skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Well, you didn't seem to understand it when I said it >shorter<.

So tptacek, enlighten us, what's the principle hardware differences between a run-of-the-mill desktop Mac and a run-of-the-mill desktop dell?

Protip: if you use the acronym "DRM" in your response you loose because you obviously don't understand what "DRM" means.
Global Inequality Is Down
Investing in derivatives like CDOs is completely different from investment in equities.

Its like if I sold you insurance for $999 trillion that there wouldn't be an earthquake in California tomorrow. I obviously don't have that much money, just like those banks didn't have the money that they are now paying Goldman Sachs and the guy in this article with taxpayer money.

Ironically you cite Warren Buffet when he himself was quoted as saying "I view derivatives as time bombs".

http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/business/2817995.stm
They don't store full copies of each revision.
Actually automatic countermeasures are almost always a bad idea. Don't do it.

If a service crashes repeatedly then fix the service, don't deploy bandaids. Those bandaids tend to pile up and god help you when that pile comes crashing down...
Artificial Intelligence Koans
This is actually a pretty decent list. I use a good portion of them on most of my Ubuntu machines. Also a few apps I had never heard of: Universal Applets and the brain stuffs.
Sarbanes-Oxley Exemption for Small Companies Said to Be Pushed by Emanuel
If dolphins are intelligent, surely some repeatable experiment can be designed to show this.

And btw, while I'll accept the point in theory, do you have any realistic examples of unrepeatable experiments in mind? Besides ones involving people, I guess.
Fair enough. I just fail to see the distinction between "semicolon insertion" and optional semicolons. Sounds to me like semicolon insertion is just a stupid way to implement an interpreter where semicolons are optional -- something that can be changed without affecting client code
Is this about whether they add value, or destroy it?
In this case:
"Some investors later would argue that Mr. Paulson's actions indirectly led to the creation of additional dangerous CDO investments, resulting in billions of dollars of additional losses for those who owned the CDO slices."
That's sports for you.
I would say maybe 20% (for me).

Now that I'm back in college, this time assistant-teaching as well as taking grad-level classes and sneaking in time for research, I am more amazed than ever by how wasteful the academic world is. They chop up your day into many context-switches (one of the worst things a knowledge-worker can do), they focus on lectures and exams instead of mentoring and experiences that bring about learning, they require useless courses, they emphasize grades relentlessly (known to decrease learning), and they present material out of context (so it's hard to retain or apply).

I think good teaching can be done in the academic world (I have seen some), and of course it's the place to go to do scientific research. But overall, the academic world is just not very good at what it does (except arguing about minutiae and winning research grants and endowments). The basis of its strong market position is subsidies and prestige. It's ripe for competition from savvy entrepreneurs.
First you need a source of raw milk. Then it's really simple. Simply leave your milk out in a wide-mouth jar for a few days until it becomes separated. Then drain the liquid (whey) by pouring through a cheesecloth (gauze works fine). Tie the cheesecloth around a wooden spoon and hang over a container. The solid part is cream cheese. The whey is also useful for cooking (can be a water substitute in almost any recipe) or can be refined into a whey cheese (such as ricotta) by boiling the whey.
It's not real. At best it is anecdotal. It's a story. It's imagination. It's entertainment. It's a very expensive form of entertainment when you value your time.
I'm thinking of "Hyperion Bay" not completely about a startup though.

The series centered around Dennis Sweeney (Mark-Paul Gosselaar) who, after a successful career in the software business, returns home to open a local division for the company he works for. The series follows the drama when the new meets the old in the little coastal town of Hyperion Bay, California.
I think this is some of the best advice I've read on this site.

You really have an awesome implementation and a real market. I agree with caffeine in that you might want to simply sell access to the children's books for parents to read with their kids, on their laptop or phone, in full screen.

The presentation of this is infinitely better than any ebook reader or a Kindle and would be worth a lot of money to a lot of parents. I think some sort of subscription model would work wonders here.

Also "let me date girls who like the books I like" -- haha I missed this the first time I read your post. Careful Chris Hansen doesn't mess around.
It's not real. At best it is anecdotal. It's a story. It's imagination. It's entertainment.

Why are ideas presented in the form of non-fiction any more "real" than ideas presented in the form of fiction?

Even the most literal non-fiction remains an expression of the author's opinion and ideas.

It's a very expensive form of entertainment when you value your time.

I find what I learn from well-chosen fiction and non-fiction to be equally valuable, and I value my time quite a bit.

I also would be very surprised that anyone who has time to comment here doesn't have time to read a fiction (or non-fiction) book.
Well, if that amount seems ridiculous to you then you're looking at the wrong figure. Have you considered what it costs to have an engineer sit down and write a proper monitoring and alerting system? Even a small one, i.e. the proverbial curl-loop?

That is the figure you should be looking at because even if you assume only a single day of work you can already buy many months of pingdom service for the same money.

Moreover even the smallest monitoring utility takes quite a bit more effort than a single day once you take SMS alerts with backoff (you don't want to spam, right?), scheduled downtimes and overall babysitting into account. Been there, done that.

So, look at the big picture and those $10 bucks suddenly become a no-brainer.
Me too, though I've only just realised that's what I've done.

My current job is great - I work as a web developer in a small web shop. The work is low stress, pays ok, and has great perks like letting me work from wherever I want. As a result, I travel internationally a lot and work from wherever I'm staying.
Although lately I've been thinking that I've hit a wall - nothing I'm doing at work is new anymore, I've just realised that this job is the kind of job the author was describing.
I've considered trying to change jobs, maybe to AI programming or game development, or anything more interesting and fun than what I'm doing now, but that would be a mistake. Instead I'm going to pursue those topics in my own time, because I enjoy it.

It's amazing that sometimes we can overlook how great things are until someone points them out.
Why not? Unless you assume an infinite supply of skilled IT workers - and granted why not. But if there is a shortage of IT workers, but not of waiters, and I choose to work as a waiter instead of in IT, another waiter is out of luck?
No, that's a fact.
So in your world, Apple has a big decision dartboard in the board room, and Steve goes there everyday and asks "should we sell a netbook?". The darts so far have landed on "No" or "Play Golf".

http://www.s2999.com/images/dartboard_decision_maker.jpg

"Apple decided not to sell them." is not a reason, it's an effect of a long line of decision making. The first part of your statement is missing. "Netbooks _____, so Apple decided not to sell them". Fill in the blank with something that makes business sense and you'll probably be not too far off the mark. You have offered absolutely 0 to the analysis of why Apple is not in this space.

My point, since you have failed to deduce it, is that I think Apple couldn't make their margin goals on that product line (netbooks). They sell for between $300-400. Apple's absolutely bottom of the barrel offering is $500 with no peripherals whatsoever. Margins on netbooks are pitiful, probably close to break even. Apple wants to sell commodity hardware at 20% markup, they can't do that in the netbook space. Common, this is Business and Products 101.

I can see no other rational business reason not to get into that space. There may be one, but I don't see it. You are certainly not offering a compelling analysis.

It introduces a product gap that their analysis should have spotted but they were willing to chance. The effect of that product gap is that something filled the hole via consumer demand and that was either:
a) People bought vanilla netbooks and "suffered" with XP.
b) People bought netbooks and turned them into hackintoshes.

Either way, Apple didn't realize revenue from these purchases. Smart business would have tried to capitalize on this form factor, which is why every major manufacturer other than Apple has some kind of netbook offering. My claim is that this is an oversight on the part of Apple. Sure they wouldn't have realized revenue from these sales, but they would have kept their consumers "in the fold" since netbooks are usually a second purchase.

Apple's response so far has not been to fill the hole in the product line with a product (even an overpriced one), but by crippling their software.

It's a scorched earth policy, if they can't have the consumer's money, nobody can.
Looks great, very professional. The only problem I'm seeing is (in Chrome/WinXP) some white letters on the top left hand corner. Debugging messages maybe? Something like "Mem 38.66MB/ ... count: 0" on top of the "Story before bed" logo.

This must be one of the few websites where the "starry sky" background image makes sense, BTW.
They should have gone with Plan-9 ;)
Just because of one article you are changing your life's direction? I found the remark interesting that one should not try to find a job one loves. But I am not yet convinced that it is bad to strive for satisfaction on the job.

That article was written by a dropout - what makes you happy might be different from what makes him happy.

Consider: suppose you could switch to another job that was equally stress free, but more interesting. How would that be bad?
Really cool stuff, but I think it should be really called "jQuery-related enhancements for Firebug" as opposed to "Firebug enhancement for jQuery".
If I were a high priced PR firm I'd charge you $30,000 for the following piece of advice: if you give this away to folks with a .mil email address you will be featured in national publications for it.

edited to add: And since you apparently already thought of that, here's another one:

Currently, you sell books for $7. You should probably also offer some deal like 3 for $20 or 5 for $30, because this will greatly increase your average customer value. (Your median number of books purchased is going to be 1, otherwise. Trust me -- nature of the beast.) After you've convinced folks $7 is the price for a book (too low, but we'll roll with it), and they've committed to spending $7, it is very easy to convince them to spend another $13 to save a buck.

Another reason you'll like this: cash flow. You see, many people are going to buy 3/5 book credits and record 1 (or 0) books. This means that you're sitting on their money in the interim. Depending on your local accounting rules, that can probably be booked as revenue (and can almost certainly be spent on expenses) today. Also, since they haven't picked a book off the shelf yet, I'm guessing you don't owe any royalties on the $13 which pays for books that haven't been recorded. (Check your contracts/legal advisors.)

(Some folks might be discomfitted by this advice since you may think the business is getting money for nothing. That isn't correct: they're just getting money in advance of doing something of value for the customer, in consideration of giving the customer a break on the ultimate price.

This is similar to how a shareware business sells you a license today which includes technical support six months down the road, rather than selling you a cheaper license today and charging a high per-incident fee later. We don't think the shareware vendor is being dishonest because the support hasn't been delivered yet, or because it may never be delivered.)
DiscountASP.NET
Apple's in business to make money, and makes decisions about their platform to maximize profit. There: 15 words, not 387.
He didn't advocate raising kids in a junkyard, he said he'd find a junkyard preferable to a clean prison with a TV. He never said either was a desirable scenario.

"I'd love to have a couple kids, but I won't do it without a physical location that's owned and paid for, and without someone besides myself to help out the mother, and without the means to dodge the institutions, whether through excellent legal help or through the institutions breaking down."

If you're going to namecall, at least do it based on fact.
I think it provides a mild but noticeable difference. More grip on turns mainly, and slightly more glide. I can't comment on durability as I've only used it twice so far.
"Where's the opt-out clause?"

You can't opt out of reality. Unless the Matrix was true.
The argument that they need the training to be qualified to teach undergraduates is belied by the fact that they are already teaching undergraduates.

But often: badly. (I was perhaps a prime example.)
To be fair, their usernames look vaguely similar :-)
Maybe you were just in the wrong degree as I've seen different studies are catered to different kinds of students (though the going to class thing is a motivation issue.)
Ares I or 70 SpaceXs? Kind of sums it up...

NASA should focus on missions and leave Earth to orbit transport to the private sector.

"As an example, SpaceX was built from scratch and has developed two launch systems (the Falcon 9 is currently scheduled for its first flight in February of next year) and a pressurized crew-and-cargo return capsule for less money than the Ares I-X flight test alone. For what NASA proposes to spend on Ares I itself, (forget about the heavy-lifter and the Orion crew module), it could form seventy SpaceXs."
Fantastic idea. Careful with bandwidth costs, though.
Conformity is a big problem.

What was the big heresy for one generation changes into "what you have to say to get tenure" in another.
Which is all well and good, except that the author doesn't. He explicitly states that he wouldn't try to raise a kid while in a dropout/simplist lifestyle.
Looks like they have something like that actually - http://www.astorybeforebed.com/milpromo - or they just added it REALLY quickly to the site. ;)
He is most definitely not speaking like TV and movies are the real world as your quote seems to make out. I also tend to stay away from fiction other than the occasional short story and find that autobiographies and other forms of non-fiction offer a nice creative boost in their writing.
Seems that it's jackson fish market 'experience' http://www.jacksonfish.com/astorybeforebed and quite frankly everything these guys have done has been excellent. Tip my hat to these guys.
Threadsy wants to be your central social media hub. But it's not there yet.
643 megapixel image of our galaxy. Zoom, pan, play. Wow.
+1 for relating with Larry David. I often joke with my cofounder, Sam, that PG/tlb/Paul Buchheit are the Larry Davids of the software world.
The other thing amazon did differently is actually have a revenue stream.
You're purposely misreading him, and you managed to misquote a passage that I actually quoted in this very thread --- he never said "prison". He's envisioning "dodging the authorities" because they demand that he provide medical care, secure shelter, and education.

He'd love to have a couple kids and raise them in a junkyard. He can't, because it's illegal to do so. So, because he doesn't have the wherewithal to handle the institutional friction involved in raising children as crypto-homeless vagabonds, he won't do it. What a prince.
This is a nice addition, but I honestly could do without new Firebug features for a while. It already has 98% of the features I need on a daily basis, and they've all been getting progressively worse in performance for at least the last 6 months. For example, I fired up an older VM the other day that happened to have FF3 and Firebug 1.2 and was amazed that it was so blazing fast compared to what I'm used to with FF3.5 and Firebug 1.4+
Pinching and The Droid
It's not about having the time or not, it's about what you choose to read when you do have the time.

The difference is that when you read fiction, you are in a world, a physical land that is entirely constructed by the mind of the author. The characters aren't bound by the same laws of physics that you and I are. When characters make decisions, the other characters react in the way the author wants, but real people may not react that way.

With nonfiction, there are rules. With fiction, there are no rules. In fact, you don't know what the rules are when you read fiction.

You know that quote about those who don't read history are doomed to repeat it? Well, there is a lot of history to read.

They're two different universes. One, fiction, is framed in a universe where we don't exist. The other, nonfiction, is in the same universe we all share here. In fiction, what goes up may not come down. If you shape your life or make decisions based on fictional ideas, they don't always apply in the real world. Sometimes they may, but mostly they do not.

Yes, you are right, lots of insights can be gained from fiction. I learned a lot reading slaughterhouse five. It's fiction, but it's also pretty real in a way. I learned a lot from 1984. I learn a lot from science fiction.

But there are is also a lot to learn and a lot of insights to be gained from nonfiction as well. Truth is stranger than fiction.

Think of it this way. If you only read fiction for the rest of your life, could you program a computer? Could you build a house? Could you understand quantum mechanics or any myriad other practical skills? Probably not.

This of course is my opinion, but if I had to choose between a future life of only fiction reading or a future life of only nonfiction reading, I would choose nonfiction. I think nonfiction is a better learning tool and a greater benefit to my life than fiction, because through nonfiction, I can learn facts that I can't learn through fiction. It's actually difficult and confusing sometimes to decipher truth from fiction.
He falls into a number of fundamental paradoxes in his reasoning.

He asserts that profit is evil, which is essentially saying that time spent procuring resources is not a cost that can be recuperated through monetary compensation. He almost even comes out and says time isn't a cost when he says he'd think it evil to sell something he found while dumpster diving, "how can you sell something you get for free?". He didn't get it for free, he got it through the time effort of dumpster diving, a recurring cost that has a random (though apparently positive) payoff. Yet his entire motivation for "dropping out" is to use his time as he sees fit, because it is the most precious thing to him.

He asserts that trade requires someone to be "the sucker", yet he justifies his couch surfing by offering his friends services instead of money. Trade fundamentally requires that both parties agree that the trade action is advantageous to both of them; total value increases for both parties, separately and combined.

He is absolutely engaged in a purely capitalistic system of free trade, completely unfettered by the dead-weight loss of tax systems, and does nothing but deride the one economic system that dragged the human race out of abject poverty.
Wow.

This is one of the best startup ideas I've seen all year.

You guys are going to rock!

The market is even bigger than you think. I hate to be morbid, but imagine: grandpa gets sick with cancer and has one year to live. Quickly he spends a couple hundred bucks and leaves all the grandkids with special stories they can cherish the rest of their lives.

I think there is real generational network potential here as well, what with families spread out all over the place.

Now whatever you do, don't screw it up!
As for my "idea" of allow a 0 on a 5 point system; it makes it a 6 point system while retaining a 5 point UI that everyone is accustom to. What is wrong with that?

Nothing is wrong with it necessarily --- it's all a matter of implementation and audience. I think the first thing you are going to run into is a need to visually differentiate a non-vote from a zero. I'm also not sure what problem it's trying to solve.

What I would find more useful (from a 'build a better recommendations engine' perspective) is a 5+: a short list of favorites that can stand in for someone's favorites. Personally, I'd also like a better way to better differentiate the gradations between standard, good, and great. Whether I hate something or 'hate-hate' it isn't going to make much of a difference. Do you think your audience is going to be persuaded to reduce their average rating by a point, or are you still going to find the oft-quoted 4.3 average? I'm doubtful, but this doesn't make it a a bad idea to try.

As to the downvote, I stand by it. My goal is to rearrange the page so that the comments that are most useful to me are at the top. If others find your comment useful, they will see the injustice and bring it back up to the top.

As to the need for 'strong backing', I think we just have different worldviews. With due respect to my friends who are psychology professors, "a [nameless] psychology professor told me" is barely a step up from "I'm not a doctor but I play one on TV". We obviously respect different authorities in our lives.
Good article. I have one note -- if you are using a 64 bit version and like to watch flash videos (i.e., youtube, hulu, etc.) do not turn up any desktop effects or visual effects. There is a bug that prevents you from pressing any buttons on flash videos if you have desktop effects on. It works fine with desktop effects off.
Winner named in lunar lander X Prize contest
I'd be curious to know how selectiveness changes over the next few years when you subtract out seats taken by foreign students. China in particular exports a rapidly increasing number of students, many of whom will go to US schools.
Warren Buffett also invests in mispriced derivatives.

You should take some time to read the following:

http://www.berkshirehathaway.com/news/may0208.pdf

Also, note that during the 2008 AGM Warren Buffett remarked that a small canadian insurance company had profited from credit default swaps, and mentioned that they aren't all that bad.

He was referring to Fairfax Financial, a company I myself invested in over 2 years ago with the intention of hedging against sub-prime:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fairfax_Financial#Subprime_mort...

Fairfax was likely the ONLY insurance company to protect its shareholders from the financial crisis and profited immensely. They were able to use the CDS investments to profit and then sold and reinvested in equities.

Next time try arguing with better facts than an arbitrary quote.
A language has to be designed around optional line terminators -- you just can't take a language like JavaScript or C and remove the semicolons, they convey meaning to the program. Something like Scala doesn't have the ambiguity that a C or JavaScript program has without line terminators.

So semicolon insertion is just a hack that happens before parsing. It's not that the semicolons are optional, they aren't, but it puts them in automatically according to a set of rules. Unfortunately that means you can't just put a return on a line by itself -- a semicolon will always be inserted.
Quick note: The "publish" method on slide 29 won't work as expected. You need to pass in the current_user object.
Let's not heap on the praise too quickly for Zynga. Let's wait till we see some actual change first.