skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
No cache coherence? There's an interesting choice. I suppose it could be handy for companies running "cloud data centers" who just want a bunch of cores with a high-bandwidth low-latency packet-switched network going between them.
What an interesting approach. I've never heard of anyone doing that, at least not systematically.
Google indexes this site very fast. I think it probably happens within 5 minutes.

Let's give it a try. It's 10:26PM EST.

This is a very obscure phrase that no one else ever uses.
Mathematica (and thus Wolfram Alpha) is unusual in it's use of brackets to enclose function arguments. Every other computer algebra system I've used has been content with parentheses. And NoScript is pretty much the leading edge for browser security, so if it thinks brackets are dangerous, they probably are and other browsers could follow at any time. Wolfram Alpha's direct use of Mathematica's notation in URLs seems a bit naive, and it wouldn't be the first time Wolfram embarrassingly misunderstood the way the web works.
Your startup hires a hacker. The hacker earns a salary. So why does he get to have equity, too?

It's not a matter of principle here, it's a matter of how bad the bargain is in reality. In my example, the employee receives a decent guaranteed pay but low percentage of the upside. The founder receives low guaranteed pay but more upside. The label though receives most of the upside and most of the guaranteed pay too.
I'd download it. I think the idea of a "napster of academic research" is a great idea, fwiw :)
The Visual Studio GUI probably is suboptimal. You may be distracted from the editing window sometimes by the other controls. One thing you can do is disable or hide many of the Visual Studio controls.

However, the cognitive load of this distraction is lower than that of having to remember keyboard commands.

Once you have spent a certain amount of time in EMacs, (a very long time) most of those keyboard interactions will become subconscious. Its a long time though. Also, the most frequently used keyboard commands are available in the GUI interface for people that choose to learn them. And environments like Visual Studio are often fully customizable, enabling users to add their own keyboard shortcuts, macros, etc.

One feature in most GUI environments that you may not have discovered is the 'Tool Tip'. By hovering your mouse cursor over various toolbar buttons you can cause a short textual description to appear.
2 minutes later, it's there.
This is a very obscure phrase that no one else ever uses. ...
hackerne.ws/item?id=973578 - 1 minute ago
Sure they're making money particularly from being smart, but would someone be able to explain to me how making money from money contributes to something worthwhile to society?

Is it just that they're being that much quicker in smoothing out prices of stuff on the stock market?

I'm not being snarky, would just like to know.

Another slightly different topic: the trend during the Bush boom years is that the so-called 'smart people' graduated to the financial industries which is where all the money was. This is opposed to the people who I regard as smart and gutsy trying to do something new and of probably greater benefit to other people such as starting your own internet company.

Is it just that it's easier to make money from money as opposed to doing something that's probably more helpful but usually pays less?
Makes me wonder if Facebook will ever decide they've pursued engagement far enough and that they have an ethical obligation to actually deliver more value even if it comes at the expense of engagement.
I think it should be a combination of both GitHub and StackOverflow. GitHub is great to see if the person can code, and a very crucial part of hiring. StackOverflow is great to see if a person can communicate, which I think is as important as having the ability to code.

I've come across many programmers that can code well, but had horrible communications skills. It's always difficult to interact with these programmers. I spend more time extracting the meaning of what they're saying rather than getting work done.
Who wants to do a calculation for TV?
Why would I pay $100 for this instead of using a free website like ComputerJobs.com, Dice.com, Monster.com etc? I'd think the quality of employers would be about the same.

So far I see zero benefits for me but lots of moola for JoS.
Discover Music (Google)
GoWalla: How We Accidentally Built a Social Network by Loving the Pixel
I tried the free trial search, that he uses in his OCaml/Houston example. I find it quite hard to believe that there is a Common Lisp programmer in Bagdad, AZ and a Clojure programmer in Window Rock, AZ.
I do not think so. We have for long hidden controls in Menus and Context Menus.
You'll be able to tell who those kids are because they'll die on the exam.
What is more interesting to notice is the aggressive use of Javascript on Google's homepage as for long Google has tried to keep the old browsers without JS support in mind. This indicates that the web is rapidly moving towards more advanced browsers.
Its not out for Google.co.*. Even I had to go to Google.com to notice.
Luxury firms tackling e-commerce
Oh, don't worry, I think it's practically the epitome of fun. I just think the fact that there's no challenge aside from spending time means the fun will run out quickly.
Well, the OCaml kid is legit, but, no, there are no lisp programmers in Bagdad or Clojure programmers in Window Rock... did someone say there were? Do you need one? Window Rock is a dusty tiny town, seat of the Navajo Nation--I've actually been there, it has one grocery store and a single strip mall.

Maybe you did a search that had 1 result, and then you edited your search, and the Ajax refresh didn't come back fast enough so it still showed one?
Well, that's short and terse.
Microsoft’s Bing Adds Some Zing
While not without its benefits, the stereotypical technical trader reminds me of a parasite. The fact that people focus on "taking profits off the table" through volatility disgusts me personally.

Whatever happened to value-driven investments... </facetious>
Spirit Gets Stuck, Makes a Big Discovery
try { ... } catch(CodeNotWrittenInTheRightCityException e) { // unreachable }
I'm on the edge of whether or not this sounds like a ridiculous number.

It would take the equivalent of 500 human lives for 1 human life to be wasted on Facebook.

For some reason I'm just not feeling a response to this; though, I'm going to have to think about it some more.
You do not describe the nature of the company. If its a technical company and you do plan to stick around, you should negotiate founder stakes, which degrade to employee options if you quit within say 4-5 years. Since none of the co-founders is technical this is reasonable.
I think that's a little high horse. Most "internet" companies don't bring us any new blow out technology or societal benefit. Twitter for example is basically just a way for narcissist to talk about themselves. Not that there is anything wrong with that but to claim an Internet company is a better way to contribute to the greater good than is stock trading is just silly.
"StackOverflow is great to see if a person can communicate ..."

... on StackOverflow.

Meanwhile, the great bulk of programmer communication is happening on blogs, mailing lists, and IRC.

You're very right that written and verbal communication is important, but you have to look in the right places for it.
I'd much prefer to buy stuff like socks and underwear online, but it ends up being cheaper to just catch a sale at Macy's.

And it gets me out of the house. :)
The hyperinflationary meltdown in Zimbabwe comes to mind as well. I bought a number of 100 Trillion zimdollar notes off ebay and handed them out at work. Each person I handed one to, I told them about how they tried to handle the inflation by chopping zeros off at the end, until this year when they cut 12 zeros off the end of numbers and shortly afterwards stopped printing their own currency.

Before my father was born, his family lived in Germany and because they had their wealth in US dollars, they were spared the trauma of the German hyperinflation of the 20s. Many of the people he knew growing up had been wiped out by that period.

What a mess. It could happen here.
Going even further off-topic, the sheer speed of Google's updates is one reason why I have felt that the pain-point of "real-time search" is overrated.
Here's eome more on this topic:

http://internationalbs.wordpress.com/2009/12/03/more-on-forw...
If you assume that people are sleeping 8 hours per night, that number becomes 1/333.
DJ has evolved into Workers
I think it is used in context of http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Disruptive_technologies
and if you furthermore only look at internet users (there are 1.7 billion of them), it goes to 1/84
Will Oprah's OWN network work? The Economist is confident
Yes, the first link addresses a strawman but I bring it up because other people still bring it up.

The second link discusses interests and influences for female undergrads majoring in some kind of engineering, not CS, though I still think it is somewhat relevant. I find the influence on family members to be the most interesting.

The third link has papers specifically related to interest. One is titled "The Anatomy of Interest." It discusses why women who started college enthusiastic about CS ended up leaving.
"In one sense, we are all Keynesians now; in another, no one is a Keynesian any longer.... we all use the Keynesian language and apparatus; none of us any longer accepts the initial Keynesian conclusions" (Friedman 1968).

Reference: http://www.auburn.edu/~garriro/fm2friedman.htm

Nixon also said something like this, but he was paraphrasing Friedman.
I won't defend all of finance / trading, but maybe this analogy will satisfy you.

Think of sports tickets. There is massive inefficiency in the primary market, meaning tickets you buy directly from the arena or on TicketMaster. One inefficiency comes from all the season ticket holders who skip the majority of the games and only go to the ones they actually want to see.

We can fix this inefficiency on a secondary market (the scalpers, StubHub, etc). A scalper might make a decent take by finding season ticket holders and buying the unused tickets. Then, the scalper sells the tickets to fans who waited too late to buy (or won't pay full price).

Now we think the scalper is evil, because he just made money without "adding value." Except he did add value... the season ticket holder and the last-minute-fan wouldn't have found each other without great effort. Both ended up happier than if the scalper didn't exist. Also, the scalper takes on some risk... he guaranteed the price he paid to the season ticket holder, had to hold the ticket, and then determine the correct time to sell. If he held the ticket too late (or got too greedy), the game would begin and he'd have a worthless ticket!

We also need to somewhat regulate scalpers because if they have too much of an impact, they can seriously distort and manipulate prices (a very wealthy scalper can buy all the tickets to a popular game and sell them all at 10x the price).

This analogy isn't perfect for high-frequency trading or all market making, but I hope it shows why arbitragers both add value and reduce risk yet seem evil to all the participants.
There are at least tens of millions of web sites. This site ranks 3500 on Alexa and 12k on Compete. Google knows that and prioritizes its crawlers accordingly.

Maintaining a fresh index of the top 100k sites is where search engines get their best bang for the buck.
If it doesn't get out of hand, program trading is a good thing. It allows the value and small investors to get in and out of the markets smoothly and cheaply. As an example,
moving to electronic trading killed the option market makers
life style by dropping the spread between bid and ask to almost nothing. The problem, it will probably get out of hand.
On a conservative estimate 1/50th.

(6.7 billion * 24 hours)/(3 billion * 1 hour) = ~50
Phase 1 is already here: http://github.com/blog/553-looking-for-a-job-let-github-help
Reference: http://www.asktog.com/TOI/toi06KeyboardVMouse1.html
There is one part that sticks in my craw, that is, the part about the correction applied for post-1960 tree ring data.

It smacks of corporate / bureaucratic mindset that there was (apparently) so little effort to find out why the tree ring data diverged after 1960.

Wouldn't a scientist be fascinated by the question of why this divergence was occurring-instead of just accepting it happened?

Example: Feynman wondered if he could describe in mathematical terms the way that a spinning plate would wobble. He took it as a challenge to himself as a physicist to determine this, despite it not appearing to have any practical application. These calculations later led to his work on electron spin.

THAT is the level of curiosity I would expect from people at a top flight research institution. Or am I wrong, and there was a lot of research to determine the tree ring divergence?
For most people, there is a lot more than just a degree to seek out in college. I'm no big fan of Facebook whoring myself, but while it obviously doesn't replace stimulating conversation or actual time spent together with good friends, it does provide a lubricant for them. My guess is that when all is said and done, you'll value your social ties and personal development a lot more than your knowledge of red black trees.

P.S. I don't mean to suggest people blowing off their classes to use Facebook is the way to go, but I think that to suggest it can't have value is somewhat silly.
People who spend that much time on Facebook would likely "waste" their time in some other way if the site did not exist.

[Edit] But that makes the figure no less staggering.
A bit off topic, but I find what the 'geeks' are producing to be the most interesting part of this article. When the next financial mega-crisis erupts (note - financial, not economic - that part comes next), perhaps this will be the reason:

John Malitzis, vice president of market surveillance at the New York Stock Exchange's oversight body, told a conference in September that he has seen examples, both in U.S. markets and elsewhere, of computer algorithms malfunctioning. He calls them "algos gone wild."

Couple 'algos gone wild' with the fact that 60% of trades (article's figure) are HFT algo trades and you have the potential for absolute chaos in the markets. Many of the algorithms mimic each other (crowding into the same trades). Some algos are programmed to essentially hunt down other programs and exploit things they expect them to do.

As the article states, the high frequency traders have moved beyond equities into options. Imagine if we see a global cap and trade scheme implemented, with a marketplace for carbon credits. Could algos 'gone wild' drive the price of carbon credits to some absurd extreme (think the speculation-fueled oil bubble in summer 08, but in reverse) that dramatically influences how much CO2 our collective industries emit?
I agree. When I worked on Cisco's printing system, CEPS, we sometimes heard from users who wanted to lock down a particular printer so that "outsiders" couldn't use it.

We never implemented that feature. CEPS provided usage logs, and if a user felt that someone was hogging or abusing a printer, he could simply talk to the abuser.

That's much more likely to have a successful outcome for the company than putting up a technological barbed wire fence across someone's path.
This McKitrick guy is like a cockroach that keeps poping back up. Not only are there TONS of datasources besides the tree ring proxies that he is so obsessed with (http://www.realclimate.org/index.php/data-sources/), his specific claims have been rejected many times including by peer reviewed sources such as Nature.

http://www.realclimate.org/index.php/archives/2004/12/myths-...

http://www.realclimate.org/index.php/archives/2004/12/false-...

http://www.google.com/url?sa=t&source=web&ct=res&...
"[...] if we lived in a world where it wouldn't be cherry-picked by axe-grinders and used for character assassination."

Unfortunately, that is exactly the current problem as well, without the data being available.

The article this discussion is keyed off of Flawed climate data (http://www.financialpost.com) which argues pretty convincingly that the AGW researchers cherry-picked their data to show the "hockey stick."

The article The Economics of Climate Change http://online.wsj.com/article/SB1000142405274870349940457455... argues very convincingly that the AGW promoters in question had a financial axe to grind.

The purloined emails (disclaimer, I only read the commonly reported quotes) were replete with character assassination.

Between my assertions and mechanical_fish's assertions, releasing and hiding both lead to nastiness. IMHO, hiding the data caused as much or more nastiness as releasing it. Given that Good Science is verifiable, that argues strongly that the data must be released.

There's an old legal aphorism that goes, "If you have the facts on your side, pound the facts. If you have the law on your side, pound the law. If you have neither on your side, pound the table." -- http://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/pound_the_table

There is a lot of table pounding going on, and it sounds like it started with the AGW researchers not having quality data that could be pounded on, so they hid the data and pounded the table.
By way of comparison:

About 60 000 American soldiers died in the Vietnam War, out of a total population of roughly 200 million Americans.

That works out to one American life lost for every 3333 (ish) Americans.

Even if we ignore the fact that Americans are almost certainly wildly overrepresented on Facebook relative to the rest of the world, the website is six times as destructive to the U.S.

Tongue firmly in cheek, incidentally.
More about HM, whose brain it is:
http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/nova/sciencenow/0407/02-cork.html

You can watch a ten-minute video feature at the site below:
http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/nova/sciencenow/video/0407/i02.html

Note that within the first few minutes of that video, they show the brain already sliced up, and speak about it in the past tense; there's also a cut-and-died slice in a photo of the already-dissected brain on the first link...

I first watched that feature a few months ago, and from what I could gather, the episode was originally aired on 2009 August 25; anybody know what gives?
How is this measured? I'm sure I have a tab open for that long, but I don't spend more than 5-10 minutes per week actually using it.

1/500 of humanity's time spent with an open browser tab of Facebook doesn't seem nearly as impressive.
It seems like the difference is how the pistons are fired. There's no fuel lost when you spontaneously start and stop the pistons with electricity, so you can only run X at a time and get better fuel economy when you don't need all the available horsepower.
If you were able to sort the results by "last updated" then I might agree, but AFAIK you can't.

With Twitter Search you can easily see the most recent results first.
Florida rhinoplasty
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Common Lisp is very, very old. Tagbody and progv, anyone?

It's an influential language, for sure, but I prefer Clojure for a number of reasons.
This radical innovation also seems somewhat... familiar:

http://web.archive.org/web/19990422191353/http://google.com/
It certainly does have value, but considering how much people pay to go to college it seems wasteful not to take advantage of the classroom resources. Going to college is great for finding a co-founder, making friends, etc. Whether class time is well spent doing those things, however, is less clear.
Interestingly enough, Goldman Sachs is reporting that quant strategies may be becoming overcrowded, yielding negligible returns:
http://www.reuters.com/article/rbssFinancialServicesAndRealE...

I do believe there is some truth to this, a couple years ago during the "quant bloodbath" we saw a major down swing across almost every quant fund, because they were all employing generally the same strategy.

At the same time, with the trend towards more complex markets, quants will continue to rise in demand at Wall St. firms (especially since their profits dwarf those of the IBanking division). However, that does not mean you have to be a financial engineer to crank out market beating returns. Traditional value strategies will probably continue to be just as good and beat the market over the long term.
Brad Sugars
I don’t see it on google.com.

Also Safari 4.

Edit: Now that I've read further down the page, apparently I really should try it in Firefox, or thoroughly clear my Safari cache.
One word: Farmville
>Traditional value strategies will probably continue to be just as good and beat the market over the long term.

I don't think so; the most you can do on average is to match the market return unless you have insider information which is clearly illegal. This is because so many has tried the traditional value strategies that the law of large numbers set in.
You can sort by date in a google search. Click on "Show Options" just below the search field, and about 15 lines down in the left bar, "Sorted By Date."

I think it's a fairly recent feature, but it's there.
No, I'm not looking for a programmer in either of those cities. I was just testing it out, to see if I could give it anything that wouldn't invite me to sign up and search.

I just didn't notice the number to the right, and clicked the "Show Results" button each time. After I read your reply I tried it again, this time looking for AJAX updates across the entire page, and I saw it. I think I would have found it on my own had the "Display Search Results" button been disabled or hidden when no results were found.
I don't think there's more risk of "algos gone wild" than there is of manipulation and malevolence, as there has been forever.

Software bugs combined with human error are a source of danger though, such as in the infamous Japanese trading disaster (someone transposed the size-- 1-- and price-- ~600000 yen-- on a short-sell of an IPO, effectively giving away more shares than existed). The fail was not so much that the clerk put in a bad order, but that the exchange software wouldn't let the firm cancel it, leaving them to eat $225m in losses.
Since Facebook has the ability to asynchronously measure the amount of time the page is open (rather than just the amount of time you're actively requesting new pages) I expect this number somewhat overestimates the amount of time that people are actually focusing on Facebook.

I leave email clients, twitter, etc open a lot. By the raw numbers, it could be said that I spend more than half of my waking life using an email client.
Take that one step further and I might agree. People who have a high rank on "his website" might would make for good job candidates. Not all programmers may be good at communication or teaching, or any of the behaviors stack overflow, server fault promote. But I agree with the site's founders that they are positive skills to posses. It's not exactly hubris thinking that people active in a programming community might make for good job candidates.
They were testing it back then, but now it seems they are launching it to everyone. However, gotta clear caches in Safari to see it.
Heh. As a telecommuter, I like how it has the telecommuter box checked by default. :)
That the hackerne.ws domain is what gets indexed is so fucking ridiculous:

1) Some cretin camped on a domain and didn't have the courtesy to do a 301
2) PG is an asshole and ignores the Host header. HTTP/1.1 was a decade ago!
3) Google is a jackass and prefers a low-pagerank domain.
Maybe some asshat used Feedburner to proxy RSS via that domain?
A gold mine for StackOverflow