skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
There are so many inaccuracies here that it can only be described as "fiction."

1. You often mix The Fed with the Board of Governors of the Fed. These are distinct. And the Board of Governers is definitely part of the government. It's an independent agency. Other indy agencies? NASA. The CIA. EPA. FEC. FCC. Dozens of them.

2. The Fed Chairman is part of the Board of Governors. All of them are appointed by the President and confirmed by the Senate. Definitely not appointed by the "CEOs of the regional Fed banks." There is a term limit. And one of those Governors is appointed (again, by the Prez, and confirmed by the Senate) to be Chairman.

3. New paper notes are created when the Fed purchases T-bills from the Tres. Dept. Yes, the Gov't pays interest on these notes. And yes, that is in general the mechanism of inflation. But it is _nowhere near_ the 5% you cited. And yes, that makes a very big deal. At no time is the value of money controlled by anybody enough that they could just will it to be reduced. And it's very easy to rail on Inflation when you don't concede that deflation would cause even more fiduciary problems. Inflation is worst for lenders. Deflation is worst for debtors. There are for more debtors in my family than there are lenders. How about yours?

4. The federal reserve is not the source of concentrated wealth in this country. Wealth was far more concentrated during the "free banking era" in the 19th century when there was no federal central bank.

It's easy to riff on this stuff. Easy to bash big biz and big gov't. And they have serious flaws. But if our Government is going to borrow money to fund it's operation, I'd rather it borrows 90% of that debt from our own banks (eg The Fed) than from foreign banks. People act like China funds our debt. No. The Fed does. Our biggest lender is ourselves. I'll take that over the opposite.

It could be reformed, though. And the House banking reform bill passed a few days ago is a good start. Not nearly good enough, but a good start.
it's also REALLY slow, especially on startup.
Your goal is picked based on what makes you happiest (your utility function). You don't pick your utility function, all you pick is your strategy for maximizing it.

For example, smart indian girls make me happy. Perhaps dumb blondes make you happy. Is it irrational for us to choose different goals based on these facts?

What rational argument and evidence do you think could change my emotional reaction to one type of girl (or food, preference concerning temperature) over another?
Oh, I wasn't thinking it was plagiarized, just that the advice is so generic that it could apply to either startups or bigcos. In fact, it so approximates the worst of this annoying genre that I wonder if it is a parody.
StackOverflow Backup Policies
And just to make that even more obvious, that would be a good thing.
The Twitter deal is supposed to improve search results. Ignoring the competition, they could calculate if people search more because of the presence of real-time results, and how much ad revenue do these searches generate. Given their $2 billion/month revenues, a 0.1% increase on that is $2 million/month.

Taking competition into account, neither Google nor Bing can afford not to show real time search results given that their competition does. If real time turns out to be important for users, they can prefer one or another search engine based on its presence. Also it gives the search engines exposure to such data so that they can learn how to use it.
Very good, really. I am tweeting a link to it right now.
Business Intelligence does not Come From a Product
> Xenon is a noble gas and therefore volatile

This must be some definition of "volatile" I'm not familiar with.
With as much VC they've raised, they certainly better figure out a better way of monetizing their traffic. $140M by 2014, which would be something like ten years in business, with $70M in VC?

This is hardly exceptional.
At least with nuclear power the byproducts are stored in nearly-indestructible containers. Where are the byproducts of coal-fired generation stored?
I seriously do not want anything like that in my search results. It'd be full of spam instantly.

I disagree. I use google because it's clean and quick. Feature creep is a sure fire way to die if you get it wrong. Sure, they should have a dedicated 'real time' search thing, like they have for blogs/news etc.

If Google do get dragged down by Bing into tit for tat features etc, it'd be a great time for a search engine startup to do what Google did at the start.
I just posted the essay:

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=993253
Going through the list of bugs (http://jhop.me/ie8-bugs) I'm surprised at how many Microsoft has stated they have no plans on fixing.
Obituary: MIT's "foremost academic economist of the 20th century"
I think you missed this part:

"The really scientific thinker does the same thing as these illiterate persons, but on a larger scale. Although he has need of much knowledge, and so must read a great deal [...]"
You should learn Scheme, and then Haskell or an ML language (OCaml would be my choice.) Clojure is a "subset" of Scheme/Lisp, so if you learn Scheme or Lisp (as in Common Lisp), you basically know Clojure, plus some extra stuff that Clojure can't do because it lacks proper tail calls.
I was in college (U of M) and going to windsor with a friend the night before spring break to visit the casino (a bit of a novelty at the time and more fun than Ann Arbor when most of the campus was vacant). He had loaded his car (he had his video game system and guitar in the back, ready to drive home to Ohio the next day)...

Just as we were pulling up to the checkpoint, I got a call from someone I hadn't heard from in a long time. In about 5-10 seconds I said, "Great to hear from you let me call you back in a few minutes". That overlapped by about 3 seconds with the guard's question "What's your citizenship".

I said "US Citizen". The guard said, "Why are you on teh phone when I'm talking to you?" I said, "I'm sorry about being on the phone, I just got a call from someone I hadn't heard from in a long time and wanted to answer and say I'd call back".

The guard reached over and stuck something under the wiper and directed us to drive into the search bay.

Then, two surly men in uniform walked up and started hyper-aggressively asking questions. I explained that I thought I'd offended the previous guard b/c I'd been on the phone, and that we were just going for a routine visit to the casino.

The guards then ordered us to get out of the car and began searching the car. They found my friend's video game system and guitar and acted as if this was highly suspicious. We explained that it was the night before spring break and that he had those things ready to bring home with him the next day and that they would be coming back to the US with us later.

The guards proceeded to ask a lot more questions with voices raised, etc. Then they informed us that were were going to have to go back to the US. I said, "That's bullshit" in a firm voice. One of the guards came quickly toward me, so I jumped back into the car and locked the door. He roiled for a few seconds and then said, "I'm not going to hit you".

I then waited for a moment until he backed away and got back out of the car and said, "Ok, you are making a mistake, we are harmless" etc.

We then returned to the US and looped back around to re-attempt crossing, but the license plate had been flagged and we were ordered to leave again without being searched.

The next day I called the Canadian border control office and explained to the supervisor what had happened. He said something along the lines of "How do I know you're telling the truth?" and hung up. He obviously didn't care.

The next time I went to Canada I asked a few people who worked in tourism related shops just inside the Canadian border if my experience was typical. They told me that the job of border guard appeals to the sort of people who enjoy getting into fights, etc. and that they take the job to "blow off steam".

If the supervisor had expressed the slightest concern, etc., I'd attribute it to a random bit of bad luck or misunderstanding, but I think the reality is that excesses/abuses happen all the time. I was ultimately only verbally abused, harassed, and turned away... fortunately the guard who came at me was prevented from acting on his impulse to get physical by my retreat into the car.
Was this ever reproduced properly?

I remember in my first year of physics some people had taken this experiment has class project. No one was able to reproduce that "effect".
Aren't nanotubes weren't as carinogenically toxic as asbestos?
Catering to the ignorant doesn't encourage non-ignorance.
Until we know what their margins are, saying that $140m/year in revenue is unexceptional seems a hard statement to justify. With just 60 employees at, say, $100k/yr each, their staffing overheads are $6m. That leaves a lot of headroom for huge hardware and operational costs with a hefty profit margin -- GOOG's is 20%, so they could be spending $100m/year on hardware and still beat that.

I'm no financial expert, but it seems like that would be a pretty great business.

Of course, I've no idea where $140M/year is coming from. "A few million per month" x {Google,Bing} => $4M/month => $48m/year, which is probably still nice and profitable.
"The plural of anecdote is data" - worth reading, linguistic fun but good point
"JavaScript is a very nice dynamic object-oriented general-purpose programming language. "

No it isn't. Javascript is a toy language for making animated menus on web pages. No one should use it for anything real.
He had inadvertently (...) stumbled on a great truth about health: exercise helps you live longer.

Er, maybe he might have been the first to demonstrate scientifically the link between lack of exercise and specific illnesses. However, the ancient Greeks already knew that physical exercise leads to good health.
Is Facebook unethical, clueless or unlucky?
I really think it is some kind of publicity stunt from the prosecution and won't hold in court.

However if I was in charge of google, and my executives were found guilty I would have my side of the story translated and displayed instead of any google service for all .it users. Avoid further risk.
Ah. Wonderful. I see now. Thanks a lot =]
Google has become a snake that too readily consumes its own keyword tail
Well, you can argue RT is more prone to spam because there is less (recent) data and therefore spam filtering is harder. However, with Twitter/social networks the accounts have reliable authorship/history and you can exploit that for filtering... basically rank higher the pieces of data from old accounts that didn't spam before. I wouldn't say spammers have inherent advantage for real time.

Google has been pretty good in figuring out what to include in their "universal" search, I guess their quality control will notice if RT results are not useful for most people.
Content Farms: Why Media, Blogs & Google Should Be Worried
You're assuming the only value Google gets is the raw data.

Does Google seem like the sort of company that stops with raw data?

Or do they seem like a company that will squeeze every tiny little bit of information out of that raw data?

There's MUCH more value in Twitter's firehose than the literal tweets.

Google will extract it.
I always thought it would be cool but now I am not so certain.

Going 55 days without net access would be a deal breaker for me.
And I posted about it months ago while it was still going on:

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=746791
Where do you go to school? I'm a college student who's looking for a co-founder as well. Shoot me an email at dzlobinsky [at] gmail.
> people who don’t write, are people who don’t think.

Pfft... In protest, I won't even bother to write a retort to this unsubstantiated claim.

I'll just think it.
Four score and seven eons ago, Yahoo! paid Google to power their search results and we know how that played out.

And now Google is paying Twitter to power their real-time search results? If I were Biz Stone, I'd be cheerful too.
That's not how fractional reserve banking works.
...but now I have no idea which is actually true.
I sincerely wished that 'wontfix' is a thing that only applied to closed source software. The number of 'wontfix' known bugs out there in the open source world is beyond counting, and in some pretty popular applications too. I don't really understand the rationale behind the whole 'wontfix' thing, essentially it is giving the finger to the user that took the time and trouble to report a bug.

Another pet peeve is to relable things that are clearly bugs as 'request for enhancement'.

The degree to which users have become conditioned to accept the presence of bugs in production software is no doubt a part of this, but there is also a serious lack of pride in workmanship on the part of the coding community.

No doubt every piece of software I ever wrote contains bugs, but if you point one out to me I won't rest until it is squashed.
I use pre-commit to check if I've left any software breakpoints in my code. Very handy.
What boggles my mind is that people will work for $20/video, $15/article, or 8 cents to proof a headline. OTOH the video guy has shot 40,000 videos. I would like to think that, even with all this crap at the bottom, there will still be room for good, creative sites that deliver meaningful content.
PageRank needs to get a lot smarter.
I think the assertion has some merit in as far as writing allows us to communicate our thoughts with a higher level of precision.

It's relatively easy to have a vague idea about something but it's a different matter to explain it with well reasoned arguments.

With programming it is the same. It is sometimes easy to conceptualize the steps required to solve a particular problem or implement a particular algorithm but when the time comes to translate it to program code it can be more difficult as we have to think about all the little details.
You have to think to write. But you don't have to write to think.
The top search results for "Dishwasher" are EnergyStar and ConsumerSearch, followed by major manufacturers and retailers (ie Best Buy), followed by How Stuff Works.

The top search result for "washing machine" is ConsumerSearch. The second and third results are spam. The fourth is Wikipedia.

The top search results for "dryer" are the same as "dishwasher", but in a slightly different order.

The top search results for "refrigerator" are the same as "dryer", but in a slightly more vendor-friendly order. Again, no spam.

No spam on the first SERP for "microwave oven", either.
It's funny, I was going to point out in the essay that I think the exact opposite of what you said above: You have to write to think, but just because you write, doesn't mean you've had big thoughts. It's necessary, but not sufficient.
Thanks for telling that story. I thought it was very informative and please don't think my following comments are demeaning it in any way. I'm simply trying to add a little context.

I think it's safe to assume that border guards are not going to be educated and treat you with the same courtesy as the concierge at the local Hilton. This is a dull, monotonous, and repetitive job that only gets interesting if international felons or terrorists show up. Add to this the natural inclination of guards to begin to mistreat/abuse people in their care. Plus these fellows are armed and have the full force of the law on their side.

There was a great link put up on another branch. I would encourage everyone to take a look at some of this information: http://www.flexyourrights.org/

The site's main message? You have to know exactly where the lines are and how to play the game when you're dealing with people in authority. Even then, you can expect to be mistreated on occasion. No, they do not care about you. You are just a number. They play this game all day long and know all the rules. You can either understand how it works or be very surprised at times.

And just so I'm really clear on this: I do not like this and am pretty ticked that it's this way. But that doesn't make reality change, and we have to live in reality whether we like it or not.
I'm not convinced that it was the "Golden Child" who instigated the change, and that the "adult supervision" failed to stand up and object. My impression of dotcom execs is they're generally more rapacious, unethical and greedy than any founder.
To paraphrase their quote re: Impossible Mission - "Play a while - play forever!"
Ask HN: Finding good interns?
Recently, I've been thinking a lot about how small software companies have trouble finding good interns. I was hoping some people could share their experiences looking for interns.

Two big questions:
-How did you approach finding them?
-Did you suffer from either a lack of applicants or did you receive lots of applications but not very many "qualified" ones

-thanks
the ancient Greeks already knew that physical exercise leads to good health.

Exactly. One can go even further back to the Chinese, etc:

http://www.unm.edu/~lkravitz/Article%20folder/history.html
I suspect the author of this piece is generalising from one example

http://lesswrong.com/lw/dr/generalizing_from_one_example/

The author probably does not possess the mental traits required to formulate big ideas without the need to write them down but I'm sure there are those that do. Of course writing ideas down is probably a useful technique for everyone and it is almost a necessity if you want anybody else to act on those ideas.
You usually have to make a lot of marks on some physical medium in order to have highly developed thoughts. They might not be writing - they might be diagrams, or equations. I doubt there are many physics Nobel winners who didn't use up a lot of chalk, or pencil, or ink. This is not to say that there are no exceptions, just that it's a pretty strong generality.
When the problem is limited to highly populous areas like New York and Chicago and the phones work better if not flawlessly in suburbs and smaller cities the network most definitely is the problem.
I get much better AT&T coverage away from San Francisco. And AT&T customers not on iPhones don't seem to have the same level of complaint. (Lower expectations, or better on-phone radio-link-management?)

Perhaps it's a little of both: AT&T's network is somewhat thin and overloaded exactly where media and tech-influentials most notice, and the iPhone is more fragile when facing that than other devices.
This also means that you can write web apps in Clojure and deploy them on one of the many Java-based web platforms - that is, its reasonably easy to get your Clojure (or rather, JVM) based web app out there.

Including App Engine (and thus you can also write bots for Wave) http://elhumidor.blogspot.com/2009/04/clojure-on-google-appe...
I'll sue you if you use my common-sense JavaScript tests
I don't really understand the rationale behind the whole 'wontfix' thing

There are lots of legitimate reasons for labeling something "wontfix": backward compatibility, conformance to standards, not actually or unambiguously wrong behavior, and so on. Whether the majority of "wontfix" bugs fall into these categories isn't clear, but it's not all a matter of giving the user the finger: in my experience, most reported issues are not actually bugs.
My parent and grandparent comments exemplify the true nature of the situation -- that writing and thinking are correlated, but there is no causation between them.

Writing stimulates thought. Thought stimulates writing. One does not necessitate the other.
An inaccurate list of the most popular Tumblr blogs
The article is not about content scraping, it's about mass generation of low quality content. Read the Wired article they linked and it will open your eyes. http://www.wired.com/magazine/2009/10/ff_demandmedia/all/1

(Of course, the demise of quality on the internet began with the creation of AdSense by Google in the first place.)
Some other gems by David Mark

http://groups.google.com/group/comp.lang.javascript/browse_f...

http://groups.google.com/group/comp.lang.javascript/browse_t...
Programmers can code to think. Illustrators can draw to think. Musicians can play to think.

One can think without writing, coding, drawing or playing. But putting your thoughts into form makes a huge difference because it lets one build.
People say they'd rather Bing won - but Microsoft isn't innovating at the pace of Google, so I know where I'd rather my custom (including buying adverts) would go - Google.
Stack stats
Every smart phone I've owned, mostly T-mobile Sidekicks and now an iPhone, has had slightly worse reception than a 'normal' phone on the same network. So I take it as a given that the iPhone trades a bit of reception strength for better battery life, but not to the point of dropped calls. Those fall strictly on AT&T shoulders in my eyes.
Prime Links - http://primes.utm.edu/links/programs/ - doesn't have anything about Leapfrog.

On Ubuntu, if you install bsdgames, "primes" can generate a list of primes up to (checks) 2^32 (4.29 billion & change).

djb's primegen - http://cr.yp.to/primegen.html - goes up to 1000000000000000 (10^15).
Yeah, I agree with you. I didn't get into it in the article because I was trying to be succinct, but you're right.
To write anything beyond random characters, you have to think. The amount of thought can vary, indeed, depending on what you are writing. Even if you wrote the word "dog"--there are some units of thought(concious or subconcious) involved.

On the other hand, we think without the physical act of writing all the time.
Which is why I discuss them with my close friend who is a hard intellectual opponent. No writing required.
Thus my emphasis on have. You can do all of that to stimulate thinking. But you don't have to.

On the other hand, you have to think to write(anything other than random letters, though even that might require some thought).
But as soon as you search for a specific model, the spam gets out of control. Try to find a review on a particular model, or whether it's comparatively good, and you'll get very little material but tons of price shopper sites and other spammy reviews sites.
In other words, the author wants a magazine (= newspaper - news + articles). Published daily (or rather, nightly.)

I'm not saying this is impossible, but I believe that there are good reasons for there being no well-known examples of this model.
"Speaking of Github, I'd love for them to implement pre-commit hooks, because then you could prevent developers from making commits any time the build is broken, which prevents people from ignoring problems in a large code base and just tunneling on building their one little feature. Right now if you want to implement this, you need to setup your own source control repository that can talk to the continuous integration system."

What? No! The whole point of git is a commit should be cheap. If you start restricting commits when the build is broken then you might as well be using Subversion.
Nice story, but how do you then explain the massive numbers of women in sociology/anthropology/English lit? The pay is even worse in those fields.

Because they are easier with more human interaction. Especially if your goal is an MRS degree, you might as well choose an easier major.

If you are going to earn 40k a year as a teacher or secretary or perhaps a marginally higher 45k with a career in science, the choice is obvious to many.
Interns are college students. College students can be kind of dumb about job searching... for the most part, they will tend to apply to the companies who come on campus, and ignore the companies that don't. Pick one or two campuses and go all out to recruit there and you'll find some. There are some colleges that have a particularly high concentration of good CS students: UIUC, Stanford, Rose Hulman, Waterloo, and MIT are all good bets.

For a whole BOOK about recruiting on campus:

http://www.amazon.com/Recruit-Die-Business-Young-Talent/dp/1...
I don't think taking dictation would qualify as thinking in the sense meant by this article. Pretty much any action a human could undertake would qualify if that was the case.