successor will arise.

Hopefully that one will be able to get past some of the mistakes of the current one. A viable built in micropayment system and you just might have every news paper on the planet pushing your new service.
I have to laugh at the idea that 20Mbps is slow. I just got upgraded to 16Mbps (from 2Mbps) and still can't believe I can download a full HD movie in 30 minutes.
Add Another Zero
I mostly listen to jazz or public radio, sometimes business podcasts. It's not a waste of time: it's time to relax, especially the commute home.

Sorry, just saw you're in traffic. My commute is mostly on rural roads, no traffic to speak of and much more relaxing than city/crowded interstate driving.
Ask HN: Is a free Ipod a good way to drive traffic to my site?
I've been working on a side project for the past couple months. I know that it's not perfect, but I believe that it could be helpful to my target audience in it's current state. The only problem is I need information from my users. The site relies on reviews from end-users to work. If I can get people to start sharing information, I'm hoping it will snow-ball from there.

My target audience is college students, so I thought that if I could entice some with a chance to win a free Ipod touch, then I might be able to get them to write reviews. I thought that if they enter 5 reviews, their name is entered into the drawing once. 10 reviews, and it is entered in twice. I figure I could limit it at 10 so that I don't get a bunch of made up reviews.

Is this a good way to drive traffic and get useful information from end-users? Do you have any experience with tactics like this? Is there another way that I should be exploring?

Update: The students are entering reviews on whether or not they needed to purchase the text book(s) for a particular course that they took.
SimpleDB gotcha: they can delete your data
Check also: http://code.google.com/p/functional-javascript/

It's not tied to jQuery and approaches things in a particular way.
First there is the recognition that there is no pyramid. Since math is so highly interrelated, learning about one area almost always helps understanding in a different area. Granted some areas require a certain prerequisites, hence you will encounter peaks, but I agree aiming for only one peak does not make all that much sense since calculus is only useful in certain situations.
Also:

- Does the whole household get cut off when one member illegally fileshares?
Sadly, calculus is a pre-requisite for anything more than very basic probability and statistics.
This is really unfortunate since it prevents using SimpleDB as the system of record for any infrequently accessed data.
Verizon Sends Out the Droids
I wonder if this droid phone will work out of the box in Europe. I'm not interested in some crappy scheme where you buy a phone that is locked to a network. It's high time I got an Android phone, though, and this looks to be a good one.
The Teaching Company; sometimes I look forward to traffic.
Ah, thanks for the info. That's just further proof that it's security theater: if they can't tell the difference between water and liquid explosives, how do they know that what's in the bottle is actually contact solution?
Have you seen some of the upcoming Android phones? As much as I hate Verizon, the Verizon Droid from Motorola looks like it'll be every bit as good hardware-wise as the current gen iPhones.

See here for a comparison of the Droid and the iPhone 3GS (http://www.networkworld.com/news/2009/101909-droid-vs-iphone...)
Really, I agree with everything you're saying. But sometimes paid apps just feel better, and I'm really hoping that all will be forgiven once TM2 blows our minds.
Because calculus is beautiful, and if you are even remotely interested in the physical sciences, absolutely necessary.

I can't even imagine a high school curriculum without calculus. It's what made some of the decisions I took about grad school possible.
LA has vanpools...maybe you could look into that in Phoenix?
I don't know where the op is situated, but it's surprising how frequently bad enough traffic occurs in Atlanta. Even what seems to be a decently long distance (20 mi) can be covered on bike faster than that commute.

Hills and unsafe roads permitting anyway.
Underscore isn't tied to jQuery either. It just complements it nicely.

Oliver Steele's Functional is a great library too, and bits of Underscore were inspired by it. The main difference between the parts they have in common is that Functional.js extends the core Function prototype, while Underscore avoids altering any core objects.
I know the author of the piece in question, Chris. He's a writer with no technical background whatsoever, and his job is to write whimsical jocular short pieces for Slate. This isn't a serious critique of any sort. There's nothing to see here.
>> _.first(array)
>> "Convenience to return the first element of an array (identical to array[0])."

How is _.first(array) more convenient than array[0] ? :/
I can't speak for others, but here's the issues I have with it.

Firstly, as you suggest, I dislike the notion of the government monitoring the Internet use of private individuals. Fortunately for me, I do not live in the UK, which is (to my inexperienced eyes) a country where this is a relatively alien notion. (Perhaps relevant: http://www.wired.com/threatlevel/2009/01/uk-approves-pol/)

Secondly, it essentially does an end-run around large chunks of what I like about the legal system (the parts with juries and lawyers and defendants-who-can-defend-themselves). I suppose I just have this quaint notion that if someone is demonstrably doing something illegal, you should drag them into court for it rather than mucking around with some ad-hoc, newly minted system for inconveniencing them.
Thanks for the link. I was a business major in school (gasp) so I missed out on a lot of math. I find things like this really helpful even if they are not super high level.

Just out of curiosity, why is it that "Open University" videos are available only on iTunes? I don't see how making me download and run that bloated and closed platform is very open.
I think this is just so that Amazon can avoid permanently storing data from idle accounts which are within the free-storage quota. It really ought to be better clarified, though.
I think when discussing Apple's attention to detail it's important to point out that the current iPhones are extremely polished. But remember that it wasn't very long ago that you couldn't cut and paste on an iPhone.

(BTW. I do think the iPhone is more polished that any current release of Android. I'm not sure it matters though. Windows XP is laughably less polished than OSX, but it doesn't seem to be hurting in market share.)
Wow. Both of those events are incredible! I wonder how many large storage tanks like that are in urban areas nowadays..
Get this (unless you have a very small laptop, like a netbook) and put it on your dash:
http://www.ecrater.com/product.php?pid=4205894

Then, get this:
http://www.nuance.com/naturallyspeaking/landing/consumer.asp
(DNS will probably fail in a noisy car, but worth a shot)

Dictate code on the road.

Edit: Be sure to configure a bunch of commands/templates in DNS so you can generate blocks of helper code.

Edit: Potentially related video (haven't watched, just found it while Googling) http://revver.com/video/348539/driving-writing-with-dragon-n...
That specific handset is for CDMA networks, specifically Verizons. There are no mainstream CDMA networks in Europe.

The app, however, is for Android 2.0, and will likely work on all devices running that -- although there's only one announced atm.
Here are my preferences:

1. Move closer to work.

2. Find a way to work from home as much as possible.

3. When you do need to drive in, podcasts are much better than the radio.

4. Find a car that you love to drive. This may be easier for me, since I generally enjoy driving, even in traffic.

Now, I'm in a situation where I can easily move, it's easy for me to work from home and I can afford cars I love to drive.
Why we don’t support Internet Explorer
I don't fault the author for blogging it, but it probably shouldn't be submitted to HACKER news.
Sometimes you need a function. The alternative isn't array[0]; it's function (array) { return array[0]; }.
A great way to find which one to focus on is:
1) Ask yourself which would be more fun for you to do?
2) Chat with the people that could use whatever you are building to get their thoughts (but be sure to talk to people who you don't know, as "only positive feedback" will give you the wrong conclusion.
3) Rate each project on an easy to hard scale and then weight them against 1 & 2 above.
If I could upvote you twice, I would.
Yep -- that one is questionable. It's there to provide symmetry with "_.last", which is definitely more convenient than:

array[array.length - 1];
As a counter point, I have a masters in math, but highschool calculus almost drove me away from math completely. It was very obtusely taught and by far the dullest course I took in highschool.

The amount of calculus you actually need for high school science is both a lot less than what is taught at high school and different calculus than is taught at high school. I agree that most of calculus should be left to university since they're going to have to re-teach most of it anyway to undo the damage done by a bad high school curriculum.
My first reaction: "Well, I'm glad I don't work at a navigation software company today."

Seems like a great product, would be fantastic if they port it to iPhone.
The Emotional Toll of a Startup
I bet most college students already have an ipod or iphone, so wouldn't that skew the results toward those who don't already have one? I think the college demographic is pretty jaded when it comes to giveaways.

Even if you got 1000 reviews in exchange for one ipod (if you actually gave it away), that's $0.20 per review. I bet you could get that from Amazon Mechanical Turk for a fraction of the price.
Chrome OS beta available (sorry, looks fake/unofficial)
There will always be a 'labor shortage' if your definition of a shortage is being unable to find staff at the price you like. It's refreshing to see at least one attempt to swim against the tide of propaganda produced by industry.
The key question really is: Is anything interesting happening fast enough that I want to see it right now?

Analytical asshole man says no -- that's what newspapers and google are for: the great majority of stuff I care about happened either in the far past (like more than a day ago) or needs to be edited, filtered, and ranked by an agrregation site (like this)

But social psychologist man says yes -- people want to chat real-time, not over a period of minutes even. Rumors get started, grow or die, in a matter of hours. For some stupid human reason people are still tweeting away happily about the meal they ate at McDonalds this morning.

And that's not even mentioning the phenomenon of the tens of millions of bloggers or small etailers who live and die on what's happening on the web right now, this minute.

You are correct in that there is no rational reason for it. And you have missed the point entirely if you think it has no value.

BAM! There's your value.
Ares 1-X countdown - 2 minutes and counting ...
Countdown is on - about two minutes to go ...
I concur with this one. And this isn't the worst of what these large banks do. How about where they have a computer program which re-orders transactions (out of their normal chronological order) in such as way as to maximize overdraft fees.

For example, let's say that you have $100 in your account and pay transactions of $20, $50, and $110 (in that order) with your debit card.

Instead of letting the first 2 go through and then hitting you with a $30 overdraft fee on the last one, or maybe even rejecting the charge, they instead put the $110 charge first. Charge you a $30 overdraft fee and then since your account is overdrawn, hit you with 2 more $30 fees for the $10 an $20 transactions.

The backlash against this sort of behavior has made the banks back off, but do you really want to do business with an institution that treats the customer this way?
Stream: http://www.space-multimedia.nl.eu.org/stream/nasa.php
Except I am not sure it is destined to become a commodity in the near future because of the sky high capital expenditure required to roll out most forms of infrastructure in most places.
Reminds me of an old Russian saying: It will still take 9 woman 9 months to give birth to one child.
I actually tried to use iPods to drive traffic to a site of mine a couple years ago. It didn't work very well but I think the reason was that I didn't make them do enough to get the prize. Just make sure that 5 new reviews on your site is going to create enough value for you to warrant the cost of the iPod.

Without knowing anything about your business I would suggest that you look at some of the Minimum Viable Product ideas for customer development. Smart use of Google ads could go a lot further than an iPod giveaway.

just my two cents.
I have around the same commute time. Lectures in the car don't work for me. Language audio lessons such as Pimsleur were a little better but still require a bit too much concentration. I can however listen to audio books and follow along.
learn to code? :) --> http://www.cplusplus.com/doc/tutorial/
Raganwald,

You are being so honest about your ego that there seems little doubt it is starting to dissolve and you will regain the lightness of touch and mood that betokens huge creative power.
If you are playing Pokerstars.com and will not put any of your ...
Ah, cool. I like the legal system bit. Seems that we have a system in place to deal with these people (criminals), and we should think long and hard before implementing something else on top of it. Or in between it.

I wonder if this kind of thing is brought up not because they want to crack down harder, but because somewhere in the back of their minds they don't want to have to go through the whole jail/immense fine conviction that the law demands, but would rather just prevent the criminals from criminaling any longer. Less fuss.

Similar, perhaps, to building a higher wall instead of arresting and prosecuting the guy that jumps over every morning and steals your cabbages?
I wonder if Google will continue to forbid others from using their maps for turn-by-turn navigation (namely: Apple).
I would personally assume that any government-managed utility would have well-defined regulations disallowing that sort of practice. The local power station, for instance, can't say that you're only allowed to charge your cellphone during off-peak hours, or that you have to pay extra for every kWh used by your bigscreen TV.
Top US Online Advertising Sites
What a joke. I can't believe someone would actually go out and say, "In a number of cases, however, these risk-management systems were totally inadequate in the face of the market tsunami that enveloped mortgage-backed securities after home prices began to drop in 2006. The storm carried away several firms, but others performed well despite the difficulties. It wasn't the bonuses that brought everything down; it was a combination of many things, some sloppy or foolish, and most far more important than bonus checks. " as a justification for the bonuses.
*Guess he forgot the fact we bailed out Citi and AIG, I guess he forgot the fact we are on the hook for that, not the firms who had the so called," these risk-management systems were totally inadequate in the face of the market tsunami". The people that built these inadequate systems still for the most part have a job, and from what I read last month the bonuses are back.

Update - Just checked out his bio, Harvard MBA, career at Goldman Sachs, definitely not part of the boys club, riiight.
Lessons in Bootstrapping a Business
Losing democracy is a big deal though.

While it is true that many people vote due to social pressure, I suspect that this social pressure would decrease with a better understanding of probability and statistics.

You could try mandatory voting, but people could just vote randomly to avoid wasting any time thinking about the matter.
Instead of a press-release, you could try contacting some blogs individually which focus on your target audience (admittedly I'm not sure what your target audience is).
You guys are assuming that the specifics of DBA works the same in England.

There's no point in setting up a DBA with a limited liability entity. Why? You're basically saying, "I don't want the limited liability".

I don't know the specifics of this transaction, and it really, really looks sketchy. The only reason I even think it has credibility is because it was posted in detail on HN. In most other forums, I would chalk this up to a Nigerian scam. Seriously.

I still think there may be a way to pull out the money if the English Ltd has actually been established and the OP has control over it. Having the English Ltd establish a bank account, pull the money from that. If Apple balks over that, than that really is Apple's fault. As the situation stands though, if the OP went public over this, I think I'd have the same reaction as the lady who sued McDonald's over spilling her own coffee on her lap, or those patent trolls out in Texas.
Apparently he's using some javascript to stop spam? as well as his comments, and his theme...
EDIT: Also, nobody has mentioned financial aid packages at private universities (not just 'name-brand' ones, but rather all private universities). depending on your family's financial situation, it's possible to pay tuition comparable to what you'd pay from going to a public school.
My experience is while press releases are valuable marketing tools, press release services are worthless. I've done probably a dozen press releases utilizing some of the expensive services. Not once has a service been directly responsible for a write up or driven any substantial amount of traffic.

Identify your target audience of bloggers and writers and get your press release directly to them.

I wrote my experience with press releases here.

http://www.bigstartups.com/matt/blog/122/Effective-Ways-to-P...
True, but you don't need a lot of calculus to do a large amount of interesting statistics and probability. And the little you do need is probably better being taught as needed in response to actual problems showing up. Most people learn better when they see a clear reason for what they are being taught.

Start with discrete probability, no calculus needed. Then when you move to continuous case show how integrals show up naturally in place of sums, and hey presto a clear and obvious intro calculus which far more people will understand the use for.
It may not work for your company, but what about making sales calls or taking support calls?
I agree. I enjoy the content of the site, but having to scroll after reading every couple sentences gets to be annoying.
I shrunk the text of an article in order to read it; however, that made the code snippets too small to read. I'd advise them to change the ratio of the code-snippet font size and body font size to something closer to 1.
Yes. Though I'd recommend another _first_ language. C is a fine second or third language.
I am not familiar with the laws out in England. What do you mean it is not recognized? I had assumed that to have an English limited company, you have to register it here. I make this assumption because all corporations and limited liability companies in the US has to file paperwork with the State Secretary in their home state... otherwise it isn't an entity.

Now I'm really curious. I'm going to forward this link to a friend of mine out in Manchester. He's set up his own limited company so he may know what you're talking about.
Tesla Roadster Travels 313 Miles on a Single Charge
> Why not also write about the 6 figure debt that many graduates walk into their first job with ?

ADDENDUM: there's been no discussion of financial aid packages at private universities (doesn't matter if they're 'name-brand' or whatever, many private schools offer need-based financial aid). depending on your family's financial status, you could end up paying tuition comparable to what you'd pay at a public school.