skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
would it have been awkward to write down the equation and then solve it? keeping a legible notebook and writing documentation are even better than doing things in your head and spewing magic numbers. i frequently have reason to do back of the envelope sanity checks...no reason not to use an envelope or a notebook, though.
Yes.

I didn't have bandwidth for the video, so downloaded the PDF and scanned it as I had time.

If I missed the point of the article, doh! I was relying on the other comment.
Two recommendations:

1) More info about who you are. When you start the form with "Will and I", that doesn't mean too much to most people who don't know either of you.

2) More quantitative choices. For example, one of the questions is:

How often do you make reservations online?
* Never.
* I have, but not frequently.
* Occasionally.
* Whenever possible.

What is the difference between infrequently and occasionally? Something like "never", "every month or two", "every week or two", and "several times per week" might be more useful for you and easier to fill out for everyone else.
Hardee's Restaurant chain comes to Pakistan.
There are whole fields of theory & practice where approximations are all that are used. http://www.wastedtalent.ca/index.php?view=341
Hey, thanks for the comment.

Yep, there is a fundamental tension between intuition and rigor. Unfortunately, I feel that rigor (and not even rigor -- rote details) are overemphasized, without giving any context, and more importantly without giving any inspiration to the student. It's like focusing on the spelling of a poem, not the content.

I do want to jump into the rigorous definitions in later posts (such as when limits exist, when they don't, why it's important) but I find intuition -> rigor is an easier path to navigate than rigor -> intuition [which often becomes rigor -> memorization]. If someone had just said "Hey, limits and infinitesimals help us solve the problem of 'How do we make an approximation which is still accurate enough?'" calculus would have clicked a lot faster for me :).
Adams is describing how marketing (tries to) work. Marketing seeks to identify customers.

In a manner of consideration, Adams is seeking to acquire better and more targeted search results, or skills in searching for products or services. Google Adwords tries to offers something close. But the Googlers are not very good at this level of targeting. (Yet?)

As for specifically contacting buyers, that's expensive for commodity gear. And what happens when you find and proffer a product to a customer, and the customer turns around and purchases that product from the lowest bidder; if you can't automate this and keep the customer acquisition costs (very) low, a business ends up a variant of the Brick-and-Mortar cost differential.

The middle ground - some form of a trusted concierge or consulting service or search service - seems to be one of the few potentially approaches from both directions; back to what amounts to a (trusted) middleman in the purchasing process.

And a concierge service has inherent costs.
Techmeme does not show user votes or comments, does it?

I am specifically referring to sites that allow voting, show the results of the vote, and have a user-feedback-comments section for each article.

So while there area a lot of tech news sites, I am curious to how many participatory user-interactive sites there are.
I have a friend who meticulously puts a small pinch of salt in her coffee before brewing. She says the salt slightly cuts down the acidity, and the flavor comes out a bit more. I'm not sure of the science behind it, but, she makes a damn good cup of coffee.
Wow -- 60k is enough to keep these guys quiet? They must have known the river of money coming in. That seems really low.
The Story of a Reluctant Entrepreneur
See also http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=939938

where there is already much discussion.
mmmmm....yes and no. if you perceives critique negatively, that's a problem with your attitude. you'll never find a good place to work because you'll react poorly to natural differences and disagreements. if others are aggressive or negative that's a problem with them, especially if they're not interested in self-analyzing and learning to be mindful.

we don't know the situation in this case.
> He says it's as if he can almost feel the rush of gamma rays that are said to emanate from the right hemisphere when an idea is born.

Inspiration angry! Inspiration smash puny humans!

...perhaps he meant "gamma waves"
Also check out Caltech's Ph 101, Order of Magnitude Physics:

http://www.its.caltech.edu/~oom/index.html

The course notes aren't nearly as good, but the homework sets have some really fun problems.
They also got this one wrong, both in asking the question, and in answering it: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pirate_game
If my understanding is that you want to build a website like "yelp/local business"...then I think you need to go out and talk to local businesses about how their needs aren't being met by craigslist, yelp, etc.

Also from the description, it looks like you might be going after too many things. For instance - if I am a small town plumber, chances are that I am not going to have a commercial to upload. This will make me look less professional on your website and I won't like it so I won't use you. On the otherhand if you had statistics like the number of "jobs" that I have done in the last month at or under the price quoted, then this would be helpful for me as a customer.

Perhaps the way to go is to make a website that lets very small local business construct advertisements that don't suck. Make it painfully easy for them to do this and they will pay money.
I agree that there are serious problems with this article. Consider the statement:

"Our personal consumption in the U.S. is already in overdrive. It's now equal to 70% of our GDP (about double that of China and nearly a third more than that of Canada)."

This is a nonsense claim. GDP is defined as consumption + government spending + net exports. It doesn't seem obvious that increasing the relative share of government or exports would do anything for the environment.
Is this related to your post from several months ago? I've been wondering what you would end up putting together, and watching for it.

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=672067
i agree. i interviewed at Google and thought the whole process was lots of fun. i didn't have any complaints about the people. (i might be biased because i was offered a job; however, i didn't take it, preferring to work at a startup instead.)
Neither of these guys have an MBA, why in the world did they do this at a b-school?
Yep, you're right about Techmeme, I was paying attention just to the "aggregator" word.
Soon, another technology aggregator will be at www.beginstop.com (now it redirects).
Hadoop World: Rethinking the Data Warehouse with Hadoop and Hive
Wikipedia's been having a perpetual pledge drive for maybe a couple years now. It actually struck me as quite odd and comical that, instead of having the normal pledge drive stuff, it just says "WIKIPEDIA FOREVER" in big blue letters.
Entire thing is stored in memory? Uh oh... Haha
PBS is not "ads in all but name". PBS "ads" (really, sponsored credits) don't interrupt shows, and are subject to guidelines that are much stricter than commercial television.
I agree with you that 'point for point' I'd lose in a heartbeat.

I'm not talking about individual sites, it is more a sense of atmosphere, the lack of commerce.
And the lack of opportunity, an odd thing to overlook on this site.
Rogue Amoeba abandons iPhone because of App Store approval insanity
The "how many X are in Y" is also known as a "case study question." From what I understand it's a standard practice in interviews for consulting companies, such as Bain or McKinsey. I've never seen one in an interview, but friends of mine who took that route obsessed over them.

As your interviewer said, these questions are asked just to see how you will come up with an answer. The actual number hardly matters, so long as you can sell it to the interviewer. Pushing you is part of the process, as well, to see how you hold up "under pressure."

If you want to be uncharitable, this is much like what a management consultant does -- come in, get some problem from a troubled company ("How can we improve sales by 20% in six months?"), develop a strategy, and then convince the client that they should do it. The interview technique makes sense for that context because it selects for people who can pull this off.

Actually, for a PR role I don't think this question is such a bad fit. You will have to think quickly on your feet, answer hostile people, and come up with diplomatic, plausible answers to crazy questions ("why does your product not work with Slackware?"). The precise answer is of course important, since if you're wrong you will be caught, but how you react is more important.
And, further, show more prominently the sellers that have the best conversion rates, which you both could monitor via an intuitive analytics package.
Honest people do not write software to defraud investors. Despite the story, they had no stroke of conscience convincing them to leave. You would never tell a criminal organization that you're going to expose them unless you're blackmailing them; there would be no benefit. These guys are con artists.

I think an honest, rational person would contact the FBI in private and seek their counsel on how to proceed.
How the Swine Flu Has Spread
Hi there - this is Jason - the guy who wrote the original post. I just found this forum with comments via a Google search. Actually, the only place I posted a link was on a moderated Django Google group. The linking and commentary came as a surprise to me - I wasn't really sure anyone would read it! Not sure who posted it to Hacker News.
References Google Flu Trends: http://www.google.org/flutrends/
You guys should also know there's a coffee called Kopi Luwak, where the beans are ingested, shit out, and then people make coffee out of that.
The PDF is a transcript of a video that is linked from 15th paragraph of the article, but is just one of many linked videos. The actual article is a response from the author (approximately) of the recent HN post about the 100 square foot house.

The article itself is good, and you might enjoy it. I skipped the video, which is probably flawed in the ways you suggest. But maybe you could unflag the interesting link to the response in the meantime? :)
Drupal and Joomla both have about 150 tables, and most modules add a few tables, so a working installation with reasonable functionality usually hits about 200 tables.
In America, most people will not know the answer to that question.
don't bother clicking, the first part basically ends with "a girlfriend had this great idea, we'll call it re...[more next week]"
The similarity is no coincidence: Sanjoy Mahajan, the principal instructor of the MIT course, did his Ph.D. at Caltech under Sterl Phinney, the instructor for the course you linked. Moreover, half of Sanjoy's dissertation was an order-of-magnitude physics textbook based on Sterl's course (taught for many years with fellow astrophysicist Peter Goldreich, now a professor emeritus).

(N.B. I taught Physics 1 with Sanjoy when we overlapped at Caltech, and Sterl was my Ph.D. advisor as well.)
> luxury version of the Corolla

That's called a Lexus IS250.
Software to Analyze Cough Sounds for Signs of Sickness
I think we're pretty much in agreement. I would rather, though, see a real example with proper rigor, but introduced and explained starting with intuition and then developed forwards into the detail.

The problem is, as I'm sure you're aware, just how many traps and pitfalls there are for the insufficiently paranoid. Working "intuitively" has a tendency not to instill that paranoia.

And, as you say, working just on the rigor tends to result in rote work with no understanding.

I think only time and practice is the real solution. The article, though, is good for someone who already has the "rote" understanding, and needs to "grok" the whole thing.

Similar criticisms can be aimed at my stuff: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=940169
If I were running a Ponzi scheme, and I needed to generate fake results, I might ask developers to create a program that generated a month's worth of random trades (perhaps explaining that this was a way to test the expected commission + slippage of a strategy that covered a given volume and mix of securities). Then I'd run it twenty times and pick the top result. Being in the 95% percentile every month was close to what Madoff did; he never showed extraordinary profits (except to people who were apparently in on it), but did show incredibly consistent returns of ~1% per month.
What surprises me is the reasoning path she took (ie estimating customer behavior). I'd have tried to guess how many servers they need for that (uuuuh...100,000?) and how much they cost a year ($1000 each, $100m?) and what's an acceptable profit margin (20%? So about $300,000/day in earnings).

Then again you could figure Google makes about $5 billion a year in profit, say a tenth of that comes from gmail, and the profit margin is 10%, suggesting ~$15m a day in earnings (not profits) which is off by a factor of 500 from the above. That sounds a lot more likely.
I defined this distinction to an older relative about a year ago (right after I apologized for "geeking" all over her shiny new coffee maker, which I had taken apart and put back together). To illustrate, I used music. A music nerd knows which years qualify as classical or baroque and which composers wrote what. A music geek tunes their own piano.
Dell unveils Android-based Mini 3 smartphone
Dell Confirms Android Smart Phone, Specs Still Secret
Programmers (or software engineers, if you like) almost never ask / negotiate what they're really worth. I don't see how it would be any different in finance.
Thanks! My comment was actually supposed to appear on another story about git! I got confused ...

http://news.ycombinator.org/item?id=939603
The way you put it almost makes me think that people are brewing their own poop instead of a civet's poop.
The problem with data.gov and sites like it is that they are built on faulty premises about data:

1. Fiction: Data doesn't require lots of work to make it useable, so we can just upload whatever we have and it will be useful to somebody. Fact: the big useable datasets (census, ipums, nlsy, all the private marketing datasets) have armies of people cleaning and integrating them. It costs money, it takes time, and it is easy to screw up.

2. Fiction: Links are worth something. Fact: links are worthless.

3. Fiction: XML adds values. Fact: aascii tab delimited in consistent formats add value, while XML SUBTRACTS value.

4. Fiction: a good dataset is easy to use. Fact: even a good dataset (google IPUMS for an example) takes a lot of work to get to know how to manipulate, presuming one can use some sort of statistical programming language in the first place.

5. Fiction: simple summaries of common data data are useful. Fact: everybody has already done the simple summaries. (This is just a bonus item, and doesn't apply to data.gov, but does apply to faulty thinking about data in general.)

6. Fiction: Federated data is just fine. Fact: Data that is curated, cleaned, and integrated into one big monolithic package is FAR better, because an analyst can then learn the conventions and names and such in one piece, and parallel categories are more likely to align.

7. Fiction: Good data is easy for a layperson to use. Fact: good data still requires a lot of skill. Well, maybe in nations with decent public schools a layperson can do something with data, but not in the US.

What I WOULD like is the following (taken from another post, now deleted):

An ideal data.gov would have a lot of staff who put together a few integrated and curated datasets from the agencies. These would be hierarchies of data in a few formats (shp, txt, raster, SQL text dump, and ...?), along with well written codebooks and narrative READMEs. They would be distributed using git or subversion. The staff would have the expertise to make such nice data packages for you and me, and they would have the political oomph to demand that the agencies release the data to them. The staff would also give classes on how to use the data along in some open source statistical packages to do useful work.
Good examples of curated data that I know are IPUMS and the Portland Metro's RLIS (both google-able).
http://popurls.com/ - There's a Technology section at the bottom with lots of different tech news sites. Some may fit what you are looking for.

http://alltop.com/ is surprisingly good. Again, not positive if it will fit exactly what you are looking for, but I found http://python.alltop.com/ to be useful.
It's related, yes, but I'm building a body of popular articles that can then sit on top of deeper explanations.

Short answer: yes. Longer answer: there's a long way to go.
Yeah - I'll go ahead and address this here since a couple people said something similar above. I suppose I could have prefaced the post with a note on the "gut feel" nature of my arguments. I spent a month or so evaluating the platforms, interviewing developers who were proponents of one or the other, talking to friends and colleagues who had strong opinions, reading lots of other blogs, and diving into tutorials and documentation for both frameworks. In the end, I formed my own opinions shaped by the people I talked to, the things I read, and my own experiences. In the post, I'm not even attempting to provide concrete data - and most of my points are about things that you'd have a hard time measuring anyway, like philosophy and culture.

I'm not trying to stand on a soap box one way or the other here. Maybe a less combative post title could have helped tone down the commentary. The reason I wrote the post was that I had found myself explaining my decision to a handful of people and I thought maybe more folks could benefit from the "research" (intentionally in quotes to designate that is was not "real" research) that I did while getting ready to make the decision.

If you want to fire arrows back and forth at each other, feel free. I'll probably not get too involved though since I don't always find those discussions productive.

- Jason (author of the original post)
Honestly, I really really feel for you. It's very clear you've put a ton of hard work into this. I think it's great that DanielStraight spent a lot of time to provide feedback. I honestly don't have as much time to give you the proper technical or user experience type of feedback that you need. I will, however, give you some more overarching feedback. I just don't believe you have enough experience at this point in time to really understand the problem with your product. It's hard to resist trying to "go for it" to make riches on an internet service. But given time and learning, anyone can get that experience. If you can find work in the Advertising industry, that would be the ideal learning place. It's the only industry that marries strategy, branding, interactive, marketing, user experience, and visual design, plus PR to boot, as the lines between what is PR and advertising is becoming non-existent. As a matter of fact, there are blurred lines between all mentioned above. But the greatest thing for you to learn about is how for a web service, the user's experience is essentially your brand. I cannot teach this to you. It's something that will probably take you a while to learn how to implement.
Um, a marketing manager is an analytical role. When I said a "a role in advertising" I was referring to making ads, or ad copy.
Have the handouts been published together in book form yet?
Feeling like what you have is the first step in your evolution ! I felt exactly the same way. Now your at a crossroads where you decide next what you want to do. First of all do what is more important. If you have the $$$ to do it, take a break, do whatever you need to do with your GF, with family so things are back on track.

Like someone said earlier, sit on a rock and decided what you want to do next (i have a warf that i did that very thing on here in sydney).

From a career point of view you usually only ever come up with two solutions. That you want to relax now, dont care about work and all you want to do is easy street. If thats your choice then find a big company, do support work get paid for your on call overtime, melt into the crowd of people and live your days out restarting applications, writing scripts and doing things that require no brainpower. Start and 9 when your shift starts and leave at 5 when your shift ends. Hey presto, all the time in the world !

Start a business, doesnt have to be a startup that is technology based or it can be. If you have a hobby maybe it can become a business, make you good income and you will have a happy life. I knew someone that actually left australia and went to bali and started a surfing safari in bali ! pays alright but he is a very happy man. Sun everyday surfing every day, lives in a modest house, no stress.

Or you can start a technology company, something along the lines of what your familiar with , work your ass off for a couple of years with the hopes of making it big and then opening the surf safari with all the money you made by either your profits or flipping (whatever you choose).

The main point is i seen those old disgruntled people who work at the large companys complaining about their bosses and how they are just viewed as a resource, yes i empathise with them but what i dont tell them is it was their choice. They could have done it when they were younger but probably didnt cause they were having to much fun or work was very comfortable that they didnt need to look else where.

Getting pushed and shoved so that it makes you realise that work is crap sooner then later is sometimes a blessing in disguise.
I would think that it was the opposite, the enormous opportunity, to change the world significantly for the better, there was an atmosphere of 'this time we'll get it right', simply because 'big money' was looking the other way.

That changed somewhere around 1997 or so, and was absolutely unstoppable.

Anyway, I can see there is no way I'm going to be able to make you see what I'm getting at. I'm grasping at putting a feeling in to words and apparently the words fail me. But I can't help that feeling...
Do people really have trouble finding the things they want to buy online? Whenever I do a search for information on any kind of product, I get a ton of ads offering to sell it to me. This seems like a solution in search of a problem.
Out of curiosity (I have no plans to apply to Google), what kind of criteria are used to identify prospective candidates? For example, does Google only look at the top 10% of academic performers and winnow from there, or sample across the board and then start filtering for critical thinking? I'm just thinking about the fact that many industry luminaries didn't bother to finish college, but rather stayed long enough to pick up some new intellectual tools and then started selling their ideas as soon as they had decided which way the wind was blowing.
Badda Bing: Microsoft woos newspapers by funding their stick to beat Google
Map of (Swedish) 3G bandwidth with real-world data.
So he's proposing a recommendation system for any/all consumer products.