skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I'm not too sympathetic, on account of the following:

- Her figure of $24K is per book, and then she says (paraphrased) "well, if I were to write one book like this a year." Most authors producing mass-market paperbacks write somewhat more than one per year. The author in question appears to write several per year (looking at the Amazon listings) which probably gross a fairly similar amount. So, what's the meaning of this "if I were to write one" business?

- She expects to see the rest of her advance and some non-negligible amount of money coming in in the future from royalties and other rights, so it's not really fair to say that her "income" from this book is $25,000. As a professional author, she would be earning that $25,000 this year and also earning money from prior sales this year, and then she would be earning more from this book later.

- Finally, here's the Amazon synopsis:

Immortal Darkyn Lord Valentin Jaus and landscape artist Liling Harper are two lost souls. Brought together by fate, bound together by passion, Valentin and Liling find solace in each other's arms. But the ties that bind them are deeper—and more dangerous—than either of them can possibly imagine...

No offense to struggling vampire romance novel writers, but why is it important that people are able to earn a great living writing books like this? I don't think it's a big loss to society if people aren't getting rich at this particular trade. When authors who are really advancing the art can't make a good living, then let me know.*

* No, this isn't totally subjective. People will be reading Pynchon 30 years from now, but they won't be reading Lynn Viehl.
Thanks for the tip. We hadn't actually heard of Flippa. We looked at Sedo, but it focuses on selling domain names. Looks like Flippa sells the platform/business too.
Don't forget that Java already has anonymous classes, which can be used to mimic closures.

I taught my advanced compilers class how to compile Scheme directly to Java by using them to implement lambda:

http://matt.might.net/articles/compiling-to-java/

In fact, as the link above points out, anonymous classes are flexible enough to express the Y combinator, allowing "recursion-less recursion" in Java.
There are tons of other phones that can record a conversation, so I don't understand what's the relevance of the iPhone in the HN title.
Marketing Idea - Make checks "Viral": Add "Deposit this check into a new account at X bank and receive an additional $100".

Just fwiw, this is a good example of how far behind US banks are. Until I moved to the US, I had barely used a check in the past 5 years. Now not only do I have to use them for a bunch of stuff (e.g. paying rent), I even have to pay for the checks themselves!

Banking 2.0 in the US should be less about adding features, and more about fixing all the blatantly broken stuff and dragging the whole system into the modern age, imho.
Zynga's FarmVille, too big for Facebook, launches FarmVille.com
Not so for me.

Also, exercise doesn't seem to improve my ability to focus, though I've not tried controlling for other things (sleep, stimulants, etc.). Could be my focus would be worse were I not exercising regularly.
You should put in on ebay. Starting bid $0.99 with no reserve.
Tesla Motors: an America's Hottest Brands Case Study
Lower your bad code footprint by purchasing Bad Code Offsets
If there is a single best way to build a bridge, then why do we have so many different types of bridges being built?

There are many different good ways to build bridges, with trade-offs between them, and knowing about them lets engineers to pick the best way to build a particular bridge.
Good book on this: The Halo Effect

http://www.the-halo-effect.com/
Netflix and a Living Wage
I believe I mentioned denial. Take a look at that video of angry muslims, by the way :)

I wonder if this will get me banned. I'm not trying to get banned, but it might happen. It'll be interesting to find out.
I so enjoy the subtleties of xkcd...
Sure, but the privacy policy is already broken at that point. The data is already in the hands of a third party, the one that bought the assets.

Bankruptcy is weird that way, stuff that normally would not be transferable can suddenly end up in the weirdest places.

Foreign companies could buy up the assets, and not be bound.
The thrilling follow-up, in which the true author of the algorithm is revealed:

http://beyond3d.com/content/articles/15
Some books for November
Or even self publish it.
In my mind, the issue is more to do with other people getting rich off the back of this authors work while the author gets hardly any thing.

So the question is not the value of the book to society, but the percentage of the value the author should get versus everyone else in the stack.
Very helpful, sir! Care to expand on that a bit? For example, why, and where you think we might focus our efforts, etc.
40% off Pragmatic Programmers books and screencasts.
Don't publish your startup if you got in, because it is a useful news event to announce the funding.
> For example, a car might be stopped for some minor
> infraction - a broken taillight perhaps - but if the
> officer sees (say) drugs in the back seat, they can change
> their priorities. Evidence in plain view is the general scope.

And that's why drug dealers should never drive hatchbacks!
I would agree with you, but have personally found it unexpectedly difficult to get people to understand the difference between "negative" rights and "positive" rights. Maybe those words have too many other connotations?
Interviews are this upcoming weekend, November 20-22 -- i.e. The Future.

Either that or we just completely blew our interview by not showing up.
PyPy vs Unladen Swallow vs CPython:  benchmarks
Still, $5M to local charities is all for the good, right? Is your argument that they're too stingy or that trying to buy goodwill by making donations is wrong?
does anyone know how these discounts affect author royalties? Do they get 40% less and do they have any say regarding their books going on sale?
Looks like you got your wish...

http://www.theiphoneblog.com/2009/11/16/apple-static-analysi...
My bank does this for free, and I can also withdraw the money from any of their ATMs as cash instantly if I want.
Meditation Gear
"No offense to struggling vampire romance novel writers, but why is it important that people are able to earn a great living writing books like this?"

I think the point was how difficult it is to make a living writing. Period. This is a book that debuted on the New York Times best seller list and it provided its author a moderate income of well under $100,000. According to the NY Times, there are over 10,000 works of fiction published by major presses every year, a lot of them astonishingly well written and crafted. A lot of authors take well over a year to write a work of fiction. If a best seller writing for a well established series can barely rake in that amount of money, imagine how little the people who are producing original work are making.

http://www.nytimes.com/2004/07/18/books/the-last-word-how-ma... (sorry the link is old, I couldn't find more recent numbers)
In the UK 3* already have a dedicated Skype-over-Wifi handset, I believe it wasn't terribly successful.

*3 is the name of a mobile telco in the UK.
But isn't that partly because Spew is written in the first person, unlike Anathem? Spew slightly predates The Diamond Age, and the style of TDA is closer to Anathem.
Interesting idea. I'm using Firefox 3.5.5 and the dinosaur images are positioned over the FAQ and Contact Us buttons, so that only the bottom half of them are clickable. They can still be totally seen, but the transparent part of the images are stopping the hover and click events.
Except for MobileMail, MobileSafari, SpringBoard, locationd, mdnsresponderd, pasteboardd, mediaserverd, launchd, configd, fairplayd, dataaccessd, accessoryd, BTServer, CoreTelephony, apsd and MobilePhone
The Datacenter as a Computer, an in-depth discussion of Google's architecture
"Microsoft was not immediately available for comment on the NSA's participation in Windows 7's development." - This totally sounds like someone sent an email, waited 5 minutes, and then posted this article.
The fact that private APIs can crash the device, access private data or cause issues with the network means Apple hasn't done their job in securing the OS. If OS X allowed processes in unprivileged user accounts access to hardware or other users' files, that would be considered a massive security hole
Sounds commonsensical since my mom always said things like "you're depressed because you're just sitting there, go outside more!" And she was usually right. But..I know a bunch of busy workaholics who are pretty depressed, if you go by alcoholism and self-hatred. And when you say "the right amount and type of sensory stimulation at the right time" it sounds like you're just saying "the cure for depression is to find something to do that'll cure your depression," unless you've got a sharper idea of what you mean.
"Mr. Bierfeldt, it turns out, was carrying the money because he was returning home from a regional conference of Campaign for Liberty, a group that supports Ron Paul, the former presidential candidate. "

It totally makes sense to me that it was a Ron Paul evangelist who made this bruhaha. I have known a few in my life and this seems like something I could see most of them doing.

Way to stand up for yourself!
Wow, the 'current support' matrix is filling out very nicely.
I think he's speaking of y-axis' scale. Using such a large scale and including older versions of IE makes IE 9 look downright fast.

If you plotted just the rightmost cluster (IE 9, FF 3.6, WebKit nightly) on its own graph with a scale that went from 0 to, say, 1500 instead of 16000, it would be very clear that IE 9 is still slow compared to it's peers -- nearly 3x slower than WebKit as noted by the earlier comment.

It's quite an improvement, but here's hoping they keep optimizing.
"Bootstrap" by Kenneth L. Hess and "The Knack" by Norm Brodsky and Bo Burlingham.
Some current fake meat has a notable Yuck Factor. :)
I like your theory. However, an alternative hypothesis within your framework could be that depression is a disorder where internal thoughts are overrepresented rather than external sensory experiences underrepresented. It seems like this could also result in the same coping behaviors eg cutting.

I wonder if a way to test these hypotheses would be to consider situations involving the expectation of a sensory experience and look for a mismatch between that and the actual sensation. You could do this with the rubber hand illusion or immersion in a virtual reality environment. A depressed person would putatively have an abnormal congruence between the magnitude of their internally generated brain states and external sensation.
NSA has been contributing to Linux development for longer: http://www.nsa.gov/research/selinux/
I would add "Influence" by Cialdini under this category .
NYC Boxee Meetup: Unveiling the Beta
Ah yes, sorry I forgot about that.

Good luck!
Well, I agree with that, and I don't doubt that fiction which I would probably say is "better" or more worthwhile might well tend to sell even less.

I think the author is being a bit alarmist about her personal situation. I and other people in many fields do high-quality work for under $100,000 a year, too. But if, as she author suggests, the publishers are making a relative killing on these same books, I'd consider that unfortunate in general. (Although I wouldn't consider it surprising, since most creative industries seem to end up with the same balance of power between distributors and producers.)

Perhaps the Kindle and self-publishing will see it fixed someday.
A recent Ask HN seemed to reveal there are a lot of people here with bipolar disorder (or bipolar tendencies, at least). For those of you who are bipolar, have you found exercise to be a cure-all or to work in combo with lithium/medication, or...? Basically looking for anecdotal advice here. (FWIW, I have bipolar II.)

This article just reminded me I wanted to raise the question here, but I don't think it warrants its own post.
What technology is it based on?
Star Goes Rogue in Untimely Collision
It had delegates initially, tho.
Give people interest on their savings.
I've had the same problem with disk I/O bound apps in the cloud. Having said that, the cloud is a great way to launch a site/startup then move off if it actually works out.
How to run Windows 7 under Mac OS X 10.6 for free
Just say "hitler" already so we can know the conversation is over and prune this ridiculous tangent of a thread from the top of the page...
No content, just

> Caliber uses cookies to improve performance by remembering that you are logged in when you go from page to page [...] you must accept the Caliber cookie to use the system

If this is typical of the authors' technical prowess, I think I'll pass.
I have a severe case of ADD, which directly impacts my programming. I was diagnosed in college and realized I've been living with it since I was around 12. I don't take Ritalin or Aderol, though my psychiatrist strongly pushed me to do so.

To deal I take Ginko Biloba. About 400-500miligrams/day. It take about 2 weeks to start impacting you and works amazingly. I don't feel like I'm drugged up all day, as opposed to when I tried other drugs to control my ADD. I suggest it to anyone who wants to take a natural approach to dealing with their memory problems. I have absolutely no side-effects from it(though some are possible).

For those people who think ADD is "just a catch-all term for people at the lower end of the spectrum of focusing", you need to take yourself down a notch and realize that ADD is a real memory problem that people like me have to struggle with every day. Please stop taking the term ADD for granted.
I had some friends that started dating from hotornot.com and the interesting thing I think is that it is more like a game or a place to amuse yourself for a few minutes than a dating site. So I think that's an interesting principle, wrap up a dating site in a game format.
Why is top color not effective across all of HN?
Yesterday I finally decided to use the top color feature, but now I find myself wondering why it doesn't work on the reply and submit pages.

Is this an oversight or is it intentional?
He was asked about macros at some recent RubyConf (maybe the one in Charlotte). He said (as I recall) that he was against having macros in Ruby because it would allow for too much variance in program syntax.

Seemed an odd argument from someone who defends other "dangerous" language features (e.g open classes) by simply saying that Ruby is a sharp knife and you just need to be careful with your tools.
Unfortunately this is neither of those. This is just another ridiculous example of Government being Government.

People should recognize that one of the costs of living in the country is a lesser infrastructure.
ActiveX support and other backwards compatibility with 5/10 year old Intranet systems people have bought.
Well, if Outlook uses the Word rendering engine, then at least it's somewhat decent, looking at some HTML formatted emails that fill my inbox.
i like the idea of meeting people and having a good time geeking out over technical things. i like the idea of sharing news and experiences with the latest technology. i like the idea of having a support group to brainstorm and problem solve with.

leave the coding for the occasional hack session and you have awesome!!!!!!!!

let me know when it's up and running....or maybe i should just start a meetup.com.... yeah??
1000000! took me about an hour to calculate on a supercomputer in 1988. It's roughly 5 million decimal digits.
Here's the pdf: http://www.morganclaypool.com/doi/pdf/10.2200/S00193ED1V01Y2...

(via @spolsky)

EDIT: removed cookieset :-)
I am not sure how this is true. Look at past serial writers and they all seem to be making a better living then $25,000 a year. Stephen King, John Grisham, Dean Koontz, Harry Potter lady, they all have done very well for themselves.

Even making only $25000 on one book a year, if you have written 5-10 books the past 5 to 10 years, you have to be making money off those books as well... Especially if her advance is $50,000 a book!

I have to agree that I have no real sympathy for this.
You've got it backwards: it is the decompression that is predictable; compressors are free to transform the input in any way such that a compliant decompressor will extract the original file.

The gzip format documentation is available here btw: http://www.gzip.org/zlib/rfc-gzip.html
Marc Benioff's Keynote at Dreamforce 2009
The publisher makes more profit than the author, but they also take more risk. The author is guaranteed $50,000, while the publisher could (theoretically) lose $50,000 plus the cost of printing and distributing if the book doesn't sell well.
Thanks.

Yeah, I heard the UK was an awesome place to live. And personally, I am a firm believer in bootstrapping startups, so venture capital isn't the first thing on my mind. It's good to know that London is not far behind. And good luck with your startup!
I wonder how much money Seth makes on creating simple lenses like this with Amazon referral links. I bet it's a decent amount.

Some interesting books on there nonetheless.
Ozzie: IE will be the "best browser for Windows without compromise"
"an alternative hypothesis within your framework could be that depression is a disorder where internal thoughts are overrepresented rather than external sensory experiences underrepresented."

I think both are happening. Basically internal thought processes increase to an unhealthy degree as a way of compensating for the decrease in sensory perception, which is the same thing as happens in a sensory deprivation tank.

I think the initial cause of the depression can be either not enough sensory stimulation or too much thinking, as happens when there is a traumatic or very stressful event. If the latter is the root cause then you may need CBT or meditation or something like that. But in both cases using my sensory jumpstart method would work to fix a bout of depression, although it will keep recurring until you change your lifestyle (sensory as root cause case) or come to terms with whatever is stressing you, or at least learn to avoid the negative thought triggers.
My mistake. The authors are Luiz André Barroso [1] and Urs Hölzle [2] from Google Research. The host of this paper has nothing to do with them. Just remove cookieSet=1 from the end of the URL (if an admin could remove it from the story, would be appreciated).

1. http://research.google.com/pubs/LuizBarroso.html

2. http://research.google.com/pubs/author79.html
Python + web.py, and PostgreSQL for the database.
Is that true in the sense that it makes you feel bad, or true in the sense that you think a smart publisher could make more money with lower rates? If you're right about how much it costs to profitably distribute a book, you could potentially dominate the publishing industry.
The Venture Capital Financing Stages
Yeah, your link won't work either. These guys have a weird linking system - you need to visit the URL http://www.morganclaypool.com/doi/pdf/10.2200/S00193ED1V01Y2...

Which sets a cookie and redirects you to the one you can't share.
Salmon: A realtime commenting protocol
Good URL: http://blog.finiteimprobability.com/2009/11/17/a-compiler-fo...
We're talking about security vulnerabilities introduced by third-party apps, so your list isn't relevant. An approved third-party iPhone app cannot include a daemon, therefore it's less likely that a bug in said app would allow worms to get into the phone.
I've been kind of obsessed with WIPP for years. Even if you don't buy the reasoning, it's just... I used to work on science in this area: colleagues were working on Synroc, and I was working on theoretical techniques which you could apply to predicting how well it'd work. So it was on my mind anyway. But there's so much in the WIPP report, the richness and depth of it, that who cares if it actually happens? Seriously, the report's worth your time anyway.

I really couldn't get away from this. I used to do a lot of music. Here's a track I made in '05/'06 off my record: (http://www.hiddenmusic.co.uk/releases/symbolic/, free download);

http://www.last.fm/music/Covert/_/A+Place+of+Honour

Like I said; obsessed...
Checkout the other links on the site. . .an interesting read if you wanna kill time. . .idk if i agree with all of it. . . but its always nice to hear someone's point of view on a subject. . .
Heh, maybe I'm neurotic, but I actually hate it when they do that. I'd much rather they tell me something like "We can probably get you a car in about ten minutes, and we'll call to confirm or update that in two," if it were more reliable.
Clean coal is still pretty dirty.
I assume your being snarky. To be a bit more serious though, China has a large ebook publishing economy. An author in China would be thrilled to make $25k off a book. Royalty payment in China are horribly low and accounting of books sold or read is highly "inaccurate".
It doesn't take less of my time, because I can do other things while I wait for the confirmation. In fact, inducing me to sit and stare at a fake progress bar probably takes more of my time. And in any case, it saves me having to repeat my order to someone who doesn't speak great English, etc.
I'm not sure that the average traveler/voter can judge what is good security. What seems plain to me is that there is no totally safe place on this planet and that the better alternative to hoping that TSA has caught the bad guys, is to allow everyone the inalienable right to defend themselves. Could there be a downside to this? Yes, but at least they would be responsible for their own defense and would not have been disarmed by their own government.
You don't need to be root to rm -rf ~/
Why the hell would you do that? I mean you could also write a script to post the errors to your printer, but there's no reason to do such a thing.
Makes sense, and I agree that there are utilitarian benefits (e.g. firemen), but it's a pretty shallow life. Maybe it's because I define myself more by my thoughts and values than my actions, but I can't imagine questioning my identity because I got laid off.
Your bank lets you send payments via SMS? What's your bank? Mine doesn't do that, I'd be interested in switching.
The solution to this problem is to mail your content back to yourself. Customs can search your "papers", but they can't search encrypted packets.
He was going to Google Search to see if anyone else had the problem, but he swore to never use Google again.

Oh, the ... irony?
PyBrain 0.3 released - Python library for machine learning
My hypothesis is that exercise-as-such helps with mood disorders, exercise outdoors (to regulate circadian rhythms) helps more, and exercise with someone else (to have pleasant social interaction and a reality check on one's thinking during conversation) helps still more. I wouldn't recommend NOT taking standard medications--I've seen a lot of people get a lot of help from lithium, but lithium leads to weight gain for many people, so then the exercise becomes all the more necessary.
Everyone else on this page is posting interesting observations on Microsoft, development, and the web. It makes me angry that you've come into my little garden of contemplation and started yelling about irrelevant subjects.