skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Steve Sailer has a reponse up on his blog:
http://isteve.blogspot.com/2009/11/gladwell-strikes-back.htm...

He has another explanation of his point here:
http://isteve.blogspot.com/2009/11/pinker-v-gladwell-on-nfl-...

Overall, I think Sailer's critique is quite valid: What Berri is doing, in effect, by using his "per-play" measure is comparing quarterbacks taken at the top of the draft (most of whom get a lot of plays in the NFL) to those taken lower in the draft who turned out to be surprisingly better than expected, and thus got a lot of plays. He's essentially leaving out of his analysis all those lower drafted quarterbacks who turned out to be as mediocre as expected and thus didn't get many plays. In other words, his methodology is pre-rigged to produce the conclusion that Malcolm likes.
Hypothesis: The reference to Sailer is mainly a hit, intended to link Pinker and Sailer, and drag Pinker down. Therefore, Sailer's response is largely irrelevant.

(Agreed that Sailer's response is valid. Further support for my hypothesis: Gladwell spends the rest of the article denigrating blogs for their names and associations with Fantasy Football, as opposed to Science.)
I'd describe that as "prominent, effective self-help options", and your implementation is brilliant. Seriously -- if you write that up in a blog post I will cite it for a decade.

I try to strike the balance between "I am always, always happy to talk to my customers" and "There are thousands of you and only one of me so I can't talk to you all every day". Mostly I fix the app and website to answer the common issues without requiring my input and, for the recurrent ones (cough Registration Key management) emphasize that they get their answer a day quicker if they use the lookup form than if they send me an email asking me to, essentially, please use the lookup form for them.

(Apropos of nothing: I would gladly abandon Registration Keys if people actually paid money for software that wasn't access controlled. Happily, the change from downloadable software to a web app has eliminated this issue for about 70% of my customers.)
Bing Captures Almost 10 Percent Search Share In U.S.
Choosing The Best SEO Company
DIA Report: Worldwide Research on Low-Energy Nuclear Reactions Increasing
https://developer.mozilla.org/en/Sharp_variables_in_JavaScri...
I just forward *@mydomain.com to gmail. Having web software you can put up on your personal server is nice, but it poses a whole different set of challenges to just hosting it yourself.

You have to worry about how to manage copyrights, coming up with a distribution that will work on a wide variety of server configurations, and handling upgrades and customer support gets a lot more complicated. One more problem that I've seen with popular open source programs that run on your server, is that hacker's will look for exploits in the source code, and search the web for sites runnning that program, attacking every one. They can keep using these exploits for a long time, because most of the site owners are too lazy to download the latest upgrades as they come out.

Right now, at least on the low-cost end of the scale, it seems to me like open-source software is usually more up to those challenges.

This is the best distribution model I could think of, if you were going to try to sell software like this. You would try to work out something with cpanel or some hosting companies where users could choose a plan, pay for, and install you're software package and have everything managed right from their hosting admin panel.

If you were going to sell software for personal servers rather than host it yourself, then, I think you should do a lot of thinking about you're target market first, because you'll be causing yourself a lot of headaches. I don't think individuals with personal servers are the best target market for this business model right now either.
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Review of the New ClickBank Elite
Ikiwiki seems to target the same nitch as Markdoc. Do you know how they compare?
For some reason. Sounds like it is there because it is really excellent. Congrats.
Hadn't heard this quote before but I do so love it now. I can just see a flow diagram of some complex concept inside a talk bubble next to one person, and a homer-simpson-esque caveman picture in a thought bubble next to the other.
I'm not a Windows 7 user (nor will I ever be - unless my employer makes mass upgrades to it), but I would almost assume that IE8 opens to Bing.

I wonder if over the coming months as XP users migrate to Windows7 if Bing will fill the gap, and users will stop typing Google into their search bar and just use what is given to them (wouldn't be the first time for Windows users).

Well timed, if you ask me. Damn you Microsoft.
Anyone else see "Unknown or expired link." after writing a long comment?
Sometimes when I spend a lot of time writing a comment I click "submit" and it takes me to the "Unknown or expired link error page".

It's a little annoying having to go back, copy my post, go back again to the story, then click "reply" and post the whole comment again.
Making browsers faster: Resource Packages
“The A players go, the B players stay and the C players get asked to leave.”

Sounds fitting for a lot of places. "A players" tend to dislike the slowness of bureaucracies.
Yes, this is a known "feature" of HN.
On a related note, I wonder how difficult it'd be to take the netlists and turn this into something that can be thrown on an FPGA.
That is rather sneaky of them, yes. But given that Firefox and Chrome both open up to Google, MS's going to be hard-pressed to keep it up, even with their OS advantage.

And I wonder how mobile search'll effect the end results...
The fact that we're having this discussion means he probably failed. The evangelist needs to make with the awesome about products without raising suspicion.
Malcolm Gladwell has a rather long history of being corrected by experts. See here: http://www.fastcompany.com/magazine/122/is-the-tipping-point... and here: http://www.dr5.org/judge-posner-on-blink-the-power-of-thinki...

Full disclosure: I am a Gladwell fan, though I recognize that he is more storyteller than scientist.
When I read the quote I wasn't sure which O'Reilly it was referring to.
What kind of sales did you have with your mac app before MacHeist? (If you don't mind me asking)
Copyright are government granted monopolies. That it has resulted in a huge industry that lives out of rent seeking and produces nothing of value is hardly surprising, and as technology threatens their rotten business models expect their grip on government to tighten and to capture the whole legal system.
The point is to get well paid for publishing such blah-blah-blah. And he did.
Is prostitution more enjoyable than programming?
Start a startup while graduating ,possible ?
hello , i am a guy at his 22 , graduating in engineering final year in india, i always wanted to start a startup but the problem here in india is that i cant find seed investment(not great startup culture) , so i decided to come to usa for MS(master of science), now i have following questions :

1) can i start a startup while graduating in usa having a american co founder and joining after an year ?

2) if its possible ,how much difference does reputation of college makes (i do not intend to to take a job) on finding future co founder ?

3) if thats not possible then what are my possible options?

p.s. i asked this before but couldnt get any satisfactory answer.

your advice would be critical in my carrier decision
thanks
Sure, if you're only reading a paragraph or two about a given personality type, it might seem like the words would apply to anyone. In my experience (and most others it seems), if you take the test honestly and actually read several page reports explaining intricate details of the personality type, you would be very suprised how accurate it is. If you're expecting to learn what your favorite ice cream flavor or movie should be, then of course you will end up disappointed about how 'broad' it is and that it didn't describe you in that manner of detail.
Very true.

That said, the typical Windows user that uses IE 'because its already on the machine' doesn't know enough to want to use Firefox or Chrome, and probably wouldn't have downloaded it anyway.

The market share I was pointing out were the ones still using IE6/7 and go to Google but might go to Bing because it looks like a good search engine, and will want the new 'Windows 7 experience.'
I hadn’t seen Ikiwiki before, but initial inspection shows that the setup procedure is tied to the VCS (http://ikiwiki.info/setup/), and the whole thing seems too heavy-duty for my needs.
It's been a really weird year with no real patterns. The best month the business had was May, when it took in about $15K, and the worst month was November when it made only $1K, and up and down randomly between those.

Averaged out, it looks okay, but I've been kind of panicking lately, even though I have a product launch coming up and obviously some exposure lately.

I've been pretty incompetent at running the business and continuing to develop the app, but I've had a lot of lucky breaks. I think next year I'll have my shit together more.
1) If the question concerns visas then i don't know.
2) none
3) Nothing is impossible. Entrepreneurs inherently do the impossible. If someone doesn't think what your doing is impossible, stupid, or ridiculous, you're not changing things.

regarding ps - what kind of answers are you looking for? Please specify and I would be happy to be more specific.
I just finished reading the paper that Greg is blogging about, by Ousterhout and a truckload of co-authors. Yes, they advocate keeping all data in RAM and logging to disk purely for backup. But they also argue that it will take years before this becomes practical (at least at scale), and that fundamental research is still needed on how to achieve durability, distribution, and other factors. I find that surprising. Do such systems really not exist today?
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Also, just because you have no chance of winning, doesn't mean you can't have a very large impact on the outcome of the game ...

Here's a hint, don't sink your wife - even if she totally deserved it. :)
Seriously, I've never gotten much of a chance to play Settlers because most of my friends were bored with it by 2001 or so. And my not-particularly-geeky 60+ year old parents were taught to play it by their friends about five years ago...
As someone with a mildly neglected (but understanding) wife and and an on-hold personal life, I couldn't disagree with your comment more -- but it's also not what the article said. The article said:

[Your] business is rarely so fragile that it can not suffer some minor neglect _now and again_.

Emphasis on now and again. You will have to put your personal and family life on hold, but you'll also need to figure out how to maintain your relationships while you do it.

Starting a company requires a tremendous amount of work, and I've regularly had to choose between what I want (a relaxing dinner out with my wife) and what I need to get done to maximize our chances of scaling to the next stable plateau (a contract, the next product feature, etc).

If you're not ready to put everything on hold and work your ass off, then starting a company is probably not the right choice for you.
Learning how the psyche works is crucial, in my opinion, to being able to grow as a person. Intellectual skills increase with the understanding too, hence why I've been adamant about learning what I can.

Read Carl Gustav Jung's work, his psychoanalytic process and framework is very powerful. Particularly his works on the shadow self, symbols and the psyche, and alchemy as a transformative psychic tool.

I also pull quite a bit from Claire Grave's work on Spiral Dynamics. Ken Wilbur is also known for taking his work and expanding upon it (a simple Google search will turn up some good resources). Here's a blurb I've got copied on it:

Here is a link to my present understanding of the spiral dynamics: http://antiquatis.info/tool/vmeme
You know, I hear suits are making a comeback in the workplace.
Wasn't WoW supposed to be the new golf amongst the Silicon Valley lot?
There are lots of things to like about Wave and lots of things to dislike. The scrollbars are by far at the very tippy top of the "loath" list.
This is a keen observation. Google's solution to this problem would be tolerable if the scrollbar managed to keep up with the simple act of scrolling. Instead it makes the entire app feel about 50% slower...like it's trying to calculate primes or fold proteins in the background or something.
thanks for reply
frankly speaking i dont know about specific questions but here i`ll try to clear it out .

i have already worked on couple of startup , i have read almost all essays of paul graham , read Founders at Work , what i want to tell is that i really really want to start a startup and know things about it (make something people want , remain cheap and lean etc ),
so right now i have decided to do MS in computers ,just to be in usa i am planning to find a a co founder as stated above .
so my question :
how could a indian college student (who has already worked on some startup) start a startup in USA .
reply if thats not clear ...
MADNESS!!!! A context sensitive UI element that only appears when you want it to and doesn't clutter up the visual space when you don't need it? INSANITY!!!
RateMyTwitterAccount: @shakethe8
USE:
Send a twitter message to @shakethe8
You don't have to include a message if you don't want, completely up to you!

Anyone else miss working in the command line all the time, and being bored of running makefiles and gcc for eternity, and just typing in "fortune" to see what might pop-up? I remember doing this back in school when we were in class and looking for something more interesting than the presentation that we being given.

Anyway, we came up with @shakethe8 a Twitter account that will give you similar feedback to 'fortune', although probably more appropriately, similar to that of the old magic 8-balls that we all used to have (I wish I could find mine now...) There's quite a few responses on there, with more always being added...Enjoy! And as always, thanks for any feedback!

[side note - because of Twitter rate limiting, it currently runs @1min intervals, even though around 22 seconds wouldn't max out the 150, i've kept it a bit slower...so you'll need to give it a few before you get your response]

[[edit another side note - it doesn't work if your Twitter account is protected because you can't read @replies from people who you yourself aren't following]]
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"For 103 days, the South Korean government held Park in a 50-square-foot cell at a Seoul detention center."

I'd like to say that this sort of insanity is not possible "here" (here being wherever you live). But these days I'm not so sure.
Android Succumbing to the Problem with Linux?
The plethora of apps designed specifically to fix OS X's obviously horribly broken and unusable acceleration curve is the only counter the universe needs against your argument.
The thing is that apps do not get reviewed for two weeks, they sit in a queue for two weeks and then get reviewd in a day. You can not increase throughput by increasing wait times.

I think the reason why it takes two weeks is that some developers submit new version as soon as the last one is approved just to enjoy the ratings of "new stuff".

A better model would be to allow developers rolling 24 updates per year, and you can chose how to spend them. This would prevent the spam problem and allow updates to publish quickly once they are done.

Personally I now publish new update the moment last one is approved (provided I have anything new at all), for a simple reason - it's better to submit any feature for approval however small ASAP than wait for it to be rejected when I really wanted to ship large bucket of features.
Benefits of Communism | Benefits Of
Such systems exist (Redis is a great example of the "just keep it in RAM" idea) but I think what Ousterhout et al are getting at is that we are just starting to think about the consequences of moving to RAM-based dbs and have not really worked out the kinks. Right now RAM-based systems that I am aware of do not do very much meta-analysis on the access patterns or the data itself to try to migrate or cluster blobs for maximum performance. We have started to get better at doing this for data on disk (e.g. column-based stores, using large disk chunks to cut down on seeks, etc) but have just started thinking about how things will change when primary data is all in RAM. We have a lot of experience with dealing with efficient use of disk resources but the world of RAM-resident data is still pretty new and we are learning how many of our assumptions about how things should work based on the world of disk-based storage will carry over to the new paradigm.
Read his papers from the 80s -- they are highly technical linguistics manuscripts. Pinker knows Unix and uses emacs. Yes, really.
This would be terribly useful in really long waves.
Simply storing the data in memory, with backup on disk, is not difficult or novel. The hard part is meeting the design's performance goals:

"It should be possible to achieve access latencies of 5-
10 microseconds, measured end-to-end for a process running in an application server to read a few hundred bytes of data from a single record in a single storage server in the same datacenter."

A single multi-core storage server should be able to service at least 1,000,000 small requests per second.
You can actually use your gmail account to check your exchange accounts. If your work place allows that, go right ahead! I've been accessing my univ exchange account via gmail and never regretted it.
I wonder how this applies to software development. The article says it applies to works for hire; if there's 35-year-old code out there, could the original author get rights to some part of the program back or otherwise block use of the software? I could still see this being applicable for legacy mainframe code.
I remember stepping into part of a fountain that looked like an ultra-glossy floor next to some green plastic stairs the first time I was in a Bloomberg office. The visual and aural clutter there was remarkable.
A Case in Antiquities for ‘Finders Keepers’
As a counterpoint, my old man builds stores and new construction has dried up and not come back. In the meantime he's had to completely retool by getting certified for inspection work for the state. This takes time and these classes are crowded.

The economy is changing and there seems to be a big disconnect between the people reading this board and the large majority of our population.
GigaOM has a syndication deal with NYTimes.
"While this effort [SPDY] from Google aims to make everything faster, it is largely orthogonal to what we’re trying to do with Resource Package."

Seems to solve the same problem, though, but without the headache of rewriting everything.
It looks like NYT syndicates GigaOm, like how the Washington Post syndicates TechCrunch.

When we're on TechCrunch I make sure to send my friends and family the Washington Post URLs, since it looks a little more impressive to people not familiar with TechCrunch ;)
Under Pressure: the Quest for Better Shower Heads
Just want to point out that if you're finding yourself unemployed and wanting to bootstrap your own business, your state might have something called the Self Employment Assistance program - it's federally funded but managed by the states.

After meeting with business counselors and ensuring that your idea is sound, you file your business plan with the state (they don't share it) and can start receiving your normal unemployment benefits.

Here's the awesome part: they're giving you the benefits to work on your business full time. No need to do job searching. It's six months of runway. Pretty awesome.
This looks to be quite useful. I've tested it just now and it works as advertised, minus a couple of installation quirks. It's interesting to me that it follows almost exactly the same principles as text-based blogging system as Jekyll and the like; goes to show you that plain text works.
Asp .Net FileUpload and Image Handler [ Visual Basic Knowledgebase ]
It's crazy that this isn't standard practice already. I guess it just shows how much momentum an old paradigm can have.
So does a plethora of other static website builders that use wiki-like markup for page contents.
Uhm. So now if I rename the app URL changes? How very inconvenient. I hope that at least linkshare URLs still work.
Allrecipes.com brings recipes to the iPhone
Sorry for the lack of precision, I mean 40+ hour weeks, much of it unpaid. The rule of thumb that I was told was that you're working about 8 hours of prep for every hour of teaching the first year. Drafting lesson plans, putting together projects, laying out longer term units of study, things like that.

They're only paid for the 8 am - 3 pm (35 hours or so a week, though the pay is per hour better), but most teachers I know show up early and work at home grading, preparing dittos, stuff like that.

Add in requirements for Continuing Education, administrative tasks, and non-teaching related requirements that most unions/tenure programs require, and I'd still say it's a surprisingly low paid position for the time that goes into it and the long-term effects on the students.
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Hmm, but the paper mostly argues that that performance advantage comes automatically from using RAM instead of disk. The only obstacle they mention to realizing 5-10µs latency per se is that networking infrastructure can't yet support it. No question that's a big deal, but they spend far more time talking about durability, data models, distribution and scaling, all of which are auxiliary to raw latency. I'm not criticizing the paper, just seeking to understand how far the vision they outline really is from current practice.

One interesting aspect is the sharp distinction the authors make between the approach they're advocating and systems that make heavy use of RAM caching (obviously common today), even when the RAM caches hold nearly all the data. So ok, let's rule out cache-based systems as instances of what they call RAMclouds. How widespread, today, are true RAM-based systems (as defined in the paper), even if they don't yet achieve 5-10µs round trips to storage? What major systems are in production that can be cited? Google were famous years ago for keeping their web indexes in RAM. Does that count?

No question many innovative projects have sprouted up in the last few years in this space (e.g. Redis), and while they sound fabulous, I don't think they count as answers to my question without examples of major systems in production (for some fuzzy value of "major"). If anyone can cite any, please do.

Troll disclaimer: Our startup is currently working on these very issues (storage strategy and how application talks to storage), so my interest is both genuine and acute.

PS: Simply storing the data in memory, with backup on disk, is not difficult or novel.

That's good to hear. What specifically are the common strategies for backup to disk?