skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Elsewhere I've seen him claim that he can make new predictions about the natural world based on his theory, which suggests it's falsifiable. Sadly, the true nature of the universe and all existence doesn't have enough bearing on my life to follow up on it.
LinkedIn Hits 50 Million Users; Still a Roach Motel
A few years ago, I knew a Microsoft intern who's project was to do exactly that for all Silverlight-type software that got installed on a user's machine. He used the P3P standard to automatically present the user with a 'privacy evaluation' before the user ok'd the installation of the software.

This was part of the Longhorn project, which as we all know got scrapped, to produce what is now Vista! :-)
Less time spent on social networking mean more productivity? Of course, this isn't surprising. Just draw the line somewhere, is continuous twittering actually making you any money?
Possibly, but couldn't you argue that the low-hanging fruit email addresses are more likely to be profitable to spammers? Which of these two internet users is more likely to buy your replica rolex: danny@aol.com, or AOL: danny (or danny at aol, or danny+don'tspamme at teh a oh l's dot com)?

My point is that users smart enough to disguise their emails from spammers are more likely to be wary of their wares.
I do this all the time with Google Apps to track who sells my email address, creating a new one for each place I signup.

1. Create a catch-all address for the domain you're going to use that isn't the normal postmaster one.

2. Pick a three- or four-letter combination of letters that rarely appears in normal conversation (like dcj, for example).

3. Set a mail filter on the catch-all account to forward all mail that has your three-letter combination as a part of its recipient list to your real address.

This means that for every service you sign up for, you can create a new address (I always use domainname.code@mydomain) that is trackable and gets to you. For example, I just signed up with Via Rail's online system - using the address viarail.dcj@mydomain. It will get forwarded to my real address (since it's got the dcj in there), if I start getting spam on it I'll know where they got the email address from, and if it gets really bad I can just change my filters to block all email to viarail.dcj@mydomain.

You could do something with Gmail's plus-addressing, but I find that many services don't accept those email addresses.
I personally don't believe that privacy policies are useful at all. They are at best the web equivalent of a verbal agreement.

People need to adopt the security-oriented attitude that says, if you post anything, anywhere, the entire Internet may very well see it. Period. You cannot trust every server, protection mechanism and employee in between. (You wouldn't really know who to sue, anyway.)

If something really "must" be private or controlled, then you don't need a policy, you need actual control over your data. For example, don't post the thing on an Internet-enabled computer in the first place. Or, strongly encrypt it, and have absolute trust in the recipients of keys. If you've made your key recipients sign something legally binding, and retained proof that no one else could have received keys from you, then at least you'd know who to sue for violating your trust.

Ideally, the mechanism for transferring the keys doesn't use a network either, e.g. physically hand something to your intended audience that will let them decrypt whatever you do send. The data should also have a built-in "time bomb" that makes it impossible to decrypt anything after some specified period of time (for peace of mind). Of course, the recipient could do something stupid like save the decrypted data somewhere, which is why the legal binding to key recipients is so important.
I voted you down because you asserted that a system was 'best' because you remember from a 'pys' class. This has to be one of the weakest 'arguments from authority' I have seen. You then asserted that a 5-star allowing zero is even better. Then why didn't your (psychology?) professor say so?

I didn't vote down because I disagree, but because you haven't made much of a case. I also downvote the 'wow, cool' comments as unhelpful, and upvote the comments that seem like they will lead to useful discussion. Without intending offense, I didn't think your comment was pitched at the right level for this audience.

Personally, I think you are on the right track, although I think 5 stars allowing halves is even better. Interestingly, Netflix (experts in this field) started out with allowing half-stars and then got rid of them, making me worry that they know better than I.
I was not under the impression that anything about what he was saying was difficult to understand, merely that it was poorly communicated, I do not see any original ideas here or concepts that have not been covered in more exacting details in various philosophy courses.

I don't mean to heap ad hominem on him, I'm simply pointing out that if one is trying to present their ideas then they ought to present them clearly without recourse to attempting to make themselves appear more complex and sophisticated. There are even examples on this very thread of people illustrating much the same ideas as in the original article in a better format.

From a personal perspective, I have a lot of sympathy for him, I watched the entire series of youtube videos about him and I find it something approaching an indictment of humanity that this guy is a bouncer.

I think your dismissive rebuke is just not digging deep enough.
Obviously this is nothing new. Reward schemes and sites have been around for 10+ years, and are really profitable for those who run them. But the value they give is debatable.
Looks like we miss some important question here.
How spammer got the emails ? Do the Spam bots really crawled to every web pages ?

Some note that i learn from Internet to minimize spam emails:

- Never use third party proxy or anonymous network (i.e. Tor). I once work for company that not allowed to use any port except 8080, so for several months i use Tor. Suddenly, after several weeks my spam folder increased with junk emails.

- Make sure you clear all your caches and cookies _before_ and after browsing for pr0n. duh! :)

- Never use any third party application from Facebook/MySpace/any-social-networks, unless you using your non-private mail on your Facebook/MySpace/any-social-networks account.

- Do not read spam email. If you know that email is spam just check it and delete, or let the system delete it automatically, like Gmail do. I do not know anything about SMTP protocol but there is one feature that make your email notified to sender when you read it, by opening your email you just notified the spammer that your email is, at least still, active.

Spammer, in context of the emails gatherer, is not stupid. They know what their doing.
Does anybody know why so few states are available? Are there restrictions on mortgage companies as to what states they operate in, like there are for health insurance companies?

I've always been an advocate for states rights (a republic of states), but these sorts of things seem like they violate Article 1 Section 8 of the constitution in that they impede interstate commerce, and for little reason other than to favor one company over another, at the expense of the citizens.
You're missing what I'm saying, and what the point of the original post you replied to was saying. We know what you're saying right now, but that's why this article wasn't as interesting as it could have been if it only surveyed people who were learning profitable trades.

I also dislike the snarky tone you take when referring to "people without useful skills", but that's secondary to the main argument.
i mean they did luck out in choosing what turned out to be a huge market, but they definitely parlayed their minor position into outstanding success.

also, they built something that they themselves used.
I think that every election year when the local polling place is packed to the brim with people waiting to get registered by slow, old people. Register every citizen centrally and put voting kiosks (that could double as places to pay taxes, etc maybe?) in grocery stores, gas stations, etc.
I can speak to the value of multivariate optimization in the oil and gas business.

Specifically, the U.S. onshore natural gas business is currently focused on what are called shale gas "resource plays". These are large contiguous blocks of acreage -- hundreds of thousands of acres -- over which thousands of wells are drilled one-after-another, in a manufacturing process. What makes this possible is a large, contiguous, underlying resource of natural gas reserves, trapped in tight rocks.

The key to profitably exploiting these resource plays is finding the right "formula" that can be repetitively applied to drilling and completing each well. There is no time to individually sit down and engineer each well. All you can do is analyze the data after the fact.

The profitability of each gas well is influenced by hundreds of variables. For instance, you have to "fracture stimulate" a gas well using a variable combination of hundreds of chemicals, each in a varying volume, with a variable pressure, to a variable depth. The well itself may have a variable number of frac stages, with a variable number of horizontal lateral wells connecting it to the reservoir, with a variable length for each lateral.

The question you have to answer is: given thousands of data points over thousands of individual wells, what is the most profitable "formula" for drilling a well in a particular resource play? Profitability is defined as the present value of the discounted future cash flow of the well using a discount rate of 10% -- you'll hear people talk about "the PV10". You know how each well has performed after it was drilled, you know what its profitability was, and you know what formula was applied to drill and to complete it. And you have this data for hundreds of wells -- each using a different combination of variables. And there's new data added every day.

There is a _lot_ of money riding on the right answer to this question.

There is a _massive_ amount of data in the oil and gas business. And every year there are entirely new classes of data being generated. 2D seismic, then 3D seismic, then microseismic, completion data, well logs, magnetic, gravity, surface linears, etc...

It's not surprising that one of the largest customers to the supercomputing industry -- after defense -- is the oil and gas business.

One trick here is that this data is usually locked up inside proprietary databases shared amongst companies in different industry consortia. So, you really have to be a player in the business to have access to the data -- that doesn't mean that you have any clue how to analyze it, however.

And there are big QA problems with this data, too. So, you have to deal with that as well.
Making the world a better place is promoting a personal advantage, so long as you're not dragged down too much in the process. My point is that by and large this is simply not the case.

I think if you believe it is then I'm wondering if your target population is truly representative of humanity at large or simply those who you interact with most commonly within some social sphere which you have found to be agreeable with you.

It isn't even that I feel superior, I simply feel utterly different, as I said, alien in the extreme. I believe this inhibits me when trying to understand why other people behave as they do because all I have to work off is a bunch of simulations of human behaviour in the past that I have observed / heard of.
> The current law on free speech in the United States is precisely designed to allow (and, indeed, encourage) open and continual refutation of mistaken ideas on public policy. That is the whole point of the American experiment in free speech.

You're right. And the whole point of not punishing for their opinion is so that you can criticize them openly. Imagine if we didn't let the racists make their argument, then we can not refute them by reason because there would be nothing to refute. So to let them express their opinions, then everyone else can openly see how ludicrous they are, rather than trying to hide them and their so obviously wrong ways.

The parenting advice is something I picked up from various sources. And it's based on the idea that we should constructively criticize, and not scold. I'm sure you've heard the advice to show young children the right way, rather than to tell them explicitly that they are wrong. I have a very young sister that was born when I was 16 (I think) and this is why I even listen to such advice.

I'm not a parent, but I was a child, as has everyone. And being a parent does not necessarily legitimize any specific parenting tactic one has, especially with regard to long term effects.

So the example I gave about showing kids the correct way to do things instead of scolding or telling them they are wrong is probably a better example. I'm not exactly sure where I saw the advice for ignoring annoying behavior to stop it, but let's forget that example.

But this example is more analogous to our current argument. Instead of telling people they are wrong, it's simply better to show them, and others, the better way. The better way should be enough convincing and any need to artificially make it better (by denouncement) would be prone to human error. But to have to show someone the better way would require cooperation by reality if you know what I mean. And such cooperation by reality would only happen if your proposed idea, opinion, or whatever is truly better.

In essence, I'm proposing that we humans do the upvote, because nothing bad comes out of doing that, and let reality do the down voting.

So by only allowing up vote we better prevent people from artificially marginalizing an idea.
Google.com removed buttons and texts on its homepage
At their current state, privacy policies are indeed not useful.

But maybe we can change that.
Terracotta's Journey to the Center of Hibernate
Yes. But we should at least give talks to our follow mathematicians that they can understand and enjoy.
Would be nice if the links on the main page went directly to the article instead of the comments page.
Unless its case hardened, which I highly doubt this steel is, the "skin" of the metal isn't stronger.

You can plainly see rust, so chemical corrosion probably started a crack, which grew through cyclical loading and more corrosion over many years.
Yes, Universities DO keep getting more expensive. This is troubling in it's own right, and needs to be looked at.

You don't get to say it's inflation, because it's rising faster than inflation.

You don't get to say, "we need more money because we need to hire more faculty and staff to serve all our extra students", because those extra students bring more money with them in the form of their tuition.

You can try to say, "we have more students, so we need to build more infrastructure", but I won't let you, because that's why bonds were invented, and they've been used for centuries for this purpose.

These universities are charging more because they can charge more. It's a bubble, and it's going to collapse like a bubble, which is a shame.
The problem is that we are from Argentina, sorry not to mention that. As far as I know, nobody in my country had a similar project.
Seems like a strange list, but I don't know how they are measuring influence.
As a college dropout and business owner at 23, I believe that its the personal responsibility of every American to have a marketable skill that they can get paid for. American Universities no longer provide this--they're playpens for the 18-22 year old set, most of whom are there simply out of obligation to their parents wishes.

If college in American isn't dead, it's certainly dying.

I didn't land a dream job in the tech community immediately after dropping out. I worked in retail for 2 years, while freelancing on the side and keeping a blog which I updated daily. When I did finally get hired, all of those things were evidence that I had a work ethic outside the context of a classroom.

Anyone can be smart in high school, anyone can do well in college, but if you're unable to hustle to get your foot in the door, don't expect me to feel bad for you.
You are right. I'll fix it.

edit: fixed
I couldn't agree more with the post. I've had my primary email address sitting out on my contact page for years and have never spent a significant amount of time dealing with spam. At this point, obfuscated addresses are as archaic as animated "under construction" GIFs and the blink tag.

Using the de-obfuscation process as a gating mechanism is arbitrary and perhaps a bit arrogant. There's no reason to assume that familiarity with this convention equates to intelligence or value. Even now, I still run into plenty of people in businesses outside of the tech industry that confuse website and email address formats. That doesn't make them "unworthy" of contacting us; it just means they have a different skillset and knowledge than we do.

Meanwhile, email spammers and scammers are most likely to understand these conventions, since it's their "job" to do so.
I don't agree with all his conclusions. In particular, it seems as though he is saying 'eventual consistency is no practical good' and then beating Dynamo for a few paragraphs with the same stick.

The most often quoted example of Dynamo's use is the shopping cart application on every Amazon page. In the worst case, your shopping cart will mysteriously empty itself. This is a huge pain, and a potential loss for Amazon, but it's not catastrophic in the way that is implied here. Indeed, assuming the liveness of a quorum, the application will read back all conflicting entries for the shopping cart (those that aren't ordered under their vector clock timestamps) and the onus is on it to merge the conflicts. Of course, the shopping cart will take the union of all updates to ensure that nothing is dropped (and therefore some delete operations may be lost).

The key point is that some applications can do without observing a linearisable history, and the interest of this paper is that it explores the design space if you drop that requirement.

I don't understand the post's points about CAP; all three requirements are in tension. Dynamo is unusual in that it is live in the case of a network partition while still maintaining its consistency guarantees.

Similarly - those systems that use chain-replication asynchronously like he describes can still suffer from the same read-old-value-after-it-was-written consistency issue, if the reader jumps between two replicas for consecutive reads. Avoiding that can require synchronous coordination of updates (a la Paxos, e.g.) which is, I think, what the paper is driving at. Otherwise, there are still failure modes which, in order to patch up, require stronger guarantees about liveness of quorums than Dynamo needs.

I understand that Dynamo is no longer used internally at Amazon at scale, so maybe some of the practical points this post makes about the realities of central coordination held water for real deployments. Still, I don't buy the reaction that prioritising availability uber alles and designing a system that does not behave exactly like a strongly-consistent key-value store immediately invalidates it for workloads that have high availability requirements and lower consistency needs.
They say we could have a table with a series of idiomatic phrases. Every sentence has to be compared with that table in order to know if its an idiomatic phrase or not. I think that's not a good idea.
I do, and they disappoint me for the same reason; I work in a machine research lab, and we work very hard to write papers which are both clear and publishable. I hold every writer to the same standard --- communicate in the clearest possible way. Sometimes the form/content relationship requires difficult prose, but that is surely a rare occurrence outside of modern fiction.

He published online, and suffered from no external pressure to obfuscate at all; if he made simple things complex it was from an inability to communicate or a desire to conceal.
If I can make a suggestion, put some sort of border on the outside edge of the main content area... the content blends in with the background image a little too much for me.

Good luck with this idea!
Depends on what you mean by every thing else. For playing Quake you need a mouse and something like a keyboard. For Super Mario, I prefer a joy pad. For interacting with a windowmanager, XMonad shows that a keyboard interface can be quite productive. A CAD program will benefit from a mouse.
By the same author I can recommend The New Science of Strong Materials: Or Why You Don't Fall Through the Floor. (The section on wooden planes is particularly interesting.)

http://www.amazon.co.uk/New-Science-Strong-Materials-Through...
The real 40-year-old virgins (13.9% of men and 8.9% of women)
The group is composed by: a linguist, an "experienced programmer", me, two business guys and a translator.

The "experienced programmer" is what they said he is, but after a week I realised that he's not. I didn't know how to make an HTML parser, so I have to do it for him(I begin programming this year).

Thanks you for the books, I'll give them a try.
Free Open Source Spell & Grammar Checker: After The Deadline
Thanks for mentioning "Link Grammar", I googled it and I find very interesting information.
Author somewhat intelligently argues that Dynamo sacrifices more consistency than it gains availability. Part of his argument is the difficulty of truly leveraging partitioning to gain availability, mostly the practical issues of users finding the currently available nodes in such a system. Another is issues arising from nodes re-joining a cluster without first performing a synchronization. He seems to favor the BigTable family, or simple master-slave replication (assuming that the write-load is low enough for this to be acceptable).
Every community has a set of shared assumptions and a particular viewpoint, this is pretty much axiomatic given the definition of the term. Most forum systems on the net are unable to deliver much nuance in terms of expressing this viewpoint, so it is easy to perceive "groupthink" when the bulk of the community disagrees with you. Where things get interesting/contentious is when people who share community view A assume everyone else agrees with B and get indignant or defensive when they discover that this view is not shared. There is nothing about "hackers" or startups or other standard topics of this community that necessitates a unique viewpoint, so why assume the rest of the community is going to tolerate large divergence from a standardized norm? Too much input from "unique" viewpoints usually leads to chaos, and that seems to be one thing of which the community has a low tolerance.
Great work! What are the future plans?

How is your experience on pligg? I had tried it last year and came back with bad taste in my mouth.
Of course we need a federated Twitter like service. Let's get moving!
That's really, really not a good idea. You need to get them to talk to someone who knows for real how hard this problem is.
Abridged version: CAP is hard/scary and eventual consistency is too complicated. Let's go shopping.
Why do they even bother specifying Courier, instead of going straight to 'monospace'? At least that way, the user-defined monospace will be used, which might in the worst case still be Courier, but is more likely to be something sensible.

(Also, I find the DejaVu fonts better than the Bitstream originals.)
See also:
http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=914889
http://www.streetsblog.org/2009/02/12/reports-of-velibs-demi...

I would be surprised if JCDecaux's PR department were not at least partially behind this.

(I go to Paris frequently. The bikes mostly work fine, and everyone loves them. Here in Barcelona the system works pretty well, too.)
Your last comment piqued my interest, in what sense did you take it as a propaganda piece?
How to Make a Comet
Armstrong on Erlang's Text Capabilities