skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
In terms of speech quality, especially how natural and human it sounds, I sure hope this is not state of the art! Sounds like my Amiga 500 in the 90s.

But I have to agree, a cool service nonetheless.
Regardless of the criteria for censorship, it'd be ineffective on a community like Reddit.

Wikipedia's process for ensuring quality of content is admirable, if imperfect. They benefit from the community's clearly defined constraints and overall mission.
Generally the U.S. has run perennial trade deficits with the rest of the world because people around the world have been essentially collecting dollars instead of spending them. They were for a long time considered the main "hard currency" other than volatile and politically-sensitive gold.

In other words, we would send dollars to country X and receive goods in return. Instead of sending back those dollars to us and receiving goods from us, they would stuff them under a mattress, or in their government reserve vaults, because their own local currency was not considered as trustworthy.

In recent years, foreign governments have begun viewing the euro as a strong, stable currency, and have been diversifying their reserves by getting rid of dollars and stocking up on euros. Two of the recent effects of that phenomenon have been a declining dollar (as with anything, its price goes down when there is a sudden flood of sellers), and high U.S. asset prices (because now the dollars are coming out of the mattresses and vaults, and being used to buy stocks and property).
What more would you expect?
Yes, I have pondered the moral implications of my startup.

Cryptography comes with a price: The bad guys get to use it too. Where my startup is concerned, this means that organized crime would have access to TLA-quality secure backups (and by "backing up" data from one system and "restoring" it to another, secure communication, too).

In the end I decided that since (a) criminals would need to pay for the service (which makes tracking them down easier), and (b) I'm going to be logging IP addresses, the extent to which this would assist criminals is fairly limited; and that the legitimate needs people have for secure backups far outweigh the potential for abuse.
I also thought what was humorous was if you were using python, you wouldn't use a python sorting algorithm for numbers. I realize it is just an example, but if you want something realistic, use the built in sort which is nicely optimized, or write your own method in C if it is non-trivial.

>def realsort():
t1 = datetime.datetime.now()
for x in range(3000):
numbers[:].sort()
t2 = datetime.datetime.now()
print t2-t1
>realsort()
>0:00:00.128081
I guess the traditional way to get a free lunch would be to borrow lots of stuff and then go bankrupt.
A free cheeseburger would be nice...
Very interesting article. It suggests that ability to organize outside firms is directly correlated with effectiveness of outsourcing. So if computers increase the ability to organize outside firms, then they must increase outsourcing.

So the question becomes, will computers ever increase the ability to organize outsiders to the point where the firm disappears altogether? (This kind of scenario was suggested in http://paulgraham.com/opensource.html)

My answer would be eventually yes, but not in the near future. Computer communication tools are still startlingly primitive. Based on experiments in office microgeography,(http://www.nytimes.com/2008/01/07/technology/07link.html) being closer to people still makes it far easier to exchange information.
Thanks for your feedback. I agree that protracted hand-wringing over the potential outcomes of my startup would be a waste of time. Nonetheless, I think it is worth pondering the issue.

In a sense, the specific problems I raised with Reddit are just a subset of a larger issue: community-driven sites rotting at their core. Sometimes they rot at their core due to racists (and other types of bigots and hate mongers) spouting off, and sometimes they rot at their core due to idiots being idiots, and sometimes they rot at their core due to spammers.

I raised the topic because I've heard plenty of ideas on how to reduce the number/influence of idiots and spammers on community-driven sites, but I have heard far less about how to prevent hate from taking hold. This is important not just because racism and other forms of bigotry harm society, but because prominently featured prejudice-based hatred diminishes the credibility of the information a given community creates/organizes just as much as idiots and spammers do.

Our concept is not really like Reddit (or Wikipedia), and we think it is less vulnerable to the rot-inducing influences I referenced above.
The problem is simply one of resolution.

Blah blah. Brace a book or magazine in the same position as a computer monitor and you will have the same unpleasant experience while reading it. Monitors are bad because of positioning, immobility, and (even if those were solved) rigidity/unresponsiveness to manipulation by the fingers.
BBC man checks out Seesmic and is impressed (with video)
Jobs: Blu-ray wins HD format war then loses to downloads
The bubble was unprecedented. Hopefully, lenders remember that credit quality matters the next time the fed decides to dump 1% credit on us.
I was hoping for something a little more substantial. What was the point of that pressure sensor?
The Semantic Wave of 2008
Yes, there are things you can do to drive the community in the way you want, without resorting to censorship.

There are softer measures you can take - make the votes of trusted editors (and people who vote like them) count for more in the ranking algo in the Reddit's case, for example. Is this ethical? Well, you have to decide for yourself.

A few examples to think of might help:

- Western civilization generally spreads its values along with its technology. Is this Ok?

- Is it ethical to support democracy in cultures that don't grow it themselves?

- If you are the government of some country and have a tribe practicing female genital mutilation and considering it normal (including the women), what is the ethical thing to do?

- Is Scientology ethical? Is it ethical to constraint them?
Is anybody riding this wave? I plan to. Surf's up!
You can't make people good.

You can make yourself a better person and lead by example, but you can't stop people from doing something like spreading misinformation and hate speech. It has been going on since the beginning of civilization. If your startup has the right moral and socially beneficial intentions, then that is really the most you can do. If someone comes along and uses your tool for evil, that doesn't mean you shouldn't have created your tool.

In scientific and technological research, there are often amazing uses that benefit humanity. For example, splitting the atom resulted in nuclear power which is arguably a great invention for mankind. However, due to human nature, it created the greatest weapon mankind has seen.
You cannot blame the researcher for facilitating this, you can only blame human nature for abusing the technology.
I'm surprised how often this comes up in YC startups, actually. I'm not sure if this is true of founders in general (it might be) but practically everyone we've funded not only wants to not be evil, but actively wants to make the world better.

This was certainly true of the Reddits. And in fact I think they succeeded. If you make a site where everyone can say what they want, some people are going to say things other people don't like. But isn't this a net improvement over the preceding model, where there were a few narrow channels for the distribution of news, and the companies that controlled them controlled the news? I'm not sure what you mean by "hate speech," and I doubt you are either, but I think we're net ahead if we have a world in which its harder for the powerful to suppress news, even if a few people take advantage of this new openness to say things that offend others. In fact, some of the best ideas started out that way.
Censorship usually is not associated with filtering true vs. false information. From wikipedia:

Censorship is the suppression or deletion of material, which may be considered objectionable, harmful or sensitive, as determined by a censor.

"Censorship" implies a value judgement, not just filtering out content that is false (although even then, it can be hard to determine what is unquestionably untrue). That's why it's so subjective and difficult.
you must be referring to the game of the century against Bryne. Fischer played that game when he was 13 years old.

In later years he rarely sacrificed much.

Fischer's style of chess is considered the most universal in that he has no preferences he just plays the best moves for the position.

Kasparov considered Fischer to be 10 years ahead of the top grandmasters. In 1972 he had scores over the grandmasters (candidates matches) of 6-0.

Yes. He was incredible.
He's been an embarrassment to the game for the last 30 years. With respect to that, good riddance.
Dude died at a power of 2 which is also the number of squares on a chess board. Poetic.
"In later years he rarely sacrificed much."

IIRC, he did that against Tal too.

Either way, his games are a thing of beauty to see and wonder "how did he think of that?"
Surgeons 'are better after playing Nintendo Wii'
Most of the world's great music is out of copyright and waiting to be free
Thinking about how to nurture your community is not a waste of time. The right community is vitally important to many startups, certainly not less important than the technology (Reddit and Wikipedia are both good examples).

He has control over the community in the way he implements its mechanisms of interaction. Crash course here:

http://www.joelonsoftware.com/articles/BuildingCommunitieswi...
Er, not to mention which, anyone who wants secure commo can just use GnuPG and friends.
The processing power required to do real-time annotation of the display isn't as close as the display technology.
that's very interesting.
The hottest fires in hell are reserved for those who remain neutral in times of moral crisis.
"My answer would be eventually yes, but not in the near future. Computer communication tools are still startlingly primitive. Based on experiments in office microgeography,(http://www.nytimes.com/2008/01/07/technology/07link.html) being closer to people still makes it far easier to exchange information."

And interrupt people in the zone.

Any information exchange between people in an office (especially programmers) works much better when the people involved are at equal talent levels. Otherwise, the lesser-talented people bug the crap out of the more-talented people with questions that could have been answered with a simple Google search.
I think I learned more about music on this thread than by listening to radio on the last year. I will try some of the artists mentioned here later on. I usually listen to internet radio. Music doesn't really bother me, but silence does. Silence makes any noise seem like a thunder to me.
Look... I am hacking Hacker News by clicking on "add comment" button!

My text gets added to the website now!

Hacking the OLPC huh? Sounds more like installing apps in OLPC.
So basically all they're saying is that young people try to minimize the amount of work they do and have short attention spans. Exactly how is this pioneering research?
Yes, Gladiator... I meant to include that as well.
No, it wasn't unprecedented. In fact, this bubble was exactly like every other bubble.

EVERY bubble is driven by folks who say "it's different this time". They're wrong every time.

As they say "pigs get fat, hogs get slaughtered".
> The US Government declaring bankruptcy. That would mean China is in $1.4 trillion worth of trouble, but the US would be in a lot, lot, lot more trouble.

The Chinese can't foreclose.

The most significant result of the US govt declaring bankruptcy would be that folks would stop lending it money, at least for a while. (Folks have a surprisingly short memory for this sort of thing. Argentina has defaulted a couple of times.)

That would be a good thing as long as it lasted.
The merge sort test is probably spending most of its time allocating/deallocating arrays. I would say it's similar to the b-tree shootout.

http://shootout.alioth.debian.org/gp4/benchmark.php?test=bin...
I think that if there is something you can do to prevent or discourage the use of your creation for evil purposes, then you should do everything in your power to do so.

Sometimes doing so is also critical to keeping your users, especially if they entrust you with something useful but dangerous.

At Loopt I think about things like this a lot, and I hope that doing so has made the service safer and harder to subvert for common questionable or evil purposes.

Simply ignoring the issues would have been negligence.
This site has so much potential!
pyglet 1.0 is out
It doesn't surprise me that this is a common concern in YC startups. It also doesn't surprise me that the Reddit guys gave the issue consideration.

I agree that limiting the ability to suppress news, even if some people take advantage of increasing openness to advance harmful agendas, is a positive trend. I used to regularly derive enjoyment from Reddit, and occasionally, I still do. Nonetheless, I think Reddit's struggle with various forms of abuse (by idiots, racists, spammers, etc.), is relevant to those of us working on community driven web-based projects (even if "community-driven," and "web-based" are the only traits in common with Reddit, as is the case with my startup). If I were one of Reddit's founders, I'd be troubled by its current state, and I want to do whatever I can to prevent similar problems from happening to our site.

As to what I meant by hate speech, I'll lean on Justice Potter Stewart's words regarding the definition of pornography:

"I shall not today attempt further to define the kinds of material I understand to be embraced within that shorthand description; and perhaps I could never succeed in intelligibly doing so. But I know it when I see it..."

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/I_know_it_when_I_see_it

There is plenty of hate speech on Reddit, and I know it when I see it.

The first time I discovered your (pg's) existence was when I received a link to your essay "What You Can't Say."

http://paulgraham.com/say.html

You said in that essay "like every other era in history, our moral map almost certainly contains a few mistakes." I agree with you. Nonetheless, I'm sure that it isn't a mistake to consider white supremacist propaganda, for example, to be harmful to society.

I'd be surprised if you haven't encountered hate speech on Reddit, but perhaps you haven't. I imagine it wouldn't take you long to find, if you tried, as I have stumbled across it quite regularly by accident. Regardless, the particulars of my critique of Reddit aren't relevant. Figuring out how to make a community good, and keep it good, is my goal. The consensus here appears to be that an ounce of bad sprinkled in with tons of good is still worth it. I agree, but I'm still going to think about how to reduce that ounce to a gram, or less. Any ideas would be appreciated.
New D language pumps up programmer productivity
Slightly misleading, because we have internal messages and documents that are also stored as items. But probaby not more than 1000 of them, so we will pass 100,000 comments + stories today.
he hasn't been playing for the last 30 years- he has only embarassed himself.
I'm sure the dream of becoming independently wealthy was plenty stimulating.
What You Can Learn From Chess Master Bobby Fisher
I need help? Best way to get around in the 'Bay Area'?
So I'm at the Radisson in Brisbane until Sunday, I want to rent a car, but I'm only 21...so that's out of the question. I wanted to try and get a zip-car, but apparently there is a 1-3 day waiting period..so that's ruled out.

I need to get to Daly City, Burlingame, the Hillsdale Mall and Downtown SF today. Any suggestions besides BART?

-no im not too good for Public Trans, I'm just pressed for tim
-Also my girlfriend and I have to split up, and I dont want her to go by herself

All contributions are greatly appreciated?
The first commercially available book (that I know of) on The D Programming Language will be released on January 28
Well... it would be nice to be able to download things and keep them on my hard-drive instead of buying physical media that has to be kept somewhere and fiddling around with DVD cases and bending down to open the tray.

But as a lot of the comments on that page point out, most service providers (in the UK at least) are just terrible - my ISP recently started to throttle torrents and the 8MB/s service is closer to 2MB ... on a good day.

I look forward to it though, but I think we'll still have Blue Ray and possibly whatever comes after that before we download everything. Perhaps some sort of wireless internet instead of the copper cables we have in the UK at the moment[1], I don't see British Telecom giving us all fiber any time soon.

[1] Wild Friday afternoon speculation of course.
Yes, I would agree that is one of the many costs associated with a firm.

However, I would say that the point of the article is that the increased coordination and communication of firms outweighs the associated costs of the office environment at present.

One could argue that the internet makes the office/firm model of doing business obsolete by reducing the costs of outsourcing. To some extent this has already happened in the open source community as well as in user generated content websites such as wikipedia. In these cases, sophisticated projects are designed and built by individuals working at many locations.

The crucial (and seemingly odd) distinction is that these projects are undertaken by individuals for no pay. I would argue that this allows some flexibility in the projects. Jobs, money, and lives rely far less on the success of an open-source project than on the success of a profit driven firm.

It remains to be seen whether the contribution model of wikipedia could be translated to a bid model that would replace the traditional for-profit firm. In some industries, such as programming, the bid model has lower costs of decreased cooperation, and thus has occurred more quickly. However, I cannot see it taking root in "heavier" industries (engineering, manufacturing, consumer services) without a significant improvement in computer communication tools.
Actually, you should care what your neighbors are doing. Your taxes will (eventually) increase when the economy is unhealthy.
Neural networks in plain English
He stood up to the government coz of what he believed in. Thats a big deal, irrespective of what he believed in seems nice or embarassing in your eyes.
Actually, it turns out that the eBook is available now.

http://www.apress.com/book/view/9781590599600
MacBook Air Good For The Impaired
Some sweet Javascript time pickers
Whoa! I got to the end of this article and was surprised to see that the offer is an econ professor. I've never written a comment this long, but just had to this time. Comparing an international trade deficit to buying books at a Barnes & Noble in a different town? I understand the schema, but it is nowhere near complete or accurate in its intention.

Buying books vs. running a trade deficit with Mexico. sure on a micro level the author can run a deficit with the city of Pittstown and still be OK, just as the US could run a deficit with Mexico and still be Ok. I'm assuming that the author is running a surplus in the city where he earns his living. That is the reason the deficit in Pittstown is manageable. The US is running a large deficit overall and therefore the situation is much less manageable.

This is a better analogy. The author has a job which makes $50k a year, yet he spends $75k a year
= earnings < spending.

How does he spend more than he earns? With credit card debt of course. The US issues and sells bonds as debt.

The author argues that a deficit is better than a surplus because credit will eventually be cut, but someone can save forever not living to their full utility (economics term for enjoyment). If these scenarios play out, here are the outcomes.

The person running a deficit is in debt without the earning power to get out. In this situation they have to cut their spending significantly and hope they can afford to feed themselves. Remember they cannot borrow any more and eventually their assets may be repossessed.

The person running a surplus can maintain his current standard of living forever. Depending on the size of his savings, he may be able to quit his job and live off the interest of the savings. He has no debt, only savings, and can most likely increase his utility/standard of living without any further effort or consequences.

Both scenarios are equally good?
There's a D book out (finally): http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=100391
A Rails generator for ExtJS
Very cool, hope to see this take off!
Yahoo Asks Employees To Turn In Computers
Recursive comic
Python: High-level Language Features and Testing
A Little Too Much aaS
Seminal Semantic Web Patents to be Auctioned
Sacrifices are great. Its visually appealing and I loved it too when I first started.

But on looking back I think what makes the greatest chess players is their intelligence and ability to calculate quickly and accurately.

Here is an example of one of Fischers greatest games. It really shows his great insight.

It is a game from 1971 against Petrosian. Here is the link
http://www.chessgames.com/perl/chessgame?gid=1044351

After the 21st move Fischer has a great knight and there is no way an amateur would give it for the useless bishop. But that's exactly what he did.

Fischer's insight was that in this particular position getting rid of the bishop allows his rooks to invade into the enemy's position quickly (which is exactly how the game ended).

At that time this move was criticized by top gradmasters as a blunder.

I just brought this up to show that chess is really a game of intelligence.

Regards.
The firm is an abstraction that lets many people (employees, managers, etc) appear as a single actor in market. As with all good abstractions, the market doesn't care how it's composed, only how it functions. The abstraction would leak in the case of horrible labor conditions causing strikes or causing labor as a whole to organize and affect all firms, or other cases like that.
Read EXIF info from JPEG and TIFF images in Ruby
7 Deadly [Rails] Sins, Part 1
Nonetheless, I'm sure that it isn't a mistake...

If you read the essay carefully, you'd understand that in every era "right thinking people" are sure that the things they want to ban are bad. In 1700 after explaining how broad-minded you were you'd be saying "Nevertheless, I'm sure it isn't a mistake to consider atheistic propaganda to be harmful to society." And you'd be wrong.

The whole point of the essay is that you have to step out of yourself to have any hope of seeing beyond the prejudices of your time, and that this is extremely hard. Your casual use of blanket labels for forbidden ideas is a sign you don't appreciate the difficulty of the problem here.

You'll notice I have never said what kinds of speech I think should be banned. That's because I've seen enough to know that that that second clause following "I'm pretty open-minded, but..." is very likely to be mistaken. Like someone saying that some open mathematical problem will never be solved, you're setting yourself up to look like a fool to future generations.

So your use of "sure" to me is very convincing evidence that your filters will generate a lot of false positives. I spent a whole month thinking about this problem. WYCS took the longest of any essay I've written. And I would be very reluctant to use that word "sure" in this kind of situation. So either you understand this stuff so much better than me that you've passed through uncertainty and back into certainty, or you simply have the confidence in your opinions that everyone is born with.