skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Expect an initial glut, which will communicate a great deal of information quickly. This will improve the site.
Heh I tricked archive.org and got the first page of the thread i wanted and found:

"Part of the problem here, some argue, is a lack of clarity or transparency in those posts, such that people whose views closely correspond to TCS generally don’t identify themselves as such." -- Alfie Kohn

He wanted TCS people to wear identifying stars, if you know what I mean.
He found the words by asking people at TED what mattered most for success. He proceeds to gives a bunch of great ~8 word sentence replies, each of which is more coherent than his word collection.

Joe Kraus is quoted, which is where he got "persistence".
well, I was mainly thinking, that more apps should move to the browser, especially apps that dont need to have a complex UI.

And a xobni is a social networking app, the web-browser seems like a very good fit for it!

Well ... ultimatly its subjective ... it just how I think, "if you can put it in the browser, do, if you don't, your did wrong"
A Farewell to Alms [http://www.nytimes.com/2007/08/07/science/07indu.html?_r=1&#...] covers similar territory, and its data is very thorough. I haven't seen any refutations.

Of relevance to this forum are the findings on entrepreneurship in the industrial revolution. The people who built the companies and science that made it possible and greatly elevated Britain never made anywhere near enough to compensate their investments of time and money. They were irrational actors. Clark argues they acted this way because of genetic predisposition -- a predisposition that was not widespread in other societies.
At FOWA the panel for create a web app in 45 minutes really revolved around email analytics and status
The power of this best-of-craigslist post is that he (a former partner-track and then partner-at-age-30 lawyer) talks about why he is happy with his post-superachiever life and at the same time - he does not condescend those people who choose to be slackers, homemakers, or McMansion home owners, or whatever they want to be (as long as it makes them happy)

I came across a definition of success on Friday that really resonated with me: Success is not about financial independence, a big house, or fame. It's about whether you are making progress towards worthy goals.

I like it because that allows us to feel we are succeeding now, rather than the proverbial later.
Yes, taste might be a better word.

I started noticing how deep the problem runs after Ray Ozzie joined the company. He has done great work, knows a great deal about usability, hacking, etc. And he has taste. Yet he has completely failed to change anything, despite the fact that he is as high on the corporate ladder as you can get, and has a lot of clout within the company.

What that shows is that the corporate culture simply doesn't support what he has to offer, and that it is not willing to change in order to accomodate a new reality.

Same thing happened to IBM in the 90's.
Charlie Does Surf. Meet The New Wizard Of The Web
Damn! And I had work to do. 20 minutes to find a plane leaving Atlanta airport!

Seriously, cancel geography class and make kids place this instead.
If you'd included the author's name in the title, this story would be #1. ;)
OOXML Fails to Get Majority Approval at BRM
Do you have a link to a study showing that IQ isn't normally distributed?
I almost didn't read this because of the domain it's on, but your comment convinced me to. Thank you. :)
Sounds like fun. Let's see what happens.
The brain drain does seem to be slowing down considerably. Many of my friends from India, who did their grad studies in the US, are now returning to India to start their own companies. Or at least to join the R&D groups of MS or Intel etc in India.
???

Why would that be bad?
Breakthrough in the study of motor neurone disease
what on earth does that mean?
Humans resolve a lot of the complexity intuitively and unconsciously. It is not an inherently bad way to handle it, just incompatible with current programming paradigms. This is not to discount the value of clear explicit thinking in humans, it is just to say that programming would benefit a lot from ability to apply common sense to mundane things.

For some dramatic evidence that imprecise is better and it really works, look at the success of Google and the non-delivery of the Semantic Web. Google's approach is probably best explained by Peter Norvig in his "Theorizing from Data" lecture:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nU8DcBF-qo4

State of the art in natural language processing is achieved with statistical inference, not building precise linguistic models. See e.g. Marti Hearst's text here:

http://www.edge.org/q2008/q08_7.html

Back to programming languages, I believe that a lot of the Ruby/Rails success is due to mimicking natural language in DSLs. Rails goes as far as using pluralization. DSLs bring convenience at the price of less understanding: people tend to try using them intuitively, without understanding precisely what happens, much more so than they do with libraries/frameworks.

Perl, similarly, was created with linguistic principles in mind:

http://www.wall.org/~larry/natural.html

It is by no means conclusive evidence, but I believe there is an underlying trend.
Sixty is impossibly low, but you have to remember a lot of countries have pervasive iodine deficiency as well as other nutritional deficiencies. Combine this with a lack of proper cognitive stimulation in the first five years and it becomes pretty easy for an entire country to score poorly. Clearly a country whose real IQ averaged sixty wouldn't be able to survive and reproduce, but if you combine the factors above with the inherent biases in (esp. early) IQ tests then it seems plausible that a country could score pretty low.

"Worldwide, about two billion people — a third of the globe — get too little iodine, including hundreds of millions in India and China. Studies show that iodine deficiency is the leading preventable cause of mental retardation. Even moderate deficiency, especially in pregnant women and infants, lowers intelligence by 10 to 15 I.Q. points, shaving incalculable potential off a nation’s development."

http://www.nytimes.com/2006/12/16/health/16iodine.html
You can always put in place a firm "if there are too many polls people are going to get banned" policy.
It just seems to me that if you're willing to do just about anything to make $100k/year, and you consider this particular job disgusting, why not get a degree in something marketable, even if you don't love it, and make the same amount, or more, that way? I'm not at all opposed to women selling this particular skill...it's just when they're saying "banging some disgusting creep for money" it makes it clear that it's not what they want to do with their life.

So, my question, perhaps not made clear enough, is why don't they do something a little less disgusting to them and make even more money than that? An MBA from any good university is worth more than 100k/year in big markets, even with little experience. A bachelors in computer science is pretty close. Law starts near there as well. Nursing pays that well in major markets with a few years experience. Heck, regional managers at McDonald's make more than that--though working up to regional manager is not a trivial amount of effort.

I'm just confused why someone would do something that disgusts them for an amount of money that is reasonably achievable in a half dozen careers that aren't all that hard to get into. If, in fact, it doesn't disgust them, and they just like to complain about their boss (as folks do in every career), then it makes more sense.

But the more I think about it, the more it becomes clear that the real answer for why they do it is: "I don't want to work very hard, but I want to have the lifestyle of someone who does. And it sucks that I have to bang some disgusting creep to avoid working hard in a field that isn't fun to achieve this lifestyle." As I said, I don't see anything wrong with a woman selling this type of labor, if she wants to. She's probably not the kind of woman I'd want in my life, but that doesn't make it morally wrong. I also wouldn't want to spend time with someone that thinks pageants are awesome, or who loves football above all else, or who enjoys hunting. None of those things are wrong, and I don't judge folks who do them...I just don't find them interesting.
Well, I haven't read the book, but the article that you point to seems to indicate that "A Farewell to Alms" actually makes the opposite point:

'What was being inherited, in his view, was not greater intelligence — being a hunter in a foraging society requires considerably greater skill than the repetitive actions of an agricultural laborer. Rather, it was “a repertoire of skills and dispositions that were very different from those of the pre-agrarian world.”

Also, the article points out that many people are skeptical of his view that the behavioral changes have biological causes and not just cultural. For instance:

'The natural-selection part of Dr. Clark’s argument “is significantly weaker, and maybe just not necessary, if you can trace the changes in the institutions,” said Kenneth L. Pomeranz, a historian at the University of California, Irvine.
Finding a worm in the Apple? Secret APIs in Mac OS X
You need passion to succeed. As long as you are thrilled by web programming, I don't think your age should be a problem. The only problem you might face, is that you'll have to struggle a bit in the beginning. That's true for everybody, but it's easier for a teenager to live on an underpaid wage, than for someone who has a mortgage and kids to feed (Assuming you do).
Wow. Microsoft is really at the head of technological innovation, aren't they? How do they come up with this stuff, I mean, applications that run on the web!? What a great idea...just think of the possibilities: you could keep all of your photos online and see them from anywhere! And your word processing files...you could share them with your co-workers without having to email a bunch of copies around! This is gonna be awesome. I can't wait until Microsoft starts releasing these products so I can use them.

I wonder what they'll think of next?
IMO it's a good feature. First you can see the results quickly and in a convenient way, there will not be a lot of comments in the "a", "b", "me to", "hope i get some karma" way and we will not have to count, i.e.: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=126360 would be clease using this feature.

Also, post will act as a catalyst (as if we need one...) to discuss, and this is good ;)

And finally it stops mangling with the karma to vote.

May I ask an extra feature? I think it would be useful to display the total number of votes, and maybe even the percentage of each option.
They do a cool implementation of polling at sermo.com
> actually makes the opposite point

It's a related theory, not the same bit on IQ and I didn't mean to imply otherwise.

> biological causes and not just cultural

I know I mentioned the word "genetic", but really all that matters is we're talking about a set of heritable traits; nature vs nurture is kind of moot. That we're talking about something heritable is detailed in the book.
Yelp! founder Jeremy Stoppelman on getting 6 million visitors
Disagree: if anything, coal power is an incentive to develop nuclear power. Coal power plants produce greenhouse gases and in fact more radiation than an equivalent nuclear power plant.

No, the reasons for nuclear power's dormancy are: (1) Three Mile Island; (2) Chernobyl; (3) too much subsidization too early, which seeded the commercial nuclear industry before it could deliver the goods both safely and profitably enough; (4) inadequate regulation and even state complicity in safety flaw cover-ups; (5) the inherent complexity of nuclear power plants and reprocessing systems which make accidents such as TMI and all the others almost inevitable; (6) the lack of transparency in the operation of nuclear facilities; (7) the imposition of nuclear facilities on communities and populations regardless of whether they want them or not; and (8) the gradual attrition of nuclear engineers which leads to fewer people qualified to run nuclear systems.

(Sidebar: I didn't read the article because Maxim split it into 17 ad-loaded pages, and frankly fuck that.)
Option b). Where's the value, otherwise? Sometimes I forget to vote even when I intend to.
Of course no! You are not too old.

Just today I was reading an article in a spanish magazine about people on their thirties that completely changed their career following their dreams.

Examples:
- a psychologist that left to work for a NGO (29 y.o)
- a lawyer how left to be an actor (33 y.o.)
- a shop manager that left to study physiotherapy (30 y.o.)
- and telecom engineer that left to study audiovisual communication (32 y.o.)

All of them are quite happy. And you may be on a similar list someday.

Leonardc, put your armor plate, take your sword and go to kill the dragon! Er, I mean, go to program webs!
World Wide Telescope
You're sure it wasn't "there"...?
It is certainly possible the APIs are hidden for competitive advantage. However...

There are costs when making an API truly public! Extra work to document it completely. Extra testing, to cover more than just the cases you know you're dealing with internally. Revisiting the API every time something new comes along ("will this API be 64 bit capable?", etc.). And ultimately, cost from losing the freedom to significantly change anything, lest you break binary compatibility or create some other problem that multiplies across your customer base.
b, though sometimes I read the article only in a superficial way.

I think it lacks an option, sometimes I upvote a submission not by the article but for the discussion evolved from it.
Because then the site would be like Reddit - interesting content that is impossible to find in the vast froothing sea of Ron Paul submissions, funny pictures and conspiracy theories.

:-)
Zed Shaw on Python
I like the following quote:

"I also still haven’t figured out why the fuck I was backing Ruby when the Python guys clearly did a way better job at building their community and infrastructure. I kind of feel like I backed the wrong horse completely."

As a Python fan, this makes me happy.
Poll: I come to YC.news to ...
Read interesting links
Read educational links
Discuss links
Learn from Ask-type questions
Increase my karma any way I can
okay ... there is more to the web, then a web browser interface.

SSRS (sql services reporting services) was implemented as a webservice. Clients include BIDS (visual studio), and reportmanager, WMI and well maybe more

Now, what MS can do, is host my SSRS service, and I can still connect to it to deploy my reports and admin them from report manager

Why i gain is, I dont need a server to host it, upgrading to ssrs 2005 would have been as simple as a request and if they host my reporting webservice they might as well host my sql servers too.

So as you see MS is very very smart, and they will eventually host my databases and applications

Eventually my firm wont have to invest in server hardware at all and largelly reduce it IT workforce, next thing you know, I will move to MS and become an account manager, for the same company i used to work for

I would say its google who doesn't seem to get it, google docs, come oooon, an ECM (enterprise content management) is more like it , do they have this already!
MS unveils strategies, everyone else just unveils.
I would say its Google - its very similar to what happened to ISVs in the 90s - if they were too close to the horizontal stuff MS did, they were steamrolled. today, its similar with startups and google - if what you do is too close - you will either be steamrolled or acquired (if you are lucky).
NY Times
Wall Street Journal
Financial Times
Newspapers? Bwhahaha, they're dead wood!
Interesting and worth a try.

If the poll-maker can add choices later, and people are encouraged to modify their opinions in response to discussion, you may want to allow voters to change their votes later. OTOH, if you want the polls to be snap surveys of initial impressions, the totals should start out hidden, and votes irreversible, so votes are unswayed by perceived popularity.

With the proposed UI, there's still a problematic conflation of 'agree' with 'quality' -- both are clicks on the same 'up' icon. So I would again suggest using a new right/left vote that means 'agree/disagree', orthogonal to 'promote/bury'. Agree/disagree would have no karma implications, and would lend itself to a horizontal bar-graph of running results:

> Users would create too many
***********
> Users would create fewer
*********
> We'd have same number
******************************

(Previous suggestion of orthogonal agree/disagree voting: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=117196 )
This website is controlled by a secretive cabal of fascists plotting a coup of the Internet. As such, all dissent will be dealt with swiftly.

As we speak brown-shirted storm troopers are converging upon your apartment. You know too much. The system has turned against you. Go! Run for your life!
Love the line break for a new choice. Could you automatically add in letters or numbers to delineate them? It would make discussion around each choice a bit easier, especially if there are four choices or more.
Summary, anyone? Please!
Yes MS has the ability to move to control the back-end of webservices, including hosting, databases, etc.

But the problem is just that this is not a very interesting market for Microsoft. The services are pretty generic with (relatively) low barriers to entry, and a resulting low profit margin. Basically that is not where the money is.
d) I am the Scrooge of upvoting articles.

I'm a bit more generous with upvoting comments, but I leave determining the front page to others.
Poll: My age is...
12 and under
13-18
31-36
37-42
43-48
49-54
55-60
61+
I'm not sure if it's intentional, but polls don't show comment counts on the home page, or beneath their title on the discussion page. This feels wrong to me as I like to use the comment count as a judge of whether or not I want to click into the discussion page (if there aren't many, there's probably nothing too thrilling going on).
Generally b, unless the title itself is upvoteable (i.e. "Arc's Out").
Sorry for the fairly big ranges. I got an error when I had more choices.
yeah, in sweden an iq of 70 suggests that you are unable to participate in a normal school and you are labelled as mentally retarded.most refugees from countries with these supposedly low iq:s attend normal schools in spite of their disadvantages regarding language.
Poll: My gender is...
Female
http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=88074
Poll: These polls are...
yeah, from an article in the economist:
during 20th century every large group of european immigrants(italians, germans, swedish...) in america have had iq:s of about 90 shortly after arrival which in all cases have risen to 100 after a couple of decades when they have been fully integrated into society.this also explains why there are other groups who have failed to experience this rise.they have failed to integrate, or society has failed to let them integrate
Ask YC: Should we raise the karma threshold for creating polls?
Or how about you have to buy them for 50 points a pop?
One of my favorite anecdotes about people who think they're too old too learn is about a 100 year old woman who was asked if she had any regrets.

She said she wished she'd starting taking violin lessons when she was sixty, since then she would have been playing the violin for forty years.
Nah. If they're valued they'll get upvoted.
i fail to see how SSRS is generic, its not a trivial product, and if you standardize on it to create your enterprise report, you wouldnt wonna change it

same goes for sql server 2005, very complex beast

okay so maybe you mean, the hosting service, not the ssrs as a serice as i first thought,

well, its only a licensing thing, MS will charge other who host ssrs webservices or sql services more then it charge the user clients, it will make money from both, those who use the service and those who provide it

and the thing about good or bad market, isnt really an issue, i think this model is an improvement, which mean companies will go for it anyway, its really a matter of time, and yes it may mean and should mean less money for MS, but i think less money is better than no money at all

and well, one topic lead to another, capitalism and growth etc ... growth is a complex issue, the problem with increasing a company revenue period after period, is that it focus on revenue and profit growth, while growth in economics is more about welfare, with doesnt directly translate to more money, so in a way, in the future we will be richer/grower but have less cash!

And MS will increase welfare, but reduce its revenues!
Shouldn't this be a poll?
A logo is an important asset for a company and should convey the "feeling" of the brand, both now and in the future since it is an expensive thing to change.

What this article overlooks is that a good logo needs to stand the test of time - and logos created from the current hype are often seen as hopelessly outdated when a new trend comes along.

A good logo needs to pass the test of time, not the test of the current hype.

IBM has an excellent logo that has stood the test of time, and conveys meaning in relation to their brand. (stability, size, accountability)

Good designers understand this.
wouldn't most people in our society act quite different from how they act today if expected lifespan was 35-40 years instead of 75-85?
I voted for both "Male" and "Android", since my girlfriend tells me that I frequently remind her of Data.
It's amazing how many PayPal founders went on to start big things on their own.
Then I think you meant that the signal/noise ratio would become lower.
Map My Tracks: real-time tracking with GPS or phone
Fun game!

I played for twenty minutes before I started wondering how I could hack the site.

I have no idea how long its legs are, but its a great example of making something fun for users with just a little code.
Oooops....

You're right. Sorry about that.
Berkshire Hathaway 2007 Annual Report (pdf)
Do you mean "these polls" as polls in general? Or, do you mean "my polls" as polls that you keep creating?
> expected lifespan was 35-40 years

This is a bit of a myth. Very high childhood and teen mortality brought average lifespan down, but once you were 20 making it to 65 was not rare at all. In places like America where plenty of good food was affordable old age was fairly common. Take a walk through an old cemetery and see for yourself.
Maybe add the votes to the post total though? It seems folks are voting in the poll but forgetting to upvote. For instance, right now, if 20 people vote in a poll, it seems like it would be interesting to the rest of the community. Plus, isn't a vote in the poll a marker of interest in said poll?
Add to that my definition of class: How you treat others. This guy learned the hard way, but he learned. Others never do.

Great post. Every once in a while, it's nice when someone says that which should go without saying.
Eric Sink's Business Finance For Geeks
Bored with no ideas for next startup
After exiting my first startup and coming out on top ($60K), I feel like I can't think of any more ideas for my next startup. I've read all of PG (yes, even the ideas one), analyzed other startups, but am sick of seeing the same ol' stuff... Can someone help me out with what to do next?

Anon for now.
Good Sleep, Good Learning, Good Life
I have way more ideas than I can handle myself...

Write a bit about what are you looking for? Embedded, web, applications? Any particular fields that you like ?