skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Thanks for pointing that out to me, I should have been clearer in my analysis. I've added an update to the bottom, and hopefully that helps: "...also please note that I am talking about the best possible education relative to what could be if you were somehow able to take a series of the best classes offered anywhere. I am sure your education was just great in some absolute sense…just like the Red Sox are pretty good at baseball, even if the All-Star team might be better."

Maybe a web analogy will work better. There is one blog (or group of blogs) today that's the most informative for you. It's a great blog, it's updated frequently, and you like it a lot. Which blogs you read is not random--you've checked out a lot of them, and you know what you like. But what if we could create some sort of blog aggregator that posted links to the best posts of the best blogs? That could be a cool thing, right?
I'm a huge Scheme fan, and I still think Lisp people are overly smug.
I wasn't aware I need sarcasm tags here. Sorry.
Getting Dugg is a badge of Honor?

Thats suprising.
All your meme are belong to us.
MS stock took a hit because part of the deal involved a 7% dilution in MS shares. That type of hit was expected.
Well, the problem is fundamentally that the people should've been playing the game before anyone said anything,

No, that's not true. The proof-by-induction doesn't work without the guru, because the initial case, N=1, is a failure. If there is only one blue-eyed person (call him "Adam"), he looks around and see a lot of brown-eyed people but has no way to know whether his own eyes are blue, or not. Meanwhile, the other 999 people see a single blue-eyed person, Adam, who isn't leaving the island, but they think it's just because Adam doesn't realize that there are any blue-eyed people at all.

Once the guru makes the observation then the chain of induction is set in motion. So, yes, that observation most certainly does convey information.

The real question is: why do our minds persist in believing that the guru's statement conveys no information? IMHO, it's a matter of psychology and anthropology. Proof-by-induction is, literally speaking, an inhuman trick. No creature on Earth can do it except humans, and most humans can't do it without special training. (We call those trained humans "math students".) Because there weren't any math students around during most of evolutionary history, our mental models of other people's behavior do not include proof-by-induction. When we see a problem like this -- one which involves an island containing 1,000 math students who apply inductive reasoning flawlessly and continuously -- our mental model of behavior just goes haywire. This scenario is literally outside our mind's design parameters, so it's completely nonintuitive.

Just solving the problem at all requires a heroic mindhack -- you have to plod along through a
set recipe, starting with the N=1 case and proceeding by a tedious chain of cases. It's fun to imagine a creature who could just see the answer to this problem, in the same way that many, many humans can spot a fleeting facial expression on the face of a Survivor contestant and just know, immediately, who will be voted off the island. (That is a task that our brain was designed for.) Perhaps some savants can do it. Perhaps Ramanujan could have done it. Perhaps Garry Kasparov can do it. Perhaps you can do it (but, if you can, it may be hard to explain how...)
So easy, and yet only one in 100,000 people can be troubled to do it.
In today's world, I'd agree with you: when you want something, you search in Google. But the trends might change (and that's the interesting part about following how social ads fare nowadays).

Provided there are incentives for people in social networks to list the commodities they own, it would be rather nice, when you're about to buy a commodity, to get (on-demand) feedback from friends that already have this type of commodity (as opposed to the feedback from the whole community). Example: how to choose among the 5 different types of GPS'es? If a friend tells you that model A works flawlessly, you might just stop cross-analysing all available models on the market and just buy model A (via a sponsored link, next to the area where you exchange feedback in your social network).

The whole web 2.0 trend with user-generated content is nice, but it's limited because one does not trust anyone equally. You need personalization (a trend in web 3.0) and/or small communities (where people can relate to each other easily, and not "to the whole world"). Hacker News is an example of the latter, where I'd say the users are much more homogeneous than those on Reddit (and that's probably the main reason why people migrated from Reddit to Hacker News).

All in all, I do see potential for social ads, but in an improved form of what we have today.
I can't come up with any big objections to this, and I usually don't have trouble with that (except for the usual: It's purely speculative whether it will gain traction or not.)

It will be interesting to see if bloggers, et al, start playing to the gallery if they get used to "tips".

One suggestion: Allow a way for website owners to 'redirect' a portion of a tip jar's tip to the creator of a particular piece of content.
Though inexperienced founders usually err too much in the direction of secrecy, it does have its uses. For example, because they didn't talk too much about what they were doing, Justin.TV was able to catch Ustream napping when they launched. Ustream had to frantically launch the next day with something that was way behind JTV's technology.
I don't think it is, or probably ever will be. There are always 1000 details you have to get right.

I'm suspicious of projects described by appending that word "out" after "build." It implies the speaker is underestimating the importance of execution. In the best projects, execution is not merely important, but even flows back into design.
congrats guys
U.S. Universities Rush to Set Up Outposts Abroad
Consumption stats show the gap between rich and poor is less than most assume
Nice experiment. A couple bug reports: The Tip button doesn't work in IE. And, I found TechCrunch on the list of the sites twice!!! One with www. and one without it.
I think your competitor is Craigslist.
Well, a big part of the problem is Metcalfe's Law, of course. But let's think about this:

How hard is it to offer a couple of decent looking templates for people to make their own site, to that it isn't such an eyesore?

That's not a bug, it's a feature.

I and others have speculated at length about why being an eyesore is a potential advantage for a site that invites the general public to contribute -- people are happier to design their own pages if they aren't being scored against a high standard. Moreover, for an eBay seller, being downscale is a potential marketing advantage. Ask yourself: who seems more likely to give you an amazing deal on the rare antique watch that you're looking for: a random guy who found it in his late father's basement, knows nothing about watches, and is nearly illiterate? Or a professional used-watch retailer with a slickly designed website?

It's telling that one of eBay's biggest competitors is Craigslist, which has far less visual design.

How hard is it to implement a better form of search and categorization?

Pretty hard, I'd wager. What is your problem with eBay's search? I always thought it worked pretty well. Do you have some specific use cases to complain about?

Designing categorization systems is hard, very hard. Go Google up "taxonomy vs folksonomy" and you'll find guys like Clay Shirky complaining about it.

How hard is it to develop a form of authentication to cut down on all the fraud that takes place on Ebay?

Isn't it easy? If you're a buyer, require an escrow service and a money-back guarantee, and bid low enough that you offset the potential cost of return shipping and handling. If you're a seller, require payment in advance and either sell "as is" or make the buyer bear the cost of return shipping.

Of course, the added friction is going to cost you money, time, options, and bidder attention, so most eBay customers are nowhere near as paranoid as this. I conclude that these people are happily choosing the risk of being defrauded in the hope of saving a couple bucks.

The general problem with building a less-fraud-prone version of eBay is that we already have things like that: they're called "retail stores" and "pawnshops" and "used-equipment dealers". You can compete with these guys, just as you can imagine competing with eBay, but they are veterans who know how to operate within thin margins, so don't expect it to be trivially easy.

eBay buried a lot of competitors in the first dotcom boom.
He was so selective in his list of big mergers.. I'd say all the companies that merged into Verizon were pretty damn successful.
Ah, now I see.
Hmmm, well I have done some freelance programming through another similar website and yeah, I had to sign up and get a debit card(from master card) through them to get paid, so what? Of course, there was other payment options but I used the card option so that I could use that later for online purchasing, etc. I don't think that should convince you to not sign up IMHO.
I really want to see this allow sites to integrate TipJoy between their own users. If you offer a small, tiny cut to sites who do this, I think this will grow by leaps and bounds across the net. Imagine if you could leave a tip for some of the crazy cool comments people submit here on TC. I know I'd do it.

Encourage other companies to put TipJoy on their sites (by letting them have a percentage of peer-to-peer donations) and everyone wins, especially you.
I am very glad Yahoo rejected Microsoft's bid. Personally, I think the bid is undervalued, and Yahoo has too much potential to monetized its massive traffic. Jerry Yang is taking Yahoo towards the right direction -- streamline operation and cutting unnecessary headcount. And I think next step is to focus on its core strength.

Microsoft is likely to bid higher, probably no more than $36-$38/share. I sure hope Yahoo's board doesn't give in to the temptation!
Kenny hinted that he will stop posting to c.l.l. (or at least cut down on his post frequency) now that he is blogging. If that is true, then "Weeny" just became my absolute favorite blog of all time ;-)
I think the point is that the utility curve for consumption flattens out a lot faster than people think. The difference between starving and a good cheeseburger is probably a lot bigger than the difference between the cheeseburger and an immaculate dinner overlooking the Thames.

Granting that it seems pretty rational to just settle with the four-times pricier television and leave the rest to the grandchildren or charity.

There are of course exceptions, e.g. someone really should have talked to Mike Tyson about the diminishing marginal utility of Bengal tigers.
And with 6 billion people in the world, that would mean that there are about 60,000 people who can be troubled to do it. :P
TC commentors are a//holes. Well I think this is a decent product. This problem area has definitely been in need of a decent solution.
Interesting article. I'm at Gonzaga University right now, and they're definitely riding this bandwagon. They've got a campus in Florence and they're working on ramping up another one in the UK and, if rumors hold true, one in Spain. At the moment it's all European, but that's mainly because they've been opening them near areas where there's a ready supply of Jesuits to teach. (GU's a Jesuit university.) I'll be interested to see where this trend goes in the next few years.

Interestingly, it doesn't seem just to be Universities that are reaching abroad in the academic/intellectual realm. A LOT of nations right now seem to be pushing international R&D collaboration. This is especially true for the Middle Eastern and East Asian countries.

Seed magazine has had a several really good articles in the past few issues about various countries looking to forge international research ties.
Also it depends on how you look at it. By some metrics of "best" there are clear leaders. For instance, if your goal in college is to land a job running a hedge fund afterwards, it's pretty clear you should get a Harvard MBA. The title and connections you get from there are far more important than any classes.
Sounds like a call for an API.
Just pay attention to what you are reading. The problem of micro-payments has been voiced many times on YC news, PG himself mentioned it in one of his writings. Yet it took forever for TipJoy to materialize.

Why? Because of all the details. When I first saw this obvious micro-payments problem I thought about it for about 30 seconds but did not come up with anything significantly different than PayPal. I moved on, but someone decided to spend more than 30 seconds on it.
Scroll through the article... I kind of like the concept of "HO-LISTIC DEVELOPMENT" :)
the only serious competitor to ebay is google. And it's a very serious one.
Pixish: it's like a Yahoo! Ask / Google Answers for images and pictures
Who's afraid of Google?
Pro sellers skipping eBay strike
Just because you mentioned it, check out this primer: http://mypage.iu.edu/~colallen/lp/lp.html

Half way through the first chapter (about 11 pages, which is really shorter than a single nytimes article) it says something on the lines with "you have now a turing complete language at your disposal." At that point you can kind of extrapolate the myriad of possibilities available with the paradigm.
TC commentors are a//holes.

You sound surprised...
Yahoo to Merge with AOL?
I know what Zuckerberg is supposed to have done, but what did Pmarca do that was iffy?
First of all, congrats to Ivan & Abigail! It's a great product and they did a great job.

As for criticism, I'm always reminded of this quote:

“It is not the critic who counts; not the man who points out how the strong man stumbles, or where the doer of deeds could have done them better. The credit belongs to the man who is actually in the arena, whose face is marred by dust and sweat and blood, who strives valiantly; who errs and comes short again and again; because there is not effort without error and shortcomings; but who does actually strive to do the deed; who knows the great enthusiasm, the great devotion, who spends himself in a worthy cause, who at the best knows in the end the triumph of high achievement and who at the worst, if he fails, at least he fails while daring greatly. So that his place shall never be with those cold and timid souls who know neither victory nor defeat.” ~ Theodore Roosevelt
Awesome idea guys. Unfortunately, no matter how hard I try, I can't get it to work with my site (mobmov.org). Also, it screws up my layout with that inline iframe you inject, which limits my options as to where to put it. Can't wait for the next iteration though, keep up the good work!
the definition they use for rich is 150k household income.
this cant be true...
Perl is now Y2038 safe
XML is ten years old today
Something we didn't see, Yahoo could merge with AOL
Amen.

Universities won't stop over-training until the financial incentives for them to do so are destroyed. For starters, I'd love to see the post-doc and graduate student salary base raised to livable levels. Most scientific research is conducted by people who can barely afford their rent, and it isn't right.
"I really mean 'why', just why are they bothering with Yahoo?"

Anyone else old enough to remember Novell combining with WordPerfect way back when to take on Microsoft? You'd think Ballmer, having been through that on the winning side would know better.
yeah its a decent language. even has a formal specification and all !
Plus there are many increasingly tight implementations of engines for it (webkit, firefox, adobe, rhino, ... etc). So people are getting real good at optimising it for the platform it runs on.

We could do worse then JS being the "next big language" as steve likes to put it.
I'm always glad to seem Microsoft doing something neat -- they have a lot of bright people.

That said....Popfly won't load on my browser -- fully updated firefox running under ubuntu (strangely, the error message implies firefox is supported).
Interactive Linux kernel Map
What did geeks do for a living before there were computers?
Agreed. For good or ill, much of the (monetary) value of education is from what others think of it. You are totally right that if someone has a specific job like that mind, where the education is more a filtering and networking service than anything else, those odds (if you can really calculate them anymore, it's almost just pure recruiting stats at that point) get cut way down.

For those coveted private equity/VC/hedge fund jobs, if you can get in to the Harvard MBA program, you are probably getting pretty close to certain that HBS is the single best school for that (Stanford/Wharton may disagree), all else equal. The individual professors, classes, your learning style, what you actually learn, and any other individual preferences, almost wash away as non-factors in light of the credential. Good point. We may have to distinguish between an education and a degree though?

I probably should have been clearer on that as well--I was just narrowly focusing on the actual knowledge-gaining/learning aspect of education. Worth noting the other side though as we abstract away from pure learning.
Record Label, Claiming Losses To P2P, Closes; Uploads Music Library To Pirate Bay
Well, I went ahead and made this tool (http://utilitymill.com/utility/Display_Unicode_Char_From_Hex)

to answer my own question.
I think the article's thesis rests on two flawed assumptions:

1.) If rich people spend as much as poor people, then their happiness must be equal because the excess income from the rich go into silly things like investments and retirement savings.

Spending $30K a year and knowing your nest egg grew by $100K, and spending $30K a year without health insurance living paycheck to paycheck in fear of layoffs isn't exactly equal happiness.

2.) A family of 2 must spend 2X to be just as happy as a family of 1 spending X.

At the very least, the Costco / BJs / Sam's Wholesale factor debunks that assumption.

I'd model happiness in discrete buckets: "can retire", "can last a while without a job", "must keep working to maintain lifestyle", and "must keep working or risk pain and death" At the high end there might also be "looking for ways to blow the money before getting too old"
Chris Sacca: Big Company, Small Company
Can UX be a Boomerang?
Who would you tip the commenters or the person who submits the link?
I got to this part (well in): "Sweden is a file sharer's heaven. Its laws protect internet service providers from being sued for what passes through their networks, which gives them little incentive to turn downloaders over to groups like the R.I.A.A. or the M.P.A.A."

and I thought the article is kind of interesting once you get past the smarmy bullshit. But at that particular part the bullshit seemed to overflow the container. I'm reasonably sure that in most countries, including the USA, ISPs are protected from being sued for what passes over their networks. I did read the rest of the article.
The last time I used Ebay or thought it was decent was back in 97-98. The site hasn't changed much since.

Someone who consulted there told me that eBay's codebase was a mess (even by the usual standards) and that they had some strange processes that made it worse. If I recall correctly, programmers weren't allowed to work in teams and were frequently 'rotated' through completely unrelated projects. He told me some other weird things that I don't remember, but that combined to form an impression that eBay's culture is really inimical to hackers. That would explain their technical stagnation. But overwhelming market share gives them powerful inertia.
What a fantastic idea! You've created not just a start-up but a social experiment. I have no idea if it'll work, but I love the idea of separating the act of tipping and the act of paying.

Do users get a reputation based on the proportion of tips they eventually pay out? Can you force users to tip (e.g. you must tip before you get to read this article, regardless of whether you're going to pay eventually).

And please make it multi-lingual! I'd love to try out a tipping-based business model, but just English won't cut it for me.

Nice to see another great idea in the winter batch, btw!
His sentences of globalization were the critical element. By including 3rd world countries in global trade, by "deepening capitalism" as he says, we essentially outsourced the poor. Now the poorest Americans represent the upper middle class of the world.

The world, especially the Muslim part, seems to object.
The other possibility is that investors are not completely rational.

Yahoo is the same company it was in November; the stock is just worth what it was then. It's the last 3 months that's been the aberration. ;-)
The article doesn't discuss happiness at all, so I don't think you can call that "resting on a flawed assumption." The relationship between income and happiness is highly non-linear -- the standard argument is that beyond a certain level of income (satisfying the lower levels of Maslow's pyramid), further income doesn't contribute much or at all to increased happiness.
I think you're alluding to skewing of the stats: http://www.lookingglassnews.org/viewcommentary.php?storyid=3...

The NYTimes article is guilty of the same thing.
Back in the 1998 at Yahoo we used to hear shocking things about how bad eBay's systems were. One of the externally visible signs was their policy of having several hours a week of scheduled downtime. That seemed just inexcusable. Do they still do that?

I think the reason eBay is so inept is that they were a monopoly almost from the beginning. So at a stage when other startups (Google for example) had to work hard to succeed, they were already coasting, at least technically.
I would imagine the network effect for something like this is huge, and basically re-enforces the market leader's position to a point that it would be hard to dethrone them. I remember Yahoo used to have auctions, and didn't Amazon try it too? I don't know if either is still at it, but clearly it didn't take off like eBay.

The network effect is even more important with the auction model, because both the price and volume of sales depend on the number of buyers. I can imagine that sellers would be reluctant to join a new auction site if it means risking getting lower margins. Although, some of the examples in the article would disagree.
I've always wondered why we really haven't seen more franchising of U.S. schools among the higher-tiers (beyond ITT Tech, U of Phoenix, etc.). And what's the real reason we see NYU-Qatar but not NYU-Los Angeles?

For example, is it the risk of brand dilution? Local competition relative to int'l--it's relatively easy money out there? That many schools actually operate at a loss (excluding endowment) ex:[1]? Do you think that the lower costs of int'l education (labor, infrastructure) changes that dynamic, since it seems they are outsourcing everything except the name and "curriculum"? Does doing it internationally make it easier since most of the U.S. alumni won't drive by the franchises on the highway? The benefits of international R&D collaboration and the ready supply of customers as TheTarquin mentions? Just curious.

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Swarthmore_College
Using Xen for High Availability Clusters
New Microsoft Research lab in Cambridge, MA: social networks, game theory
Portrait of a N00b
I tried to play with Popfly. It wouldn't work in Safari so I downloaded Firefox. Then I had to register an account. Then it loaded fine, but it failed to pull the News.yc feed. So I tried digg... nope, wouldn't load that either. I tried 4 boxes and I couldn't get any of them to work. I guess the app is still working out its kinks...
i think there is a happy medium in there somewhere
I agree - that separation is going to make this an interesting experiment when you're tipping for what could very easily be seen as a public good.