skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
3. "Your web designer will create one or more prototype designs for your web site. This is typically a .jpg image of what the final design will look like."

5. "At this point, your web designer will attend to the final details and test your web site. ... A good web designer is one who is well versed in current standards for web site design and development. The basic technologies currently used are XHTML and CSS"

I don't see the logic here. If a web designer's primary task is creating design mockups then knowledge of xhtml and css isn't very helpful. A professional tester would be a better choice.
I miss being a minor. I hung out with a lot of other nerdy kids, so it was always fun to walk up behind a guy who was hassling one of my friends, tap him on the shoulder, and punch him in the face.
That's the sad thing about it, there's stuff you can't just get told. I know all the things my parents said to help, but it didn't really help at all when they said it, it's just now that it's over that I get what they meant.

I guess you just have to reach a point where you're fed up enough that you want to change for the best, whether it takes a year or 12 to reach your bottom of the barrel.

edit: There's this guy on the street that told me to raise my head instead of looking on the ground, and that kickstarted my process. I know it wouldn't have worked if I hadn't been fed up with my current situation and didn't have a clue I could do something about it. Like, if he had told me that 2 years earlier it wouldn't have had any effect probably. But it's just to say, if you're in deep trouble like Billy my hints might be worthless but for someone farther along, "on the fence", it might help.
It increases our chances of survival, so I guess we can blame on the DNA :)

Or it increased, I don't know. By having a family, you took care and was protected by people with similar background and interests. Dumping your wife in the past meant none would take care of your children, who were either laboring to increase home sweet home aggregated value or were your legacy, who would took your inheritance. It gave meaning to work today, because someone would use it after you're gone.

And people do some pretty hardcore stuff for love. War, even. I guess you need to justify that kind of behaviour later in your life. What good would be to sacrifice so much and forget about it next week?

Nowadays more people have their basic needs covered, and the concept of personal freedom is much more present. So you don't need a family to have a shelter or food on the table, and it's ok to do what's best for you, not for someone or something else.
I think the four-hour workday is an interesting idea. I'm still in school but I worked at a real estate development office for a summer, and most of those jobs could've been done in four hours a day if people didn't get away with being so lazy. I bet a lot of companies could reduce the workday to four hours, and if they're quicker to fire people for not making deadlines and such, they'd get exactly the same productivity out of them as they do now (plus, lots of people would probably want to work there).
http://twitter.com/mdesjardins
http://twitter.com/initself
seems like more of a business application than ordinary consumers?
I did that but it somewhat defeats the purpose of the whole thing. The problem is that some of the add-ins do NOT work with the beta version so overwriting the check is kind of an exercise in futility
The OA5 business process ( http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=140712 ) is a more moderate and conventional version of this idea.
i typically read the first high karma comment or two before reading the article if there are tons of comments, just to get a feel for whats going on.

otherwise, article first.
http://twitter.com/justin_dz

Just loaded twhirl, which runs on Adobe AIR. Twitter is fun for doing neat things with. Check out "Foamee" for pseudo-beer-sharing fun.
Prime time = no Firebug? Eep. I'll wait until it comes out on DVD. It worked fine for me, but I kind of use Firebug a lot. Sorry, I forgot I was on the internet. I use it alot.

Installing version 3 dumped all my sessions. Not a big deal, but FYI that you'll have to re-log in to everything if you have the same experience I did.
I thought of doing this a couple years ago but never went through with it because no one pissed me off enough.
I'm surprised it took this long to happen.
When I first came to the US I was still dating and, of course my accent came up in conversation pretty early. I remember a couple of times saying "oh thanks, I like your accent too", only to be told "but I don't have an accent" ;-)
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Minitel
Is this article on infoq.com plagiarised ( http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=145142 )?
There was a similar topic posted a few days back [http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=138229] and here is my comment [http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=138380]
Effects of TechCrunch article (with News.YC traffic graph)
I grant that they are not that old yet. One counter-example of a software company that has kept growing organically is SAS Institute (now $2+ billion and counting). Don't know anything about their internal culture - they say attrition rate is very low.

I would modify the "grow or die" to "adapt or die" because it is really lack of adaptation that seems to kill, and lack of growth may be a manifestation of lack of adaptation. I am not sure size is actually a benefit or hindrance to adaptation (it may be neither). It is theoretically possible for a small company around in 1985 to have adapted itself successfully through waves of change. But alas the only company I can think of that has come anywhere close to adapting through waves of change is Microsoft (and even it hasn't adapted that well).

An example of botched adaptation is the Altavista search engine from Digital. I remember the time it was the most advanced search engine (at a time when Gates didn't think search even mattered). The parent company entirely missed their value.
http://twitter.com/looselytyped
Does that mean that FF3 is now in Google-beta (as opposed to normal beta, where prime-time comes _after_ the beta versions)?
"There has been some dilution as a result. The stories that get voted up are not quite as good, and the average tone in comment threads is slightly less polite."

The problem is voting. As you might guess, I think a more meritocratic approach to social news (e.g., intelligence testing through puzzles) would give you better results when you have more users.
with a great program like Rosetta Stone, why would someone use ingolingo?

Because it's free sure -- but many people have tried and failed many language learning systems, so what value does ingolingo provide that an established player like Rosetta Stone doesn't?
So maybe, someone's life situation also has a "tipping point".

I hear ya though. I didn't get beaten up, but I felt like a loser for a long time. It was made worse because I was naturally able to get a lot of things right, the first time. As things got more and more progressively difficult, I couldn't figure out why I wasn't able to accomplish what I wanted to do.

I was helped though by a lot of fiction writers -- Heinlein, for one. I read Ender's Game annually for a while. But it wasn't until reading Neal Stephenson's Diamond Age that I got thinking I should start writing stuff, as a way to try to pass on what I know now about taking initiative, personal responsibility, etc. that on the off-chance that some teenager scraping the bottom of the barrel gets a hold of my book, it just might be what catalyzes this realization.

Diamond Age was about a primer given to three different girls; the primer was built with nanotech, has a database full of old myths, folklore, and teachings, has sensors to figure out what is going on around itself and the girl that is bonded with it, and is able to generate stories based on what's happening. It was that which lead me to my current studies into Joseph Campbell's works on mythology and folklore. It's also why articles like this has always interested me.

It's also why I like the whole concept of OLPC. I'd like to be able to write something like that Primer, or at least a pale imitation of it.

It also helped that I trained in the martial arts that I did. Martial arts is pretty much obsolete if you measure if by how well you can inflict violence. A gun is a technology allowing someone to inflict more damage with less training time. But as far as a life practice that keeps your ability to take initiative sharp -- something Stephen Covey describes as "sharpening your saw" -- to push past that, "I dun wanna" feeling, martial arts is better for that than a gun.

Since I think you understand this, I'm bringing this out here which I normally wouldn't for Hacker News. There's a Japanese word meaning budo. Transliterated, it means "way of war". I once heard someone explain it to mean, "the art of living well under all circumstances while protecting your interest." That is the context which I was reading the story with the bullying.

The other is the Chinese word, kungfu. It's used in America to mean "martial arts", but it's been mistranslated. ("Wushu" is what you want). Kungfu means refined skill accumulated over time, the integral of effort over time. One teacher I met at a seminar once said, "I don't know why 'kung fu' is translated as 'martial arts' when it really means patience."
Apple’s Safari Push is Not About the Money
Term Sheet Hacks: The Cheat Sheet
d.scott.brown _ gmail
Wufoo is going to surprise everyone.
My guess is Billy could have done something like this earlier on, but by now, it's too late. Also, it sounds like his problem has more to do with ADD, being surrounded by assholes, and being weak then problems with his attitude. Having ADD often gets mistaken for being weak-willed, lazy, absent-minded, naive, having the wrong attitude, and so on. But unlike better-known conditions, like Down Syndrome, for instance, people don't hesitate to accuse the person with ADD of being lazy or naive.
So when Billy says, "Mom, I don't want to go to school today. I fear I'll be badly hurt," his parents make him go anyway?

Awful story :(
That's different: Ender won his fights.
D) Home School
Greatest experiment ever in particle physics nears countdown
I'm not so sure. That's not so much meritocratic as a test of someone's determination or the amount of time they have to waste.

True meritocracy in online voting situations would be something like giving more importance to votes from people with higher karma. So, the people who get voted up more, then get more power in voting situations themselves. That way, the site becomes whatever the "top users" want, a true meritocracy.

I'm also a fan of giving precedence depending on the "age" of the user. That is, how long they've been a member of the site. This means the site may not evolve as quickly, but it appears that's something people want to avoid anyway. It tends to be the new "influx" of users that comes after popularity that drags a site down, so letting older users have more say could make sense.
The hooking element is really based on intermittent variable reward. eg: when someone responds, direct messages you, etc. you can't really predict it.

Twitter's kind of like a message board that, instead of filtering by categories or topics, you filter by people. So you can also imagine, the more people you find interesting or to interact with, the more addicting it becomes.

@NathanSnell
http://twitter.com/peterc
"I'm not so sure. That's not so much meritocratic as a test of someone's determination or the amount of time they have to waste."

That depends on the nature of the puzzle. Not many people can solve Rubik's Cube no matter how determined they may be.

"True meritocracy in online voting situations would be something like giving more importance to votes from people with higher karma. So, the people who get voted up more, then get more power in voting situations themselves. That way, the site becomes whatever the "top users" want, a true meritocracy."

That may not lead to a meritocracy. I think intelligence testing is more reliable.
Most sites still hack-able
http://www.twitter.com/bradmaier
The funny thing about hackers is that they have the intellectual capability to hack their own life, and rarely try.

Users who merely use a computer system don't get that feeling hackers get when they are able to push into that creative realm, to shape and mold a system, often ideas that had not been anywhere. It's that experience of bringing something out of nothing, I think, is what makes coding so much fun. You get to make choices when you code.

But just as you can make these choices when you code, you can do the same for your life. Why else would people flock to Hacker News? Sure, it is about Paul Graham's ideas on startups. I think, though, we flock here because we want to take control of your financial situation.

What about your social life? What about that bully in high school ... or that asshole boss of your's that keeps taking advantage of you?

In this civilized society, physical abuse is grounds for punishment by the community. Verbal abuse leaves a lot of room to seriously damage someone without leaving a mark. The question I have to ask is, are you going to depend on the civilization's operating system, or are you going to use the skills learned from hacking code to really understand how the social OS works?

It may seem like blaming the "user", but you protect users from themselves because they don't know how to hack. I too empathize with the boy, but I also think he already has a lot of the tools he needs to get himself out.
Thanks, that's good advice. I'll give that a try.

I am pretty curious, although I try to limit it intentionally. With the internet, it's unfortunately very easy to get sidetracked...
"You are not a unique snowflake"

I love the fight club tone...
Change what you can change. The parents may find changing the environment easier than changing Billy, and Billy may find changing himself easier than changing things around him.
Some of us just need a little more time than others. What concerns me most in this case is whether so much damage has been done to cripple the boy for life. Hard for us to imagine but still easy enough to happen.
Ha! That made me laugh!
http://twitter.com/nuin

but I'm not (yet) in the hype.
Mixwit == superhit. These guys are underground but judging how viral it is and how much their traffic is growing its going to be huge. I don't often say this. Watch these guys.
Your design is good, I like the colors and buttons.

The second page is a nightmare, too much content not enough call out/ organization, just calls to action.

Registration is painless, contrary to the feedback here.

The app is easy to use, but it's missing something. What I'm not sure...?
What part of New Jersey are you from?
I rather enjoy a good newspaper. Perhaps I just have more years than the customers who decide a products' fate -- I grew up with an Apple II instead of an Apple iPod -- but there's something about spending an hour quietly reading a physical newspaper that I just don't get out of websites. I'm not really even sure how to describe it. Good material on the printed page just holds a certain intrigue and mystique.

Regrettably, our local newspaper is dwindling. Less of this, less of that, and even though it's printed on paper, a tiny helping of suboptimally-written material makes it a shell of what it once was.
The worrying thing is that when things start to go bad they go bad fast because the system is self-reinforcing in two different ways:

1) When people see lame stories make the front page, they see that they can submit lame stories and have them make the front page.

2) When you submit a good story and it doesn't make the front page then it's kind of depressing. And what kind of people still bother to submit content when that happens? Sucky people.
I've also heard of "incubators" which were really "rich guy paying others to do his ideas."

I agree though, I can't think of a single example of a successful incubator that called themselves an incubator.
Ender didn't win all of his fights. He gets regularly beaten up by his older brother.

Remember this? Ender didn't like how his bullies fought, strong versus weak. He didn't like how he fought, smart versus stupid. And none of it worked with his brother, who is just as smart and much more ruthless. Ender just wanted to be left alone.

What about the Buggers? Weren't they bullying the humans? What happened later when Ender found out the Buggers didn't even know they were killing sentient beings? What was the human response? To get a bigger stick.

What are Billy's parents doing? They are doing what Ender realized couldn't happen in Battle School. He couldn't go to the authorities. He had to finish it on his own.

Why did Billy's sister stopped him from finishing the fight? To win, you have to to win all the fights that come after -- that was what Ender saw. What happened in the trial at the end of the book? Those kids had died. If Billy did that, he would win that fight, and it would be a Pyrrhic victory. Instead of a New York Times article about bullying, we'd have a media fest about another Columbine.

Ender won almost all his fights, but it nearly destroyed him. To win, he had to empathize with the enemy until he loved them. Then he annihilated them. He kept seeing Peter's face in the mirror, until he realized his sister Valentine was always with him. He beat the Giant who kept killing him with those poisoned drinks ... by cheating. And that's when he came to the End of the World.

My point with Ender's Game is not to say that Ender had the solution to this, but rather that the book discussed all the issues people are bringing up here in these comments. In detail. It is too bad it seems so few people have read it or regarded my comment as pointless enough to downmod it. Too bad for them.
Well, I'm not sure if we need to blame the victim, but everyone needs to realize the victim is partially responsible. That doesn't mean what's happening is right or even justifiable. Heck, nobody should have to go to school afraid that they'll end up in the hospital. The school definitely needs to be sued for not ensuring the safety of the students.

But people will always pick on easy targets. The lesson to be learned is that confidence and the will to fight back can go a long way in preventing these kinds of attacks in the future. Sometimes the "wait for the authorities to save me" approach doesn't work. That's why we're empowered to defend ourselves.

The solution is twofold: change the environment to reduce physical violence, and change Billy to make the bullies less willing to attempt any attacks.
People overestimate things on a shorter term, and underestimate on a longer term.
My thoughts exactly. The heroku website doesn't seem to answer that question, but http://www.urlfan.com/local/heroku/68765816.html says:

"Whenever you save a file, any updates are automatically deployed and appear on your website."

Ideally, heroku would support revision control and have the ability to run multiple versions on different urls, at least testing and live.
I usually scan the article first, and only if piques my interest read it properly. I probably read the comments about 20% of the time - typically if I have some kind of emotional response. If I'm completely honest, I'm more likely to read the comments on a piece that attacks or supports my own view of the world, and bypass the guff in the middle. Is that normal?
Most people on my twitter are either local, friends from afar, or a bunch of techies

http://twitter.com/truebosko
"How the Mind Works" by Steven Pinker has some very well-reasoned arguments to support your intuition that it's in our DNA. [It's basically a popsci introduction to evolutionary psychology and cognitive science.]
I've been using Mercurial for personal projects and I've really been liking it. I do a lot more branching and merging with it and it feels faster because of local commits.
I agree. Personally, I view the story of Billy as a basis for discussion on the dynamics of bullying, the idiosyncracies of his particular case are not very important to me. It's almost certain I'll never meet him or have whatever influence on him, ever.
It's possible (probable, even) that every one here has read Clay Shirky's "A Group Is Its Own Worst Enemy", but here 'tis for posterity: http://www.shirky.com/writings/group_enemy.html
I've noticed it feels faster than SVN even when used like svn (pushing/pulling from a remote source)
Running with Shoes - Tasty Text
Mercurial rocks. We use it at the startup I work for, and it has been invaluable. Being able to swiftly and easily make your own branches is fantastic for prototyping.
http://twitter.com/Human_USB
Facebook Security Lapse Leaves Private Photos Exposed, Even Paris and Zuck's
I think rather than government involvement, things that are largely physical are bound by stronger constraints. Also when it comes to things like intracity transportation we tend to underestimate old solutions like walking and riding.
My complaint with it when I was messing around with it was I wasn't about to sit the and type into a textfield and not use some-sort of editor. But it appears they fixed that. I just wonder how useful it will be to working on the deployed copy, I mean your site would be giving off all sorts of fun errors to the people coming to your site if your sitting there messing the the script.
All dynamic sites are hack-able.
95% of Vietnamese PCs are infected with viruses
I particularly appreciate their approach to data storage and security: http://skydeck.com/security/ ... no need to store this server-side where it's out of the users' control.
Sure it's funny, but just wait until the people of 2045 dig up Ray Kurzweil's "Singularity is Near". Fourty years ago some people thought we'd have automated cars, undersea resorts and climatized, domed cities. Today some people think 40 years from now we'll be immortal, omniscient, omnipotent gods that rule the universe...
http://twitter.com/andrewparker

It's generally just random musings, but some VC tidbits and tech news mixed in.
The hook is the serendipity the service creates in your life.
deadpool from techcrunch: socialmoth, xobni, jamglue, heysanm flagr, inkling,youos, likebetter, clickfacts, loopt

loopt is a mobile scam
Thinkature - dead
I've done a desktop app myself in Java. It just seems like it could be a seamless integration from desktop app to hybrid web/desktop app (but I must confess I've never written a real applet).
An "ordinary savings account" can't give you a stream of income for the rest of your life that adjusts for inflation, even if you have to retire early due to disability, regardless of the state of the stock market or interest rates.

And right now, Social Security loans money to the rest of the government, not vice versa.
Why is that? Load time? Clunky? Crash a lot?
A good argument, but do you think a user's raw intelligence could correlate to the quality of their links and link preferences?

I don't. The people who post all the political links to Reddit seem quite intelligent, as do many of the people starting pointless arguments. The ability to troll and incite flame wars might even go UP with intelligence.

Perhaps if the puzzles you proposed measured "emotional intelligence" or domain specific knowledge we'd stand a chance, but raw intelligence doesn't prove much. Many of the nicest, most "savvy" people I know are not of high intelligence in an IQ sense, but are still very successful in their fields, and vice versa.
the entire "Learn together with other people" section reads very cheesy, imho. i don't think you should focus on whether or not this service gives people any kind of bragging rights.

the service itself seems valuable, though.
I forgot about the fights with his brother. FWIW I upmodded you (a while ago, before reading this).