skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
There are more than two reasons a user might upvote another user's post.

Some of the many situations one might click the up arrow:

- to thank others for posting to one's thread in order to create a positive feedback loop

- to increase visibility of what a user wrote or submitted

- to display agreement with points made in the submission

- to "save" the submission for future reference, as users can track what they've upvoted in the past

- to promote a specific idea or ideology
The 'problem' of claiming site/post ownership could be solved with public key cryptography. However, so far, no one's bothered to do so.
If all the world were diabetic, the edge would be to the one with the insulin, no?
Although I'm guilty of making an occasional witty one liner, I generally down-mod them from the outset to try to discourage them. It seems like some others do as well.
I'm repeatedly miffed that these articles admire rich people for giving money away, but they never recognize the good that they do for society in making the money in the first place. There's almost an implicit assumption that business is a necessary evil that we have to endure to enjoy the goodness of philanthropy.
I was a finalist in The Daily WTF programming contest:

http://dennisferron.blogspot.com/2007/06/that-contest-i-didn...
SXSW: Web Awards Winners
Lessons Learned Running a Software as a Service (SaaS) Business
Meet Kyte: This Year's Twitter
Actually we're doing that... If you hear about our company in 5 - 6 years, that means it worked!
Yes, in general, simplicity in design is good, but I agree that 37signals takes it a step too far by deciding what their customers need or don't need.

Attitudes aside, it's great that they are successful.I understand the concept of forced scarcity through limited features and staffing, but I don't agree with their attitude with their customers.

Sure, 92% of their customers are happy with them, they provide a month to month service, the unhappy ones left long ago.
Instance variables, class variables, and inheritance in Ruby
I noticed at the toolator website there were advertisements for software to hide and change the ip address!
Is an RSS feed available?
When I submitted this post I was going to add a cautionary comment regarding the political content of it. Leaving aside the politics I liked the point made in the article. I don't particularly care about Obama or Clinton and who got what votes in what state. So I'd prefer not to discuss that aspect.
So I'd prefer not to discuss that aspect

Then don't. Problem solved.
This article was rather pointless...
Well, her posture is awful.
maybe this 'journalist' has a book coming out and would like to raise more publicity about herself in order to get some interest in her book.

seems to be working quite well seeing as this 'news' is posted on a lot of major tech sites.
It's not the Golden Retrievers fault it's coded to retrieve every piece of crap that hits the ground.
How This Economy Is Going To Play Out
His annual predictions for 2007 achieved 61.5% ( http://www.pbs.org/cringely/pulpit/2008/pulpit_20080104_0037... ).
Uhm, wouldn't this have been more appropriate a week and a half ago? Little late now...
These single serving sites always get dead'd.

http://www.kottke.org/08/02/single-serving-sites
For a more "developer" oriented discussion of the same topics, I recommend the OWASP Top 10:

http://www.owasp.org/index.php/Top_10_2007

another great resource is RSnake's blog:

http://ha.ckers.org
I wonder how this compares with the Io language, which is also a (partial) descendant of Smalltalk and Self?
Op-Ed: The Con of the Information Age
"In order to view the Kyte website, you will need the following:

1. JavaScript enabled.

>>2. If using Internet Explorer, ActiveX must be enabled<<

3. Version 9.0.98 (or greater) of Flash"

that's a serious weakness if they want early adopters...
Apple fanboy embarasses himself. Film at 11.
Hacked: Top 10 security mistakes
I've tested that particular version of Opera and it didn't feel any faster than firefox. It probably doesn't matter much, though. All browsers (that fully support javascrpit) I've tried were very slow.

I don't get why it's so slow. Aren't there efficient ways to execute javascript? I mean, GUIs in python, perl and other interpreted languages aren't nearly as slow as a javascript GUI, like gmail's e-mail client. What's going on here?
I haven't been a part of a startup, but I'm at a company that's been reorganizing around an agile methodology, paying some lip service to "self-organizing teams." I think one of the problems with doing this is that if this methodology is imposed from the top down, you get the sense that this is "just a bunch of crap that management is making us do". So I think a good idea would be to have the team figure out how they want to do this reorganization (possibly suggesting the kind of atmosphere you're going for). That way they will have some stake in making this work, because it was partially their idea.

Secondly, in a startup, in an early stage, it's a couple guys in a garage, and there is no management. That means if it's like a startup, it's a problem to try and factor you as a manager into the equation. So you should make a deal up front what kind of management you will do. Just keeping upper management off their backs? Or will you be on the team yourself in some capacity?
Making money is not the same as creating wealth. I generally admire people more for the wealth they create than the money they accumulate.
No offense intended, but I challenge your claim that Javascript is slow.

I've seen (and worked on) incredibly complex javascript that is also very fast. It's a matter of writing efficient code, and avoiding some of the "pitfalls" of specific browser implementations.
Parents are sometimes mistaken, so strategies that rely on the parent being right in all disputes result in some avoidable mistakes. I want policies for how to live that function reasonably well even for people who have flaws and sometimes act unreasonably (aka everyone). In other words, one of the major features I look for in a philosophy of education, or of life in general, is resilience to errors. So far, I think we are in agreement.

But you seem to have brought up your own imperfection as a point of possible disagreement. I'm guessing that has more to do with this other issue:

The fundamental issue is that if you can't persuade someone of your ideas, that is a bad reason to force him.

Here your comments about different ways people can be unreasonable are important. If a problem is due to someone's ignorance then it makes sense that good ideas can solve the problem. Ideas clearly are capable of reducing ignorance.

If it's a problem of akrasia, lack of self control, emotions run wild, or solidly entrenched bad ideas, then what to do is less clear. What if the person, adult or child, won't listen to reason? If what he wants isn't based a reasoned decision then why would reason change his mind?

I have some answers to those questions. But first I want to check in to see if you agree so far, and if this is the sort of question you are interested in.

PS FYI I might potentially be able to give a more helpful reply in private; I try to avoid personal comments in public about both myself and others.
Software that makes software better
Cool story, but don't run your startup like that.

If you do, you will deliver perfect software, years too late, that nobody wants.
The parts involving Goto Dengo were for me the most interesting.
If normal software buyers were as averse to defects as NASA, all software development would probably be like this. However, normal customers tend to prefer more features and overlook defects (relatively speaking).
If the whole interview was like this then the article blows this way out of proportion.
the way to accumulate money is:

you create wealth. you give it to other people in exchange for money -- for promises to pay you back in wealth later. then accumulating money means you don't call in those promises, you just hold on to them. as long as you do that, other people got wealth you created, and you haven't gotten anything back yet. (well of course you spent some money, but the more you accumulate, the less you've asked in return for what you did)
I want a billionaire friend >_>

Let's team up. How about you become a billionaire and I'll keep working on befriending you.
Where can I see this video?
Young Entrepreneur's Help
Same requirements as YouTube, basically.
"Despite what many people may think, academia and science are not a game. "

Wait; all that over/under stuff on the Fields Medal betting is a scam?

Damn.
Yes, I suspect the author and 37signals are in violent agreement.
If you read that article, you'd think that drugs are the only way to enhancing brain performance... I enhance my brain all the time, but with exercise instead of drugs.

The article seems to be based on the premise that unless you take drugs you can't do anything about the performance of your brain, when there's a wealth of research indicating otherwise. Maybe if people didn't have the misconception that intelligence is something fixed and innate, they would actually try to train their brain instead of taking drugs?
minus IE
I couldn't get read past the author's picture. Impossible to take him seriously. He's like a self caricature.
300 machines ? nice! btw,did u use distributed erlang.and how do u make sure they unique ?
More Monads on the Cheap: Inlined fromMaybe
IE's not a requirement.
Actually he's the most hacker-like journalist I've met. So it's just as well you can't see the people on this site, or you'd have the same problem with most of them.
"If substance X is supposedly so beneficial, why doesn't the body manufacture it by itself?"

Well, it does. Many nootropic drugs work either by stimulating the production of, or blocking the absorption of, otherwise normally occurring brain chemicals.

I believe, for example, that methylphenidate (Ritalin) stimulates the production of dopamine, while bupropion (Wellbutrin) blocks dopamine reuptake.

I used to do a fair amount of wetware hacking, and one of the concerns was avoiding the crash that comes when your brain is depleted of one or another chemical.

One path to a better brain, then, is to feed it the material it needs to produce the more interesting (noradrenalin, dopamine, etc.) stuff.
‘Snow Day’ at the Beijing Olympics
I would tell them good luck, but its not going to happen. Trying to create a startup mentality within a corporation is like trying to create a festive mood at a wake. It comes down to motivations. Early stage startup founders are motivated because the rewards for being successful are potentially high, and the cost of failure is at worst some ego and time wasted.

Some corporations try to instill a startup mentality in their employees by letting them propose product ideas and by doing some of the implementation on company time. I'm not sure how they reward these employees, and I'm not sure how motivated these employees would remain if they come up with a million dollar idea, but only get a $50 gift card for their troubles.

In the end there is no substitute for a real startup.
Even with all the free time, people don't seem so happy. Some stats on depression:

http://www.upliftprogram.com/depression_stats.html

(what's with all the pill popping pre-schoolers?)
you're right again =)

I got by hit crappy javascript and my inability to click on 'try again'... I should get back to actually working...
"You are essentially looking for someone to invest in your company, but to buy their shares with labor instead of cash. So you need someone who is 1) financially able to make such an investment, 2) a savvy enough investor to be able to assess whether or not your company is worth investing in (or foolish enough to make the investment without due diligence) and 3) able (and willing) to program. "

Dead on.

I heard this observation from a designer who had been asked to take on a contract for stock. From his point of view it was the same as being paid cash, then turning around and investing all that money in that company. And, base on what (little) he knew, there was no clear reason to think it would be a sound investment; it was pretty much a crap shoot.

Put another way, if you simply had that cash lying around, would you invest it in that start-up?
He argued that in academics and sports, increased performance due to chemical abuse will pressure the non abusers to do the same. This is bad if the abuse is bad for the user.

I'm echoing the idea that increased production doesn't necessarily entail increased happiness due to second order effects.

One scenario: a lot of those WoW players can play so much because their parents have worked very hard. But, they play so much because they don't have good relationships with their parents, since their parents spent so much time working hard.

Then there is the issue of whether the level of production is sustainable, and what happens to a society dependent upon such activity if it stops or slows. Also, what kind of class attitudes develop with the societal stratification.
Are We In A Recession Right Now?
> Unlike the often-misplaced cell phone, it can't be called so you can locate it by ring

Am I the only one here who would just SSH into their computer and play a sound file? It does have wireless... although it might be asleep.
Microsoft wary on Yahoo integration
Making money is not the same as creating wealth.

If you are referring to the fed or anybody who happens to having a high-end printer with a 20 dollar TIFF loaded, yeah.
Canada warns US over oil sands
Why Apple Will Dominate Next Gen Computing
Can you provide a specific link?
Hmm...sure, as soon as you give me the money!

It would be interesting to be a venture capitalist though. I could fairly easily save up enough to pay for someone's ramen, and I know at least one directionless hacker. Now all I need is a killer idea!
If i were Rose, i would've sold last year or perhaps even around the time when he was all hyped up on the cover of businessweek. As far as I can see, digg doesn't really have any real content besides its collection of asinine comments that it's accumulated now and links to LOLCATS images.

No offense, the same model seems to be working at hacker news here - but digg has gone beyond it's useful life. It's one of those things where the community has exceeded it's critical mass and wisdom of the crowds eventually becomes a really dumb idea.
>digg has gone beyond it's useful life

If you're looking for intellectual discourse it has. But if you have 10 minutes to kill at work, it can be really entertaining. It's more educational than primetime network TV, if nothing else.
My point in the article is also that we can and need to do better (maybe not clearly explained ;), but it is my belief that using the "engineering" metaphor will hold us back. A lot of people, maybe even most, believe that we should improve ourselves by becoming "more like engineers". For example by using Formal Methods etc. This might be true for a small number of projects, but it is my believe that for most software projects, as software developers we need to become "less like engineers".

"Engineering is the application of technical knowledge to solve problems.", therefore, engineers try to gain as much technical knowledge as possible to solve their problems. In my opinion software development should evolve to require less and less technical knowledge, that way we can spend more effort on the real problem: mapping the problem domain into a clear software representation. Developing software should evolve closer towards the human side, and not towards the technical side. And so far, programming languages for example have evolved in that direction.
How about a web 2.0 site for parents (large potential audience) with social features that tells them that their ideas about parenting are deeply mistaken. That's bound to be a big hit.
Ask YC:how do you do Sessions on EC2?
I have been thinking of implementing a replacement session handler for PHP you can see more here.

http://us3.php.net/session_set_save_handler

my custom version would be for ec2 s3 and or simpleDB so that I can do RRDyDNS and have session state stored between server instances for load balancing.

I was wondering what the crowd thought, and how some of you might be tackling the sessions problem on ec2? DB?
Secrets of Superstar Employers
I thought it wasn't time spent actually in javascript - it was the DOM manipulation that was the cause of any real "slowness".
Transform Your Website Into a Sales Powerhouse
Sara Lacy speaks out after criticized Mark Zuckerberg interview
Spirit of the Entrepreneur
Ask YC: how is SimpleDB?
I am wondering how simpleDB compares to making S3 calls or a MySQL call on a separate EC2 instance.
if someone will pay for what u have, it might be valuable
ThruDB accelerate aws.S3 or other cross system calls
Why FriendFeed is the next big thing
It's sad that Microsoft felt the need to sell another OS. They CAN put out decent software, when they put in the requisite development time and energy. The windows machines I work on are Windows XP SP 1, which I think was kind of the last decent MS OS. And you know what? At the risk of drawing some ire, it's pretty good. For 99% of what I need to do, it Just Works. And with good anti-spyware, anti-virus tools, I don't have any problems with malware.

Really, I think that most of the problems with Vista can be traced to Microsoft thinking that they needed to make grand, sweeping changes, when they had a perfectly serviceable operating system already. It's like reinventing the wheel and starting by saying "okay, we've done the 'circular' thing, what other shapes could we use?"
I disagree that one needs an implicit assumption that "business is a necessary evil" to admire what people like Feeney do. One simply needs to believe that charity is a virtue. Virtue on such a large scale as this is admirable.

Regardless of what one things of capitalism, wealth-creation, etc. one can still admire Mr. Feeney for his philanthropic activities.
eh... She dropped the ball in the last quarter of that, but I think he could have tossed a lifejacket instead of watching her drown.
What I really like about this is that this is open source doing cutting edge stuff that will benefit people everywhere. There's not a hint of "me too", "microsoft replacement" here. The promise of open source in full force.

This is the kind of thing that even 10 years ago would have been barricaded behind dozens of patents and royalties to the point of being unusable; just another technical oddity that no one could afford to use. A few would have been donated to token disabled folks for publicity and then that would have been the end of it.

Here's the link to get it and try it out, sans RTFA.

http://www.inference.phy.cam.ac.uk/dasher/
That's what I would call first-order wealth (i.e. basic goods or services). It's the equivalent of the fish you give (or perhaps sell) that allows someone to eat for a day. Getting rich that way is a matter of knowing how much to charge and how much to spend so that you accumulate a surplus.

The problem with this kind of "wealth" is that it doesn't have much of a network effect.

I admire second-order wealth creators more. This kind of wealth is the knowledge you give (or sell) when you teach someone to fish. This creates the possibility of more first-order wealth without significantly diminishing the seller's wealth (unless the value of the knowledge itself is directly related to its scarcity).

The guy in the original article is clearly a first-order rich guy. While I applaud him for helping worthy causes, I'd admire him more if he were a creator of second-order wealth, perhaps by starting a YC-like company which would help start new companies in that industry.
How to plan humble user-centric web application?
The News.YC headline for this is a touch confusing. When I clicked on it, I thought the OP was summing up the article as "Don't look for startup cofounders." In fact the article is "don't look for cofounders via an unreasonably demanding Craigslist ad."
Reminds me of one of my favorite bash.org quotes:

"<erno> hm. I've lost a machine.. literally _lost_. it responds to ping, it works completely, I just can't figure out where in my apartment it is."

I'm sure as machines become smaller, such events will become more frequent. . . . That is, of course, right up until we start implanting our machines directly in our brains.
I would like to know about your experiences regarding this. thanks in advance.
That's considered to be a bad idea generally.

http://www.socialtext.net/memcached/index.cgi?sessions
Why the heck wouldn't he wait until after the divorce?
From the way it is worded I would bet it is two MBA guys, who never wrote a line of code in their lives (but know a bunch of acronyms), expecting to find a guy, who would build the whole thing singlehandedly for 5% of equity max? Are you freaking kidding me?

This attitude clearly displays no respect for technical abilities involved building a web company from zero. They are looking for a brilliant code monkey who would sit quiet in the corner and code away why they are making the world shattering "business decisions".

In my view they should get to know another acronym: KMA.
The Myth of A Listers and Influencers
Yes, that is what founders do. But you didn't say you were looking for a co-founder who could hack, you said you were looking for a hacker willing to work for equity. These are not the same thing. The distinction is important. Asking for "a hacker who works for equity" (with only a "chance to be part of the founding team") makes it sound like you're looking for someone to be an employee and an investor, but not a member of the senior management team.
Opera for general browsing (js, plugins, etc all disabled by default).

Safari for selective personal transactions (plugins, etc enabled).

Firefox for all work related stuff: Trac, RT, etc.

Camino for playing games and reading xkcd.
Look at amazon, ebay, and walmart -- very useful things to have. Selling lots of 'first-order' goods, cheaply, helps a lot of people tremendously.

It's not clear to me how to judge which is better, but it is clear to me that both are awesome.
http://www.apple.com/retail/macbookair/

In the beginning MBAs were also constantly out of stock and the quoted ship times from the online store weren't pretty. Not so much nowadays. The iPhone release was a lot uglier in terms of availability (and popularity).
This is an epidemic among business types. They very often just don't have the imagination to know whats involved.

You could build a giant rocket, complete with moon lander and robots to build a habitat once it arrived and connect it to a giant red button that said "launch"... You'd still have to tell the MBA what button to push, and after he did, he really would believe that he had single handedly colonized the moon.

All of the engineers would think him a slimy weasel for making such a claim after all of their hard work. He would just think that they were jealous because while he was busy with the hard, visionary work of moon colonization, they just sat around and fiddled with rocket parts all day.
Heroin is processed opium. Opium comes from poppy seeds, and the processing for that is minimal.

Cocaine is made from the coca plant; the leaves of which can be chewed raw for a similar, but markedly weaker, effect.

I doubt tobacco has to be processed to be smoked.

Psilocybin mushrooms require no processing.

Peyote requires no processing.

Alcohol be found naturally from rotting, fermented fruit fallen from trees. There's a video on Youtube of animals getting drunk from eating it.

I'm sure there are several other plants that will get you high that I'm unaware of. Just thought I'd throw a little knowledge out there for anyone who might be interested.
+1 for nano. Nano + syntax highlighting = best light-weight coding tool I've found for C/C++ work.
Gibson, Sterling, Vinge, and later Stephenson each helped take the cyberpunk genre to a new level. That said I think John Brunner's "The Shockwave Rider" deserves more mention then it usually gets and I'm glad it appears in this article.

Brunner wrote many good stories.