skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
would it be wise to also include into the algorithm for frontpage ranking, the diversity of sources for HN (if and when it becomes a problem)? Or will determined submitters just circumvent it by proxying the article with another url?
You can't really call vastly different sites the same idea. This train wreck totally misses the "I would show this to my friends design" aspect of the idea:

http://web.archive.org/web/20010202080600/http://amihot.com/

And you've got to admit that the basic idea alone totally carried the hotornot site.
derefr pretty much hit the nail on the head as to the reality of things. See http://money.cnn.com/2008/02/12/smbusiness/patent_website.fs... for the quote from the US PTO. But he didn't explain the logic behind that reasoning. The theory is that patents are given for things that are non-intuitive: in order for a firm to recoup the "sunk costs" of R&D that led to the creation of the patent in the first place.

Second, you don't understand what constitutes suing. You can sue anyone for any reason (with rare exception). I'm just indicating that he'll lose, if all he said was, "Hey, we should have a Google Maps for the sky!" he doesn't stand a snowball's chance in hell of winning.

Third, if he shared patentable information, that doesn't automatically become Google's. Some employers (Radio Shack, for instance) have you sign a contract when you're hired saying that anything you invent as a consequence of your work there belong to them as a result. Some schools require it if you do research there. But if I posted the draft of a patent application to a discussion group, it wouldn't then be available for anyone to try and patent. Even if it's a discussion board at work.
I am not Joe Hewitt. I was in the same YC program as Joe, however, and my name also happens to be Joe.
The Attention Economy
Interesting, thanks!
Erlang - A CEO's View
There are at least three ways to answer that.

First, why?

Second, why doesn't the "sound of silence" count? Many composers utilize silence within a composition for a certain effect. Cage just took that to an extreme.

Third, some would argue that the sound of the audience-performer combination constitutes the 'sound' of the composition in this case--a _musical_ breakdown of the fourth wall. (Which is less cliche as an idea 50 years ago than it is today.)

On the whole, I probably agree with you. But there's a certain richness or fullness available to us after we've thought more rigorously about the questions involved than if we hadn't. (Consider the difference between seeing a sweet hack in a system you barely understand v. seeing a sweet hack in a system with which you're very familiar - the later is a much more profound experience.)
Short summary of the posted link: It's now a commonplace idea that online reputation and attention often translate into real world economic gains. This article (and a similar article the same author wrote for Wired in the early 90s) seems to have been one of the original sources for this idea, and still makes for stimulating reading. Goldhaber also has an interesting blog at http://www.goldhaber.org/
Anyone know the name of the statistical formula he's using to determine the population size, as mentioned in the article?
>Furthermore, Yahoo's board is vulnerable in a proxy fight. Yahoo does not have a staggered board, so all of its directors are up for nomination this year.

Silly Yahoo. They're just asking for a hostile takeover.
I don't see a correlation between disabling JS and tech level personally. Perhaps people who think they are technically sophisticated disable JS...
One option Joel doesn't mention is to use OpenOffice. It has its own object model (called UNO), which has bindings in many languages.

It's not a perfect implementation of the formats, but it's good enough for most things. And has the rather large advantage that you can run it under your favorite *nix.
Scribd’s iPaper Plan
Laid off? Share the pain
Fail Early, Fail Often
Conceptual learning is fine, but you have to memorize some base cases. I don't think about 9 x 9. I just know it's 81. If you have to think about that every time, you'll be so slow at doing anything. At the same time, learn multiplication too. You should know how to do 637 x 59 if you have to.
While there are many problems with the education system, this is why I don't get opposition to vouchers. There are lots of ways to teach. School districts don't adapt to their customers - they use homogeneous systems with at best 1 or 2 levels of differentiation. Wouldn't competition be good?
The interesting part is that with lots of people and no editors, there is a tendency for a concentration of sources. Although I don't see this concentration as being critical (after all, there are not so many "objectively" respectable tech blogs out there), there seems to be a point for regulation, to ensure diversity.

Apart from that, it was amusing to feel Richard MacManus's (open) jealousy over the other tech blogs...
Mozilla launches Mozilla Messaging unit; Can it fix email?
And yet they don't have even one University in Canada listed. I guess you're even lonelier if you're Canadian.
They're using flashpaper on the backend I believe. Or possibly print2flash, which is what we use for uploaded screenplays at massify.com.
It's hard for me to get too wound up about an issue for which there is literally an episode of the Cosby Show.
"Later on, when the children know something about how the toy actually works, they can discuss the more general principles of energy."

So true, and this is why the parents are frustrated. It seems much learning is a process of successive approximations. Not only with adding -> algebra, but more advanced things, like algebra -> number theory or geometry -> calculus. You get to _doing_ some stuff because it _works_, then you realize (or rather, someone brilliant like Leibniz realizes) there's something the same in all of these cases,
I guess you upload your PHP code and it either works or it doesn't. Mosso is Web hosting, not VPS hosting.
Math Education: An Inconvenient Truth (video)
Take a look at this video. You will see why parents think this new textbook is just not good enough. It discusses the 'new math' and textbook mentioned in the video:

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=119317

No wonder kids from other countries are excelling at math...
What choice do they have? Mozilla's strength is in desktop GUIs, so it would be risky to start working on server-side Web 2.0 mail. If Web mail is indeed the only future of mail, then I guess Mozilla should just shut down their mail efforts.
DVD Jon Creates DRM Killer, frees your media with DoubleTwist
Mozilla Messaging Ignores the Web App Trend
I asked them earlier about Django support, and they said that they're adding it in Q3 or Q4 of this year.
I'm not sure how forcing everyone to see every story keeps the quality high

It means the watchdogs will bark when crap stories try to infiltrate the camp.
A very pretty news aggregator
Ontogeny recapitulates phylogeny. Social news sites devolve into top 10 lists.
Chevy Volt: Batteries aren't the problem
Photos of Jakob Nielsen
Jonathan Coulton went from being just another "code monkey" to the Godfather of "Geek Rock."
http://www.useit.com/jakob/photos/jakob_likes_it.jpg
Damn, I wish I wasn't so skeptical in my earlier postings on this thread. The "tools" page link above seemed too good to be true; but it turned out to be true, so does this mean it is that good? I hope so...

I have been playing with Peacock for the last hour and I must say that the last time I had this much fun messing around with any sort of graphics application was way back when I discovered KPT v2.0 back in 1996.

Good job to the team at Aviary and worth1000.com! You definitely have something here.
Make sure you don't miss the US data point.
But the guy was talking about a hide button, not a "hide it before I even see that it is there" (if that's even possible) button. Am I misunderstanding this?
hotmail is one startup people typically cite as an example of this. Sabeer & Jack themselves admit it.

from idea to $400MM acquisition by Microsoft in 18 months.
Domain-Specific Social Applications
"the client would make the mistake of finding someone who would bill for only 2"

Sounds like a self correcting problem. You'd let "someone" have the clients you don't want and end up with only those worth keeping.
Causation, correlation, or coincidence?
i agree with the article -- first mover advantage only carries you once in a blue moon. The biggest successes today were nowhere near the first ones, they just did it better. Google came YEARS after yahoo, lycos, alta vista, and facebook came way after friendster. doing it better is more important than doing it first.
it's a reorg, not a breakthrough. thunderbird is better than outlook and mail.app but not as widely adopted as outlook enterprise. but that's okay, because the announcement wasn't to introduce the outlook killer, it was a REORG.

i also find this prevailing webapp trend idea noxious. we work on machines. that run windows, linux, or mac os x. deal with it.
US States Renamed For Countries With Similar GDPs
NPR: Tech Junkies Crazy About "Getting Things Done"
HoTMaiL = HTML
I used to worry about this until I just decided to not worry about it anymore. Don't have an answer for you, but I'd venture to guess that both numbers are +90% by now. At what point do you just bite the bullet and say, "I'm going to require js to run my app and if they don't have it, oh well."
Brazen Careerist: Answering the toughest interview question
i agree, that would be more precise way to say it
Jacob is one of those people who can improve anyone else's appearance simply by standing next to them. They always look better than he does.

Also, how did I know just by looking at the thumbnail that this one would have "pensive" in the title. Isn't there another word we can substitute here? "Thoughtful," maybe? "Pensive" appears to be the favorite selection for such shots -- to the point of excluding alternatives. :/

http://www.useit.com/jakob/photos/jakob_pensive_big.jpg
Next thing you know those tech junkies will be sniffing crushed OC-80 pills, oh no!
Real talk, that's one user friendly man.
ebay

Once they got traction, a tough space to crack for a decade. Sellers didn't want to go anywhere else because the buyers were there. Buyers didn't want to go anywhere else because the sellers were there. Hard to mess up without monumental screw-ups (but stand by, they are sure to come...)
" Individual attention getters of all sorts will find it ever easier to get attention directly through the Web, without any corporate packaging necessary."

a.k.a Tila Tequila

"In a full-fledged attention economy the goal is simply to get either enough attention or as much as possible. Recall now what I pointed out earlier: if you have a person's full attention, you can get them to perform physical acts, ranging from moving their eyes to follow you, to raising their hands, to applauding, to bringing you a glass of water, to handing you a sandwich, or, as is not uncommon in the case of rock groupies or sports fans, having sex with you (to cite a notorious example)."

Will the next cult arise online? I remember a scene in a Sci-Fi novel (was it Snowcrash) where a online textbook empowered thousands of teenage girls.

Still reading this fascinating article. It puts a dry academic perspective on the madness of Facebook/RockYou/et al.
Snarkless query.

"...all the other components are electrified as well. [...] There is not an established supplier community for this. It's a very complicated system with known technological solutions. But they've never been integrated in these forms."

Could someone familiar with manufacturing explain why this is a problem? I mean, if there are solutions, shouldn't it be just an issue of fitting them together? That doesn't _seem_ all that difficult, from a complete layman's perspective. Enlighten me, please.
Exploring Lisp: Continuing and restarts
This is all semantics. What he's really talking about are companies that gain inertia because they were first to market and companies that were able to disrupt the market, which is altogether an entire different magnitude of success.

So yeah, sure if you can go to market with a great product, launch first, and gain market sure, good for you. If someone else comes by and usurp your position, well... that's just business.
I'm a young Republican and I find myself in great company.
10 points for anyone who can find the 3 G8 countries on the map...
This thread is two days old, but I wanted to put some content in relation to the behaviour of "trolling" to my comment above. I would add being quick to judge as yet another dynamic that adds little value and can cause positive dynamics to devolve. I volunteer myself as an example in the following link:

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=119120

I put forth a great deal of skepticism regarding a product and actually got a response from one of the founding members of the company. It turns out that they actually had a real product that shows a great deal of promise...

This just goes to show that sometimes being quick to judge can have drastic consequences for others. I would argue that this is a form of trolling when a great deal of skepticism mixed with anecdotal information from the past (which has nothing to do with the present as things are more mutually exclusive than we would otherwise like to believe) leads to quick karma points and increased skepticism on behalf of other members.

"I for one welcome our new overlords". Oops wait, wrong context. What I meant to say is that being quick to judge is in many ways similar to the reactionary "comedic lashing out" I was citing in the comedic trolling above and can often times lead to making yourself look foolish at no cost to nobody but yourself (as immortalized by Kent Brockman in the above opening sentence of this paragraph!).

Like the comedic attempts above, this is not something that can be easily controlled. Rather this requires restraint exercised on behalf of the author of any given comment. One thing that I feel works against this all is the fact that the anonymity of the internet often affords people to keep doing what they are doing.

The fact that I'm using my real name online (for the first time mind you) is causing me to respond more deeply to this issue and to the open (and unfair) skepticism I was voicing in another thread. Definitely a tougher thing to do...definitely worth it.
<sarcasm>

72% of viewers are uncomfortable with a dark tie over a dark shirt.

68% of viewers dislike striped shirts in high resolution photos.

52% of viewers don't trust a man with a receding hairline and hair over his ears.

18% of viewers are PETA members who are offended when a mouse is suspended by its tail.

27% of right brained individuals experience discomfort when the speaker blocks the words on the slide behind him.

18% of women with incomes over $100,000 think a matching tie and hankerchief convey distrustfulness.

22% of elderly tailors think that putting your hand in your pocket reveals flaws in workmanship.

67% of "green aware" individuals are extremely uncomfortable when faucets are left running.

100% of sighted people think that red shirts should be reserved for bull fighters.

18% of people suffering with vertico are uncomfortable with people on bridges with traffic below.

22% of hookers expect higher payments from men in wrinkled shirts.

</sarcasm>
As a matter of fact, we're not. We built iPaper starting from scratch because there wasn't anything good enough to build it on top of. Both FlashPaper and Print2Flash are Windows print drivers designed as consumer applications. They were never intended for something like Scribd that processes millions of documents. The iPaper back-end is built for web-scale use.
Autopia: As lithium cars arrive, lithium questions persist
The Fall of Suburbia
DVD Jon releases tool allowing iTunes music to be copied to other devices
+1 for the use of the word "dreck" to describe something technical
"Regarding privacy, promoters say the video isn’t clear and isn’t recorded, so it’s not archived."

I wish people would realize that everything on the Internet can be subject to unexpected storage. The fact that they're not recording doesn't mean it's not being recorded.
Happy Birthday News.YC
Based on some of the oldest users (except pg), it appears that today is News.YC's one year birthday.
This mapping surprised me:
"Tennessee – Saudi Arabia (GDP #25 at $286 billion)"

I probably magnify the oil economy in my mind. You hear about the vast wealth, the oil sheiks, the buying of US assets, etc. Either my intuition on relative economies is very off (likely)... or GDP doesn't cover some things that impact our perception. Wonder how that map would look if we used GDP per capita.
That surprised me too - but I'm guessing its because their GDP is almost entirely from oil, whereas the US economy is very distributed.

Edit: Guess I was wrong.
Reasonably astute summary of the situation. This is the gospel Jim Kunstler and others have been preaching for years now (http://www.kunstler.com/). If you accept the idea of peak oil, you can readily see where the intersection of PO and the re-urbanization trend will spell disaster for the suburbs.
From Wikipedia (probably taken from CIA factbook):

"The petroleum sector accounts for roughly 75% of budget revenues, 45% of GDP, and 90% of export earnings."
Handbrake 0.9.2 arrives
Another Litmanism "The name of the game in life is you either have to focus on the process or the reward at any given moment. If you focus on the reward... (procrastination) If you focus on the process, you'll get there"

Litman quotes Bloomberg...

From page 52 (paperback) in his book 'Bloomberg By Bloomberg':

"We made mistakes, of course. Most of them were omissions we didn't think of when we initially wrote the software. We fixed them by doing it over and over, again and again. We do the same today. While our competitors are still sucking their thumbs trying to make the design perfect, we're already on prototype version No. 5.

By the time our rivals are ready with wires and screws, we are on version No. 10. It gets back to planning versus acting. We act from day one; others plan how to plan - for months."

The principle is fundamental. I don't think it was a specific book. I'm on his email list twice - he reiterates the theme a lot.

To elaborate, Litman says it's all about small steps. You need to make a commitment to taking small steps. All of successful business is a compilation of small victories. It's the small steps that make a difference. Most people aren't willing to stay in the game long enough to succeed...

Conversations with Millionaires is a great book because he interviews a really diverse group of successful entrepreneurs.

Personally, I don't always like his rah-rah cheerleading you-can-do-it approach but he shares some valuable insights.
I can see what the textbook authors intended here, I think. There's not a whole lot of point to memorizing multiplication tables, it's much more useful to be able to work out arithmetic in your head. The way described here (going to multiples of ten and adding) is pretty close to the way I do it (going to prime factors and then multiplying back). Probably the authors wanted to teach what my grade school teachers called "mental math", which sounds like a worthy goal to me.

What's impossible to tell without looking at the textbook is, are the parents resisting because they equate math with memorization, or because the textbook fails to teach "mental math"? The article is slanted a bit toward the latter, and I was looking forward to reading it and laughing at the dumb textbook writers along with it, but I'm not so sure.

I love the picture on the article, also. The kid, sort of dopey and puzzled-looking, and the father, with the sad look on his face, far in the background, out of focus, powerless to help... It's perfect.
not really, iPaper has lots of little features pdfmenot misses, incl zoom and scrolling.
Amusingly, the methods she described are almost exactly how I do arithmetic. And when I can't solve a problem mentally I do just grab a calculator. I don't recall using long multiplication or long division since I was in elementary school.
I'm sorry, but i really am tired of this reddit content making the front page of Hacker News.
Not the same formula this guy is using, but related: http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2006/jul/20/secondworldwar.t...
Interesting, and we've all heard this thing about whoever says a number first loses.

Having been on the hiring and hiree side of the table, I don't think this is as universally true as people make it out to be. I've both paid more than budgeted, and been paid more than the budget, on several occasions when it seemed the "fit" was right.

I usually try to get a feel for the salary range, the phase of the company (pre-launch, post-launch but small sales, sales flowing, etc.), and the overall position. If I can get the company (or candidate) to offer a number first, that's great. If not, so be it. I think that more often than not I've told candidates what the salary is for a position before they've asked. If they would've worked for less, oh well, I'd rather compensate all members of my team fairly... employees that got the salary shaft soon find out and become bitter. If they wanted more, they can reconsider or negotiate. It matters little to me when I'm in the hiring position.
Study finds some thoughts really do require language
I do long multiplication all the time... In the Emacs "multiplication puzzle" mode.
I love the magic seven technique for division. It's essentially "given x / y, keep subtracting y from x until x is 0, then count how many times you did it!"
this is not the right place...
I feel the same way about "Good Times".
The novel sounds like The Diamond Age.

Regarding your last remark, I think it's really interesting that the article was published in 1997, and is based on an article from (I think) 1993. Effectively, the author predicted some of the things you mention, and probably a lot of things that haven't happened yet.
I mostly agree. I never did math the traditional paper and pencil way; I always used various short cuts to do mental math. Schools are leading kids down the wrong path teaching the traditional carrying-the-one approach. Nobody does that in real life. I do think though, that having command of the multiplication tables is extremely important, because it makes all future math so much easier.
Usually I'm strongly in favor of things that fall outside the bounds of hackerism, but this is a little much.

Fidel Castro was fine though, it doesn't bother me to see truly major news make it here, even if I suspect many of us had already seen it on another site.
A Journey Through Web 2.0 Hell
My tale of New School Marketing and its amazing potential. If you haven't jumped face first into Web 2.0, you're robbing your own business.
The author mentions money flowing towards attention centers in the attention economy. Interestingly, he does mentions advertising as paid attention - not as a money source for attention getters.

How will people be paid in the attention economy?
Micropayments? Transaction fees? The brand-called-you. Facebook Beacon v10? I think it's very much up in the air.
sell sell sell!
Imagine when gas hits $5/gallon.
Anti-religious links come up occasionally on reddit and elsewhere. Reddit commentors aren't a good sample of the population, but they are a good sample of the population that is 1) youngish, 2) professional, 3) media-aware, and 4) intellectually self-conscious.

And their attitude toward religion? Contemptuous, resentful, cheeky, mocking. ...it lends me to believe that the 1-4 things I described above simply raise people to a cynicism that won't tolerate the more obvious fairy tales. Nothing too complicated. You aren't dealing with Spinoza here, but just kids who got out of Mayberry.

Anyway, those same 1-4 things (when present in large amounts) are exactly what produce wealth in society.