skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
People have (severely) bounded rationality and don't continue the induction to its logical conclusion.

As proof simply see the 'guess 2/3rds of the average' game (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Guess_2/3_of_the_average).

As a quick summary: Put a bunch of people in a room and tell them to each guess a number from 0 to 100 - and whoever guesses 2/3rds of the average of everyone's number 'wins.'

Logically, no one should guess above 66 (since 2/3rds the average can't exceed 66 even if everyone guesses 100). Then, no one should guess above 44 since 2/3rd the average can't exceed 44 even if everyone guesses 66. Continue on, and the only logical move is for everyone to guess 0.

But, in real life, the winning guess is almost always around 20 (which implies most people only carry on the induction for 3 or 4 steps).
If you're going to consider a database which buffers writes in memory, you should also consider logging which buffers writes in memory.
The article fails to mention the principle driver of this technology, David Chaum. The system is a descendant of Chaum's prior voting works with broader participation.
Apple Reverses Decision re: Political Caricatures
Amass a large number of facebook "friends" that you don't know, then ask them (in the chat) to beta test whatever it is you create. If they ask questions for answers that should be self explanitory then you need to redo it until it's obvious.

Hint: if you get facebook friends that are high and drunk all the time this can actually help idiot-proof your design as well.
It makes sense as the title; it provides context. On Bram's site, using the title "Bram Cohen: Comments on Go" would be redundant. If you're already reading his blog, then you know every entry is by him.

When his entry is mixed in with the rest of the internet, his title has no context. Putting his name in the title provides the context.
To the people downvoting this: what is your problem? The guy is being nice and saying thanks, and you're downvoting him to -4?
In Switzerland, I believe it was in Zurich (sorry, no idea where that umlaut hides) there is (or at least was) a restaurant where you get your food by model train, the seats are so high that you get 'helped on' when you enter and the waiters are on stilts!

It's years ago, but this video reminded me of it.

I wonder why they used the word 'robot' in their title, but then again, it did made me click, so maybe that's why they used it :)
A profile of the Psytar brothers two days ago: http://www.sfweekly.com/content/printVersion/1744650
Stardust, Finding Forrester, anything Pixar, The Princess Bride, The Fifth Element and Hackers.
This is great. Thanks for the link. I'll probably do a similar flow in a project I'm working on.
There is nothing wrong with making money off of someone else's work, if they allow/encourage you to do so. The Creative Commons "Allow commercial use" and the GPL _explicity_ give someone else the permission to make money off of my work. Red Hat, a $5Billion+ company, owes much of it's value to the work of others.

What's happened with PsyStar, is that they tried to do this _without_ the permission of Apple, and did so with software that was distributed under a restrictive commercial EULA. They didn't respect the Author's (Apple) intent regarding their software. That's the issue at hand (in my opinion) here.

I'm actually celebrating this judgment a bit - It highlights the value we get from Free Software. Nobody is going to come knocking on my door, sending lawyers, or dragging me into court because I'm running a business installing (modified) Linux on Computers. Indeed, the community will actually support me in my efforts to do so, http://www.linuxdriverproject.org.
Success and Jealousy
Because Common Lisp has been suitable for building complex applications for more than 20 years, while Haskell has been in that state for about 2? It follows that Lisp would have at least an order of magnitude more applications, and that's neglecting "network effects".

Also, Common Lisp still has no libraries or coherent community. Every time I ask #lisp about a library for something trivial, the answer is "write it yourself". This is annoying to people that don't want to shave that particular yak.

Haskell's community is nearly the opposite, so I bet in 18 years we will see many more Haskell apps than Common Lisp apps. Unless the community starts being nice to people, and people start sharing code worth sharing, that is.
That's a great point. The convenience to most users justifies the inconvenience to the few who miss-type their password.
And the internet can't do math...

"In the second quarter alone, Google has managed to reel almost $1.5 billion in earnings."

"If you do the mathematics here, Google is making upwards of $4 million daily"

Except they mistakenly used the quarterly earnings in place of annual earnings. So it would be in the range of 4x that.
Croatia, and before that ex Yugoslavia.
I never understood how they could think a business model that circumvents DMCA was going to succeed. Folks, every hackintosh uses a kext called dsmos.kext. It's purpose is to decrypt Apple encrypted system binaries. It wasn't written or authorized by Apple.

As an avid OSX86 tinkerer I was conflicted about the case. Part of me wanted Psystar to win while the other part wanted the entire thing to go away. If Psystar had prevailed it would only bring difficulties for the hackintosh community. Apple would have taken drastic measures to secure their business at the expense of hackintoshers.
I'll be in the Atlanta area around Thanksgiving if you wanted one not-regular-attendee person - I might be able to sneak away from the in-laws for a meetup.
Looks like a good book, would you recommend it?

(Also, looks like this is a chapter: Chapter 18 Python's Dictionary Implementation: Being All Things to All People)
What if everyone posted a similar contentless "thanks" post on every article they found interesting? Such posts would dominate the comments. There's already a "thanks, this is very helpful button" -- it's called the up arrow.

EDIT: I'm not trying to troll here, I'm serious -- do you think comments like this add something to a discussion?
I've been noticing many acceptable comments being downvoted a lot recently.
These sound like technology use cases to me.
Guilty as charged, let me explain why. When this was posted first, it looked like a pattern I've seen before on HN, some spammer posts a link and then uses a sockpuppet (or more) make it seem as though the content is great.

For another example of that see here:

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=941568

So I was a bit quick on the trigger there. On the other hand, if I would have been able to undo my vote (reddit style) I would have done so.

edit: it seems quite arbitrary to single these out for being modded down, there are much better examples of good contributions that got dumped on.
I thought it was ironic that Loopt was using Microsoft Maps in the demo for the iphone, anyone know why they chose Virtual Earth over GOOG?
(1) I did notice. Why do you think I mentioned Japan?

(2) He never stated how much revenue his IT consulting activities generated.

This person is quite eager to qualify his potential partners (that's a sales technique, btw), but from reading the pitch, the only thing that's clear is what he doesn't bring to the table. Promises of help with future marketing and funding do not justify equity to me, but things might look different to someone else.
Interesting choice of image. The gears cannot turn.

http://www.freestylemind.com/wp-content/uploads/2009/11/brai...
Secret Worlds: The Universe Within
this assumes the players have full awareness and are mostly rational.
Think about it this way: will the database write more or less information than writing the raw data to the disk? Will using the database require more or less instructions than writing the raw data to the disk?

I know it's said all the time, but it's said for a reason: do the simple thing first. If after measurement it turns out to be slow, optimize.
Perhaps something at Gordon Biersh, Einsteins or the Vortex on a Monday or Tuesday?

I think the week of thanksgiving is a bad idea.
They only have to convince their boss. Not their co-workers.
EDIT: this was meant to be in reply to ct4ul4u.

Agree. There are still cases where assembly language is the appropriate choice. That doesn't mean those generalize to "business" use cases.

Sure there are cases where a "nosql" approach makes sense. But the examples cited (Google, Digg) bear little similarity to a typical "business" use case, and I'd claim that for "business" applications RDBMS is generally the best solution.
You have to both mistype your password AND mistype your email for it to be a problem. The percent of users who do that is minimal, and if it happens, it's not the end of the world: create a new account.
How to Avoid Exam Anxiety | eHow.com
Can I distribute games built on SDL there? or do i have to drink the msft coolaid?
This made me remember the Japanese restaurant which works on the opposite principle: robotic chefs and human waiters. Video here: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5sVOSlUn7e0

There is an interesting cultural dimension to Germans choosing to replace human interaction with robot interaction while Japanese choosing to replace human work with robot work.
This strikes me as an (at least theoretically) smart way to solve a very stupid problem.

There is an unspoken assumption in this article that piracy is actually a crime.

Well, if it is indeed a crime then the only victims are various MAFIAA execs, and the lawyers they supply.

And this article writer of course, who is almost assuredly being paid to write this dreck.
This seems nice game theory but I don't see it practically unforcable for copyright laws.

- Punishment is not automatic: people are innocent unless proven otherwise (spoofed ip address, pirated wifi network, etc...).

- People are finding and adopting more and more sophisticated ways not get caught (like the transition from napster to emule/bittorrent).

- Majors are powerful, but adding more pressure requires the right propaganda to legitimate their action, imho this would be percieved as too autocratic, arbitrary, unfair.
Leah's asking the right questions, but I don't think the direction she took is the right one. Users rely on the UI to be familiar, and I've always found Amazon's UI strange in that I have to pause, analyze, and think when logging in/signing up. While Amazon might be able to get away with it, removing the familiarity from the UI is probably a bad decision for most. If an extra field is a barrier to sign-up, the user actually having to actively analyze and parse your sign-up form is a huge mental hoop to jump through.

We (Weebly) thought of this problem early on, and we tried to simplify things by just requiring an email/password when signing up. What we found was that our users were extremely confused, because the sign-up form didn't look like a sign-up form. When doing usability testing, we found that users would stare at the page for minutes. "us: Just sign up..." "user: I can't see where to sign up", even when it was right in front of them. They saw two fields and assumed it was a log-in form, even when it said in really big letters "Create a new account".

Users don't read your page, they scan it. People expect the log-in form to be in the upper right and the sign-up form to be towards the center of the page. You should absolutely make your site scan-friendly.

Users do, though, get confused and try to use the sign-up form to login. Our solution? If the user enters credentials into the sign-up form that already exist (like the correct username/password combo), we'll just log them in instead of creating a new user. You can try it out on weebly.com.
Thanks for the link to the Hanging Paradox. I hadn't come across that one yet. Very interesting.
One of the questions you need to ask is: what you are going to do with all that data? If all you need is to store the data and never read it again except sequentially, then flat log files are probably the best way. But if you ever need to, say, calculate aggregates or do any kind of visualization, a database would probably be a better initial choice.

You'll want to keep in mind that whatever you choose should be pretty flexible, because as you discover more about the analytics you're providing, you'll need to slice and dice that data differently. You won't know what data and how it will answer the questions until you know the questions.
No, there is not.

(Two anecdotes are not data.)
I think you're looking for scribe:

http://developers.facebook.com/scribe/
PyCon 2010 talks announced
Paul Graham often talks about the partial ordering of language goodness, but doesn't know what beats Lisp. Possibly still nothing does, but this provides the way to give concrete examples: Since no one language can choose all invariants, it is likely that over time certain invariants will come to be seen as better in some niches than others, so there will indeed be several "winners" at the top of the ordering based on different choice of invariants.

Lisp will still be one of them, the choice of no invariants that restrict the programmer. It's a viable niche. It just isn't the only niche. I think it's less viable than Lisp advocates think and that this is part of the reason it never has taken off, but here we enter the realm of opinion as there isn't anywhere near enough science to actually know. (Indeed, the whole of idea of "science" sounds weird here because we are so far away from having it at all.)

I also point to foldr's message in this thread. Strong typing has its pros and cons, even when done as nicely as Haskell's typing can be, and personally, I don't think that's ever going to change. Sometimes you're going to want it and sometimes not.
The 'Common Lisp has no libraries' thing disqualifies you somehow. I think I have a couple millions lines of Lisp code on my laptop. ITA Software wrote now around 650kloc lines of code for their reservation system, additionally they are using 150kloc of public libraries.

Sure the Common Lisp community is not that 'coherent' - the language is used for very different things. Still there are meetings and conferences where users meet.

The first Haskell report appeared 1990. I'd say there has been lots of time to get applications written. Before Haskell there was Miranda.

Common Lisp has a lot of libraries. Look at CLIKI for some pointers.

So, did you write your Common Lisp library yourself? That's what I usually do when I miss some stuff or would like a different implementation.
Although, you could argue that the business use defines the technology use case which, in turn, informs the decision to use "nosql".

For example, key/value DB's have enabled me to better implement features of a enterprise web app I am working on. The lack of a defined schema, in particular, was a strong business case for deciding to use key/value DB's. This document-based app can now store arbitrary fields on a per user basis (which was a headache with SQL!), which is a key USP for the app.

Although, I agree, these points are tech-related. It would be nice to see the article mention true business use cases, such as transactions (i.e for financial, sensitive data applications).
I wonder if this book has any novel information that isn't available in the dozens of other books on the subject, or in the one I read fifteen years ago that covered all the examples in the Forbes article.

Although I've found it occasionally amusing at interviews and meetings, since reading that one book many years ago, to lead other people through series of posture changes, or to make some overconfident fool drop his alpha posture by adopting the same, in general these techniques are for bullshitters. If you're touching your neck because you feel uneasy/unsure, DO something about that. Don't find ways to appear competent, confident, whatever -- be competent, confident, whatever by knowing what you're doing and talking about.

These postures, gestures, etc. will flow naturally from the ease and confidence of having achieved something honestly. Like Lupe Fiasco says: The wings don't make you fly and the crown don't make you king.
Searching for Real-Time Search
I would be happy to host people at Emory University. Email me nir.levy@emory.edu
What kinds of apps do you use in xmonad?
Once again, this article assumes that the current way of doing things is the only way of doing things. New business models will spring up. They always do, no matter how much people decry progress.
But if reducing congestion is also a goal, as the second sentence of the article states, a per-kilometer tax is superior. A GPS-based system can also target those who drive at peak hours and on congested roads. Given that the Netherlands is small and population-dense, they might be very interested in reducing congestion.
Voting is more complicated than it seems.

Here are two rules I discovered about voting that are quite non-obvious:

You can not print out a receipt of the votes, in order. Because in a small town, someone could write down the order that people show up, and then correlate it with the order of votes on the receipt. (This is why paper trails of electronic votes were never implemented.)

The voter must never be given a receipt that allows a third party to verify who they voted for. This is because it allows vote buying: I buy votes, and you show me your receipt and prove you voted for who I want before getting paid.

This system fails the second rule, and thus will never be implemented widely.
I'm down (live in Midtown).
Paranormal activity an Pi are dirty cheap, but nonetheless good movies. I mean expensive is not necessarily good.
One problem is that voter turnout is generally low. And as far as I can tell, there is nothing in the system to stop a lot of fake ballots from being counted. And it's not possible to claim that a turnout of 75% is fraud, even if the usual turnout is around 50. Russian elections routinely get 95% turnout with almost no one going to the booths.

There needs to be a way to verify whether a person has not voted. Could be based on SSN in some way. But it also has to be simple to use.
Organization to archive shortened URLs
I use xmonad for everything, all the time.
This does not seem to reward fuel-efficient vehicles that get more mileage per unit of fuel.
The author holds xmonad as an example of "trying bold, new ideas in user interface design".

I'm not convinced that a tiling window manager qualifies, because the invention goes back some 30 years to Xerox PARC (where else). The Xerox Star shipped in 1981, and a major feature of its GUI was that simultaneously open application windows were automatically laid out so that they would not overlap.
It works okay with speeding -- in places where police consistently pull over the leading car in a pack of speeders, I tend to slow down when I'm in front.

I don't think it'd work as well in this situation. It would have to be immediately obvious to everyone what the rules were, whether someone had already been caught that day, and if they were about to become the first in line. Given the casual and distributed nature of the crime in question, I think that'd be difficult.
Visual Mathematics
I ate at this restaurant, its quite fun and they even deliver soup down the slides. I got really embarrassed though when I wanted to pay for everyone as a gift at the end. The till is human operated, the woman was rude and they don't take credit cards.
"data" is a very flexible term and you can choose how you define it. For instance, I argue that we should take into account choices of each individual who in anyway had to give their active (i.e. though contribution) or passive (i.e. though acceptance) agreement for the respective project (i.e. robotic chef vs. robotic waiter) to go though to completion. Projects of this scope involve teams of people who analyze needs, consider business impact, create designs, build the robots, etc. Thus each team is a sample of its culture and their decisions constitute "data" about each culture. Of course you could argue about team size, but that means you are just arguing about sample size.
"As a traditionally educated engineer, my training teaches me not to guess whenever facts are available."

Ah, but the most lucrative questions are about products not yet invented, for which there are few facts. They are lucrative because there is not yet any competition. If there were lots of facts available, ripe for the picking, then by definition the net margins would be terrible.

For instance, suppose you were a grad student at the MIT Media Lab in 1995. Does it make financial sense to join the work on an electronic ink product? The answer to that question could only have been derived from a series of guesses and wild deductions. You cannot just look up how efficient planar electroluminescent backlights are going to be in 10 years. Or how expensive and power-hungry non-volatile memory devices are going to be in 10 years.

For a research organization to invent and capture a new market, they have to be good at making and using wild guesses about the future. (Looking up answers is valuable too, but for different reasons.)
David Chaum was/is the guy behind 'digicash'.
Wouldn’t a more rational approach to punishment to be one that puts (with certain constraints – freedom, privacy, cost and maybe a few others) minimizing crime above everything else?

I don’t care how I feel about a certain punishment as long as it gets its job done. There are the least murders if you legalize murder (unlikely)? Fine, legalize it.

Sure, you might want to minimize or maximize other things. The happiness of the victims (or their family and friends). The happiness of the people reading or hearing about the punishments. But that feels rather superficial to me. I guess that’s a judgment call.

Now, we don’t really know whether this law actually gets the job done (and insofar, I am pretty split on this case) but at the very least, I have become quite careful when evaluating punishments (stripping certain rights to privacy away would be a punishment) with my feelings.

Man, I’m rambling :)
"They didn't respect the Author's (Apple) intent regarding their software."

Huh, is there a law about respecting author's intents?
Sure, define it that way. But no one (sane) will believe you if you define data that way.

(You can define any word however you want it and I have no problem whatsoever with that. If you communicate your definitions, fine, alright. But your definition of data is not one that would convince very many people when it comes to generalizations.)
California also requires a fingerprint to get a driver's license
Actually, it doesn't. The correlation between the revealed code and the selected candidate is not published.
Apple Crushes Clone Maker in Court
Experience shows they're harmless.

New users are explicitly told such comments are ok: http://ycombinator.com/newswelcome.html