aneesh

> RescueTime is too analytics-oriented

Maybe, but what gets measured, gets done.

The used copies of the older first edition are reasonably cheap.

http://www.amazon.com/gp/offer-listing/0387975136/

> Suicide is never the result of outside details, it's a personal disorder.

If you look at the Wikipedia link tokenadult posted, it's clear that there are huge variances both over time (http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/7/72/Hungarian...) and between different countries (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_suicide_ra...).

That strongly suggests that some component of a society does influence the suicide rate. Of course, it's not the only factor, but it is surely a factor.

Ah, I never noticed that :-)

Saying the Putnam is a next step from AMC12 problems is like saying the NBA is a next step from pickup basketball with friends in middle school! There are people who can do Putnam problems for fun, but those people generally know who they are already.

One of my biggest problems with Google Reader is those annoying unread counts. It makes it feel like email you have to get through ... so I quit Google Reader about a year ago, and started using Twitter as my new "Feed Reader". A stream you can check out when you want, and ignore when you don't want, is really nice. Plus, it's easier to whip through 140-character blurbs than paragraphs of text.

Traffic to HN was around 30,000 uniques per day at the end of April (source: http://ycombinator.com/newsnews.html)

I've definitely noticed that effect here on HN, and it doesn't seem so pronounced on many other sites. Here are the first sites I could think of, and they seem pretty flat. Sites like HN and TechCrunch have less content on weekends, so you'd expect a drop-off in traffic.

http://www.alexa.com/siteinfo/facebook.com

http://www.alexa.com/siteinfo/yahoo.com

http://www.alexa.com/siteinfo/msn.com

It's interesting to note the significant drop-off on weekends in Alexa's data.

"But, I see on HN a lot of people whipping up simple webapps and sometimes complex webapps with out any revenue being generated, and just running it for the fun of it"

I really don't think most of the hobby projects are paying anywhere near $100/mo for hosting. Is there something specific about your project that would need a $100/mo webhost?

It's not vaporware. I saw a demo of it several months ago, and I'd bet it's feature complete by now, or close.

There's a webapp based on that at http://dontbreakthechain.com/ (not mine!)

That's not quite correct. They didn't give Apple $46m. The $46m that they're "giving up" is money they would never have had otherwise. The town had 2 choices:

1) Don't give any tax break. Apple will likely go elsewhere, and the town doesn't get any additional tax revenue.

2) Give Apple a break on some fraction of their taxes, amounting to $46m. They will still get some tax revenue from Apple.

It's like saying a store is giving money when it puts a product on sale. The town is just lowering the price to sell more goods.

The UI is really clean, and the workflow seems pretty straighforward. Great job!

The "Add Story" sidebar doesn't render properly for me when hints are enabled (FF 3.5, Windows 7). The submit button is hidden behind the hint bar -- maybe the sidebar could be shorter so it's not covered by the hint.

Test the waters with MIT OCW (http://ocw.mit.edu) and Academic Earth (http://academicearth.org) for lots of lectures & problem sets, and then make the jump if you feel that'll make you happy.

> "Already, I'm confused. Which one of these versions allows me to use all 48 GB of my server's memory? ... Just try to make sense of it all. I dare you. No, I double dog dare you! "

Dare accepted. It's actually right there, 1 click away from the page Jeff linked to: http://www.microsoft.com/windowsserver2008/en/us/compare-spe...

The answer to his question is Enterprise, Datacenter, and HPC.

I recently had to call 911 when I witnessed a highway accident happen. I must've called within 30 seconds, and the operator (I got through without any wait or busy signal) told me they already had several reports of that accident -- within 30 seconds! I was impressed.

I guess it varies by locale.

It's a very cool field, and it's been around for longer than most people would think. Follow @againstthespin on twitter if you want to get my (infrequent) thoughts on the subject. And read Moneyball by Michael Lewis if you want a brilliant writer's thoughts on the subject.

I don't think it is real. I've listened to Gates speak several times, and this piece sounds nothing like him.

I'm a sports fan in general, and a cricket fan in particular. I've been working on a structured data repository for cricket matches to facilitate sabermetric-type analyses.

Repository: http://data.againstthespin.com

Get NDISwrapper: http://sourceforge.net/projects/ndiswrapper/

It will allows you to use the Windows driver for that wireless card.

R is very powerful, but its use is mostly limited to statisticians. So providing a simple interface for people to leverage predictive models built in R is a great idea.

But their sample output (http://predict.i2pi.com/8MjSV2AA) just shows the distributions of all the input variables. I don't actually see any predictions.

Edit: There are no predictions there because there are no "NA"'s in the sample file to predict. You would think they'd create a demo file that would showcase the predictions!

Have they added support for Django models as well?

perfectlygoodideas.com

Bing Travel's design is almost exactly what Farecast -- acquired by MS in early 2008, and part of Live Search -- has had for at least the past year (maybe more, I first visited Farecast about a year ago).

Farecast and Kayak have had a very similar design for quite a while. I'm not sure whose design came first. But to suggest that Bing Travel copied Kayak right now is simply wrong.

The funny thing is, most of this stuff isn't new. The integration is just better.

Cashback launched about a year ago, and has been integrated into the product search for months.

Infinite scroll on images is nice too, but that's been there as long as I can remember.

Farecast (the airfare search engine) was acquired by Microsoft a while back, and was part of Live.

PayPal has a Direct Payment option where the credit card is processed in the background, and the user stays on your page instead of being redirected to PayPal. Essentially, the user doesn't know that PayPal is being used to process their payment. Does Amazon offer something similar?

> "It will be a TAX on every energy consumer in the world ... It won't actually DO anything to fix the environment"

Actually, it will. The use of taxes to influence consumption is well-documented. It's basic economics: price increases, demand decreases (because demand is not completely inelastic). As less products are made, less resources will be used, which helps the environment.

I say work backwards. Instead of thinking how you want to compute the score, think about how you want the distribution of scores to be. Anything you come up with will be fairly arbitrary, so you might as well "game the system" by creating incentives that will cause people to get addicted to increasing their score on your service.

For example, you may want very few people in the 90-100 range (reward the few who reach this high level), very few people in the 0-10 range (don't make people feel bad), and most people below 50. Then come up with a scoring system that fits this distribution. If you find a metric that doesn't quite fit the distribution, tweak it by using a log transform, or by adding to/multiplying everyone's score.

Also, make it simple to understand. If it's some magic formula that people can't understand, they may not engage as much. Make it clear what they need to do to increase their score.

Plenty of times. Sometimes I even submit them and delete them a minute later.

I felt like I had something interesting to say, but when I actually articulated it, it didn't add much to the conversation. If you noticed PG's essay that he wrote with Etherpad, he had entire paragraphs in his draft that didn't make it to the final version.