skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Yea, verily. A quick google turns up:

Mexico City is sinking due to aquifer depletion:
http://www.bnamericas.com/news/waterandwaste/Official:_Metro...

Shanghai is sinking due to aquifer depletion:
http://www.bnamericas.com/news/waterandwaste/Official:_Metro...

Iran is sinking:
http://news.nationalgeographic.com/news/2008/09/080922-iran-...

Gee, I was just looking for references to Los Angeles and the American Midwest sinking due to aquifer depletion. And, finally, here is one that mentions the Ogallala Aquifer of the American Midwest: http://academic.evergreen.edu/g/grossmaz/WORMKA/
Misspelling that word so badly does. I'm sorry. Eigenvalues are very fundamental to the types of math social scientists have to do. They are a core concept of linear algebra, which itself is all over modern statistics.

Imagine if you get a book about geometry, and the author spells pi as "pie." What would you think of his competency?

Confusing 'pi' with a homophone can only come from an incredibly superficial and lore-based understanding of the mathematics. Even if he offered an explanation was not technically wrong, it wouldn't do much to dissolve the suspicion that his understanding is based on lore. Most likely, he heard someone superficially explain "pie," recorded it or wrote it down in his notes, and then just used that explanation in his book.

Actually our "pie" author would be in a better place than Gladwell, because he could blame it on a spell checker. But it's not possible for bad copy-editing to turn 'eigenvalue' into "Igon Value."
twitter is only valuable to established celebrities and well known brands who have already built a strong brand presence through the traditional mediums.

For other people, the masses don't care.
My AP Computer Science course is more like teaching people how to program in Java. They taught us the specifics like interface class, abstract class, ArrayList class, and the like. Then they make us do toy programs that teaches these concept. I practically roll my eyes at the "Student class, Person class, etc" assignment.

It was as if they don't have enough for all that they need to teach in Java programming and decided to push it over to computer science.

I thought I was going to be writing algorithms, learning data structure, how to optimize it, etc. I was wrong. It was nothing more than gorified java programming class, at least this semester.

Plus the teacher doesn't seem to be interested in her students' private projects and what we really think of her class.

It was only a class of 8 students. As a result there's only 8 people who take computer science AP class in the entire school. Java programmming class have a lot of students but few students made it to computer science.

There's little incentives in providing a compelling computer science education in high school.
unless you work in an anonymous, transactional industry, which startups aren't.

I've found through both first- and (close) second-hand experience that this generalization doesn't hold.

The OP's poing about assessing openness and honesty of the management is well taken.
One nice thing about a game of Settlers is that even if you get locked out early, you'll only be losing for 45 minutes at most. The game is downright quick to play. Around here we go from opening the box to packing it up in about 30 minutes usually.
I like #1 as well. But the hard part about that is the uncertainty.

Am I a visionary or just delirious? :)
Five competitive differentiators for cloud services
I was tempted to stop reading after the WebTV example, and did actually stop reading after the "slicker, simpler interfaces" example.

A couple of points: first, none of these ideas or vaporware products are doing anything to prevent anyone from using the web the way they want to. You can still buy a new computer, install Firefox, and type in a URL. I would be somewhat more worried if, for example, Microsoft made it impossible to type URLs into Internet Explorer, but that's not the case. (And even then, as long as other browsers exist, it's not that big of a deal.)

Secondly, I doubt the author has worked with the "average" computer user all that much. I do, every day, as an IT consultant -- whether with individuals or employees of large or small companies. The great majority of them don't know what the "address bar" is; if I ask them to go to "www.google.com", they click on their homepage -- whether it's yahoo or iGoogle or what-have-you -- and type "www.google.com" into the search box.

These companies are trying to serve a market, and it's a very real -- and very large -- market of users that don't know an IP from a URL, and they definitely are confused by this stuff.

Hell, one of my clients was furious with me because every time she clicked on her email address on the new website, it opened up Outlook Express on her computer, and dammit, she uses Gmail...
I agree he's full of shit, but to be fair, that was one of Pinker's relatively few factual examples. I think it was good form on Gladwell's part to address only facts and not Pinker's thesis.
I also like the 2 player game. And it is somehow aesthetically pleasing to the brain when the complex shapes snap together :-)

My mistake was to play online a lot, so I can't play with my friends anymore because I have too much practice.
Bill Gates on Google - Worst Predictions
The Dark Side of Incentives
Startup and sell before next recession cycle
If you let them, big companies make you small
He admits as much: "I give credit to the book Brave New World by Aldous Huxley for many of these ideas."

He basically presents Huxley's world exactly. His real contribution seems to be the analysis at the end. Specifically, the notion that individuality must be retained, as it is an "asset of society."
Same book for $30 less brand new at Amazon - http://www.amazon.com/Introduction-Algorithms-Third-Thomas-C...
“That’s the government’s job, to maintain a nice, clean Internet.”
BioLib - Taxonomic tree of plants and animals with photos
No, it is even simpler than that. Regular expressions are for matching patterns, not parsing. They don't parse HTML. They don't parse text blobs. They don't parse anything. They just match.
The author probably gets affiliate kickbacks as well. On the other hand though, what else is he going to blog about?

What baffles me however is how there is supposedly so much money in blogging about making money through blogging. During the summer I attempted to blog some more, and put in a bunch of content that resulted in large traffic spikes of 20-30k visitors for a couple days.

Amazingly, I received something on the order of 50 cents which seems like a complete opposite of people claiming to make a few dollars on a random blog with 100 visitors a day.

So now I've decided that everyone is either grossly exaggerating or I am a complete failure at monetizing.
In real life, virtually no one uses true ad hominem. No on says, "he is a jerk, therefore he's wrong." In my book, using insults and connotative (negative) language rather than strictly denotative is on the ad hominem scale. It is absolutely designed to undermine the credibility of the person you're debating while not engaging the argument at all.

This new meme that started on reddit claiming ad hominem isn't ad hominem is weird. We shouldn't defend argument techniques that make truth-seeking harder. There's a time and a place for ad hominem and that time and place is entertainment writing.
To be fair to the ancients, floods were as common an occurrence as they are today. Every living person would have probably experienced at least one.

There exists however, a story about a particularity bad flood in many cultures.

Instead of assuming that the ancients were stupid and thought of every flood as "teh worst evar!!!", it's far more likely that there was in fact an instance of a flood that stood out from the rest enough to write down.
> Of course, nowadays I can find this kind of information on the Internet in no time. But, as I said, you never know with the Internet.

As much as i respect Umberto Eco, i have to say this is a very common mistake amongst people not acquainted with internet. Truth is, you never knew BEFORE the internet. What we account as the truth in books is based around the idea of truthfulness of a particular author. But in reality, and for big period of times in history, lies have been spread by books wich were thought as very respected. And as the 20th century showed us, the best way to prevent lies from spreading, is the free circulation of information.

Any clever kid on the street has the capacity to filter the information coming from the internet in a very efficient way. And when you know how to filter, interpret and analyze, i'll go as far as saying, internet is the best source for truth we ever had. Just pray for it to last ..
Number of people. Specifically, Dunbar's Number, which is only theoretical but is generally accepted to be around 150 (presumably +/- 149).
Cool, I'll try to make it.

Also – there's an Open House at Cowork Central this Wednesday, so feel free to join us: http://eventioz.com/events/open-house-jelly
gary vaynerchuck's video blogs only get 70 viewers at most now.
Hey biz2hack, I'm not seeing your email in your profile. I'm in for joining you guys. I last programmed about 4 years ago, and 4 weeks ago I picked it up again. My email is in my profile, and please keep me in the loop.
I was left feeling completely dissatisfied with this response. It came across as childish.
hmmm... thats a good idea. If you're running a profitable business that just wants a little money to grow, and you know you'll be able to pay that back, then debt might just be the better (and lower risk) way to go.

But obviously, lower risk means lower returns. Why else do VCs ask that you have more "traction"? They want lower risk for themselves, yet being able to insure that they'll maximize their returns.

Pretty good deal for the investors, if you ask me.
Although how to handle mailto: links is a browser setting, of course, you could have detected her IP and redirected her to GMail. That's probably why she was furious with you.
There are two problems with the app store, but they are usually not recognized as separate problems:

- Apple unreasonably rejects applications.

- It takes 2 to 3 weeks to be told you've been rejected, and even then you only are given one reason even if there are several problems that need to be addressed.

My overall impression is that most of the complaints about the first point are simply due to the frustration borne of the second. It's not the rejection over the stupidest things that stings, it's the fact that you had to wait forever to be told "you need to change your icon." Then, after your five minute fix, it's back in the hopper for another three weeks. All the while competitors appear in the App Store, clients get pissed, and cash burns.

It's incredible to me that the embarassingly parallel problem of app approval wait time has not only been left unsolved, but has apparently gotten worse.

Imagine if the turnaround time on these things dropped from 3 weeks to a few hours. Being rejected would turn from a devestating event to a minor inconvenience, and I'd imagine that all this bad press would evaporate. Sure, you'd have some developers complain that their apps would never be approved due to impasses between them and Apple in terms of service violations, but I think these folks would be in the minority since most violations can be fixed once you're made aware of them.
As a libertarian I'm inclined to believe that the whole idea of IP is just a farce made up by corporate interests. Maybe it wasn't like that in the beginning, but no doubt that's what it is today.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Copyright_Term_Extension_Act
The full-length article on one link:

http://www.wired.com/magazine/2009/10/mf_minerva/all/1
In addition to the points below about Hadoop's implementation of MapReduce, Hadoop consists of many subprojects which perform complex tasks: HDFS, a reliable, petabyte-scale distributed file system; HBase, a clone of Google's BigTable; Pig and Hive, which provide higher-level syntax, columnar storage in HDFS, and a persistent metadata repository; and Zookeeper, a coordination service for distributed systems.

I'm not impressed by how REvolution's new management is approaching marketing.
Best Keyboard for fast, effortless touch?
Shouldn't coding/typing be like driving a car? The physical job should be fun. It is not! What happened to the old selectrics? I want one hooked up to my computer. Failing that, what is your favorite keyboard for a light touch? The lighter the better for speed: 2.5oz is typical and 1.0oz is sort of ok...
That would seem to be a fairly deep architectural flaw. Namely, that (roughly speaking) all users of the basecamp server experience performance and reliability roughly equal to that of those users experiencing the worst performance and reliability at any given moment. The guys who depend on the service for $2^N value per day are in the same boat as those who depend on it as those who depend on it for $2^(N-K) value. Each group that depends on it for $2^N value CAN NOT differentiate themselves, reliability, from their competitors who also rely on it for $2^N value.

That's old news, really. It's well known that that's a problem with SaS, centralization, and applications without competition. It's well known that it would be fixed by letting basecamp users install and run the system on servers under their own control with full software freedom over the thing (trading, probably, a little bit less reliability for each customer against faster recoveries for most and no "global outages" and the ability to invest in hardening the infrastructure for a competitive advantage).... it's just interesting to see those theoretical defects confirmed in practice.
So two soft scientists are fighting? Who cares?
Pirates that prints books must "produces" it via their printing press. It depends on the context.
amen, the MapReduce paper is all about the distributed system they built around the core algorithm.

this article would be akin to somebody 5 years ago saying "hey guys, it's easy to implement Google's search engine in 5 lines of R ... here's the calculation for PageRank, the rest is just detailz!"
Pinker is not a soft scientist.
These two are both good intros to Ruby:
http://pine.fm/LearnToProgram/
http://mislav.uniqpath.com/poignant-guide/
sorry to sound trollish, but the sad part is that this sort of marketing-speak masquerading as technical blogging might actually be able to earn companies 'streed cred' with customers. their potential clients might be like "oh wow you guys really CAN implement Google's famous MapReduce or Yahoo's Hadoop in a few lines of R, and you even wrote about it on a techie blog, we'll buy it!"
Pranav Mistry - MIT Media LAB - Sixth Sense and beyond
Mmm, a debate about debates. How meta.

I have a couple of problems with this. First, by broadly sweeping "everything I don't like about arguments" under the label "ad hominem", you're powerfully eroding the usefulness of the term. It has a specific use and purpose, and it's useful to understand the various fallacies in debate (http://www.nizkor.org/features/fallacies/).

Also, you admit that this style of debate has a place in entertainment writing -- in a thread about his letter to the editor. This was not a formal debate, nor was it the appropriate forum for such; he was writing a response that would reach a large number of readers, and they were his audience.

Besides, aren't you committing the selfsame fallacy that you're accusing him of, according to your own rules? i.e., "Gladwell used methods I don't like, so he's wrong."

I wasn't aware that this was a Reddit meme. I stopped visiting Reddit some months ago, and my usage fell off even before then. I'm glad it is, though. If someone's going to try and bolster their criticism of someone else by using fancy Latin phrases, they really ought to get called out on it by someone that knows better.
Ricuarte, sorry about that. We're also going to start an IRC Channel where we can all get together and ask each other questions. My e-mail should be in my profile now.
I'm down for this. Email in profile.
What better language for someone like you than my language of choice, Ruby.

Get started here: http://tryruby.sophrinix.com/. Now.
When you get that done, if you want more goodies, email me (email in my profile) or reply, I'll be glad to help.

Also check out http://www.htdp.org
In real life, virtually no one uses true ad hominem. No on says, "he is a jerk, therefore he's wrong." In my book, using insults and connotative (negative) language rather than strictly denotative is on the ad hominem scale. It is absolutely designed to undermine the credibility of the person you're debating while not engaging the argument at all.

If something is "a lot like ad hominem, but not ad hominem", then referring to it as "ad hominem" is deliberately distorting the truth.

We shouldn't defend argument techniques that make truth-seeking harder.

I don't see anyone claiming we should. What is being claimed is that this isn't ad hominem, which is a point you've all but conceded in your opening two sentences.

If you are going to request that people debate "properly", it would be rather nice if you didn't reserve a special place for yourself and your favourite misinterpretations.
Exactly. The smaller quotas actually encourage users to push more email into PST files. I believe the record at our work is 20 PST files for one user.
There are two things to consider: First, you need to make sure that your filename is a long, unique, hard-to-guess string, that is easy to generate. This rules out all 5 UUID specifications:

Version 1: MAC + timestamp => easy to predict

Version 2: MAC + some other static data + partial timestamp: => Also easy to predict

Version 3: MD5 of some file or random string => If an attacker has a file, he can generate the MD5 hash himself and see if you also have this file.

Version 4: Random data => slow

Version 5: Same as version 3, but with SHA1.

Your best bet IMHO is to use the HMAC of the file. This will defend you against all the flaws that using an unique ID would have.

The second step is to ensure that your secret links don't leak. You can employ robots.txt to disallow robots, use dereferer.org or anonym.to to hide away referers, but you still won't be secure, as someone can still copy and paste the link. If that is ok with you, then you can stop reading now.

You could of course add an EC2 machine between the user and your S3 storage that makes sure each link only works once, but this would be expensive and counter-effective. However, Amazon S3 allows you to create a request that can be made via HTTP GET and that is only valid until a specific time. (See the API documentation, chapter "Authentication and Access Control"). This will allow you to generate a new URL every time you want to serve a file to your client. The URL will only be valid for a specific time period. The downside is, that this again is time-demanding and that all caching on the user side will be useless.

Good luck!
I guess we should find a cheap fab plant and start selling these to hobbyists?
Just this week, I was talking to some well-known venture capitalists about my company, told them about the idea, talked about the market, and one of the first questions they asked was 'do you have a website yet?' Well, not only do we have a website up, but we have a product AND paying customers! And they were stunned because the majority of entrepreneurs who pitch them have nothing to show for but a nice powerpoint presentation.

Very interesting.

Wow. If a .ppt-type of presentation alone is enough to wow the VC people, I'm obviously doing something wrong.

Mah's approach is smart, kinda like mine: don't ask for it unless it's needed; use what you have efficiently.

The multiple-zero VC stuff is too easily manipulated.
2.5yrs later, why isn't the site finished? a list of excuses from a freelancer
Just in case anyone ever wants to be cool like me, I actually sync all my email using Windows Mail (yah, I know, I'm not very cool), which means it shows up in my desktop search as well as in gmail.

Just in general, the backup strategy of storing things in at least two places is the only way to go, and simply knowing in the abstract that I could backup my data if I so chose is meaningless. Make a cron job, sync your home directory, whatever floats your boat, just do it.

(I work at Google, and I am consistently surprised by the amount of effort people put into portability. I think this is important and underappreciated)
That doesn't really fix the issue though... Sure, you won't have "global outages," but I would bet that the overall amount of downtime would be significantly larger when installed on private servers and not centralized and managed by 37signals.

I doubt that recoveries would be faster anyway.
Actually, I really wish Apple would pull their head out on this one; if I'm browsing on a computer that doesn't have iTunes installed, that doesn't mean I don't want to see the information about the app, and it does mean I might interested in buying it later. As it is, it's not uncommon of me to click on a link, expecting to be directed to a page about an app, and being told that I don't have iTunes installed (duh! it's Linux).

I think apple costs app developers sales every time they fail to show people information they asked for and instead give idiot messages about not having the proper software to view a link.

I like the iphone a lot, but keeping me happy with it involves removing some of the obstacles that make it compare poorly with Droid (and hopefully many other phones in the near future). For instance, I would like to run an interpreter on my phone...
There are others, and more information here: http://scienceblogs.com/pontiff/2009/11/igon_value_problems....
Let me try to answer your question in a different way.

There are two things, security and the perception of security. For arguments sake, even if we assume that the method of simply creating UUIDs for file names is secure (which as several people have said is not a valid assumption), I would argue that it does not provide a good enough perception of security.

So, if your users are really concerned about security and afraid that others will look at their files, a simple solution as above would just not cut it. You will have to really convince them that your system is really secure. Now, no matter what you use, UUID, MD5, SHA1/2/256 etc. to them it won't make a difference and that may mean that you will lose users.

Based on that, my suggestion would be to do what you said above, make them all private and use authenticated access control. This will provide security as well as perception of security and get you more satisfied users.
I think it's important to just sit down and have a casual chat - no expectations, no presentations, no real "preparation". Just talk to them as you would to a hot girl on your first date! Too many people rush into trying to impress investors the traditional way, and that never made much sense to me.
Don's going to regret writing this. This post drops a nuclear weapon on any bridge, no matter how fragile, that led from Mountain View back to Redmond.

Edit: removed the last part, it was a bit uncalled for. My bad.
Gladwell is a journalist, not a scientist.
...nothing prevents these apps from being accessible by URLs.

That's true. In fact, they already are:

http://itunes.apple.com/us/app/super-monkey-ball/id281966695...
Let's say he is being honest, and we believe that he really is actually acting on new information. So working for Microsoft completely blind-sided him to how useful Gmail and Google Docs are? He really didn't know about Gmail's spam filtering and conversation threading? You're not going to be a very good advocate if you don't know your competition.
Lee's Random Thoughts on YC Interviews