skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Who's to say nothing good comes from a heated (nasty) debate? Sure, a casual user doesn't want the comment section flooded with tripe, but to shut down a discussion may be picking and discarding fruit off the vine before it's ripe.

A solution to this might be rating comment pairs. Any thread that becomes over-heated could be taken "offline" between the two users (or groups), possibly so far as scheduling a live chat if they're so passionate about their topic. The (abbreviated) conversation would only re-appear in the thread (possibly by the readers choice) if the two came to a civil conclusion.

Granted, it sounds like a nightmare to implement, but I'd grant the Nobel Peace Prize to anyone who solved the online discussion conundrum.
"The FDA had long maintained that BPA is safe, relying largely on two studies funded by the chemical industry. The agency was faulted by its own panel of independent science advisers in 2008, which said its position on BPA was scientifically flawed because it ignored more than 100 published studies by government scientists and university laboratories that raised health concerns about BPA. Recent data found health effects even at low doses of BPA -- lower than the levels considered safe by the FDA."
Not expecting this to work for them, but if it does, maybe they'll use the money to start doing good investigative reporting again. I'd love to see more journalist-run sting operations like reporters used to do in the old days.
> And Feynman himself thought that Gell-Mann was smarter than him.

Having read biographies of both scientists, I think it's fair to say that Gell-Mann agreed with him!
That doesn't make him plural though ;)

(The article appears to show only his personal view, not that of others)
Guns, Germs and Steel is worth reading.
Collective knowledge systems
A big part of how Google won was that they made everything on Yahoo obsolete except for the search box. Now somebody just needs to make the search box obsolete.
This thing really could have helped me prepare for chemistry for exams in school. I matches my curriculum to the mark. definitely going to share with my juniors.
Great link, grellas. The New Yorker recently had an interesting article on Andy Warhol. Very Michael Jackson'ish type of guy... It's really simple; when one builds a foundation on weird things, instead of values, weird things are bound to happen.

Here's the New Yorker article: http://www.newyorker.com/reporting/2010/01/11/100111fa_fact_...
They could make it much more secure by requiring an account (which NY Times already does).
I agree, I don't think it's the panacea for that problem. It's a start though. The toughest things to get over imo, are the meme's that people will never use math and/or that math is not useful in the real world. The KhanAcademy handles the problem of insecurity about math and a gentler introduction to the topics once someone is interested enough to consider learning it. How you instill that initial desire and overcome their deep seated biases and insecurities about it are a much harder problem.
Internet access can be pooled, and many people who don't have it at home can get it from libraries, schools, or other organizations. (The same is true of books, of course.)
Breach of Copyright - The Independent
If it's not too late, adding "(like del.icio.us)" to the title would make it obvious that this is not a post about DNS security.
Yep, but then the articles would not viewable for "free" anymore thus cutting off a huge number of potential readers.
Perhaps there is no real disagreement. What we have here are four concepts masquerading as two. Let's start with inflation, a rise in prices, and deflation, a fall in prices, and introduce the two missing words: expansion, an increase in the money supply, and contraction, a decrease in the money supply.

Now, expansion causes inflation, and contraction causes deflation. Both have harmful effects. But inflation doesn't imply expansion, and deflation doesn't imply contraction. By themselves, inflation and deflation aren't necessarily bad.

With a fixed currency supply, there is neither expansion nor contraction, by definition. Thus, in this case inflation and deflation simply reflect changes in supply, demand, or both. In particular, a rise in the demand for money increases its price (i.e., purchasing power) relative to other goods, which causes lower prices. If you think lower prices are necessarily a problem, I have a $50,000 computer to sell you. :-)
What are you imagining will replace it?

Typing in a short query and getting results is a pretty minimal UI. Google has been steadily getting better at making it even more useful, for example, their calculator feature, weather, sports results for major sporting events, and so on.
I'd like to add a very personal comment to this discussion. I have very bad vision. So much so that in school, I couldn't see the board even when sitting as close as possible. As a result, I'd end up creating notes from a synthesis of what the teacher was saying and what I read in the book as the lesson was going on. This usually didn't work out, and my math skills suffered.

This website helped me fill in the gaps of knowledge I had. Actually being able to see the problem being done while given instructions was a great help.
Could you be more precise about your experience of God ?
I wonder if with this and some other stuff( for example, diagnostics using car computer) , people could easily fix their car on their own?
Myths That Can Kill a Startup
Well there is Hackers: Heroes of the Computer Revolution by Steven Levy[1]. The first part is mainly about how hackers from MIT influenced the world of technology but the second and third part touches upon how they effected the economy with there companies and all.

This may not be the best book for your research but this definitely will help you understand the players.

[1]http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hackers:_Heroes_of_the_Computer...
I'd still say adding just one feature to an already working client is less work than writing one from the ground up. It's easy to think you can just grab a library to do IMAP. But what about attachments? Encodings? HTML mail? Storage? Search? Remember, all these will need a UI of some sort. And this is just the tip of the iceberg.

Thunderbird 3.0 has custom tags. OpenOffice eats Thunderbird address books and can do mail merge. The one thing that's left is running a script when a message is received. That is actually a good idea for an extension.
If that is how it works out, they don't care.

Just like with Adblock, if the most tech-savvy 2% find a way around it, it's not going to make a big difference to their bottom line. Even moreso here because a lot of those free riders would have just chosen not to read it if it required money.
Nasty comments can certainly contain interesting ideas. But I believe all those ideas could be expressed just as well if not better without the nastiness.
I always get this mixed up with the Sphinx search engine: http://www.sphinxsearch.com/powered.html.
Not all languages, but many: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Turing_completeness#Examples
It's understood that one thread serves as channel for communication, so a discussion can take place between both sides. A second thread only dilutes the conversation; there are no separate parliament houses for separate party members, they all share one.

If I came across an opposing view, I would typically submit it in a comment/reply, not start a separate thread. And if you look at the topic IDs, they were submitted right after the other (i.e. submitter knew of both sides before hand.)

That, and the triviality of the subject made be suspicious of the submitter's intentions. I didn't mean to be hurtful, but, for crying out loud ..
Looks very cool, excited about the possibilities, but my first thought was "FCC violation."

Did a quick Google search, looks like they did a test at Burning Man in 2008 and got local FCC approvals: http://lwn.net/Articles/297038/
Not really a book, but check out James Burkes Connections series. Other shows he's worked on have to do with the history of science/technology as well.

The episode pertaining to the birth of the computer is here: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ORY-mXXgJg4&feature=PlayL...

That's worth checking out first, to give you an idea of what it's like. The rest of his stuff is here: http://www.youtube.com/profile?user=JamesBurkeWeb#g/p
This reminds me of a thread here on hn about 6 months ago where the woman refused to take a job because it paid less than her unemployment.

Same story. Opposite responses. Respect to this guy. Shame on her.

Here's that thread:

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=741663
I'm definitely going to change the site. The reason I haven't yet is that (a) I haven't decided exactly what to do, and (b) a new batch of startups just arrived at YC a couple weeks ago.
Re: "Loss of resolution: The human eye can resolve detail a lot better than a small display. This is especially important for getting accurate focus."

I couldn't agree more. This is especially true when shooting in low light with a very wide aperture (2.0 and under), as I am a huge fan of doing. I hate flash. Also, good bokeh is awesome.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bokeh
I guess EtherPad-like features are coming to Google Docs. Now that will be sweet!
Our by Google, when they roll out EtherPad-like features to Google Docs. Oops.
The author of the article actually demands mixing them. He says that you should never use tabs to do things like format a block of text -- that's what spaces are for.

So this guy isn't pro-tab-only. He's in favor of mixing.

And I agree with you, that's just trouble.
Actually there is a book version as well:

http://www.amazon.com/Connections-James-Burke/dp/0743299558

I loved this series as a kid. It was my favorite TV show. Now that I know more about the history of technology, the connections sometimes seem a bit strained, but even so I know of no better introduction to the topic.
Doubt charging for NYT will work. FT and WSJ can get away with it because their financial reporting is actually worth paying for by biz people.

I think what is really interesting to observe from all of this is the fact that leaving families in charge of companies can lead to innovation stagnation.

WaPo got lucky in that Buffett came aboard decades ago and steered the company towards good capital allocation. Those kinds of lessons served them well and they managed to purchase businesses to support their journalism operations (Kaplan).

But the Sulzberger family (NYT) pretty much stuck with journalism. The Bancroft family (WSJ) lucked out in that their product is good enough to pay for, but early on they had the option of moving into providing financial data services (think Bloomberg) and decided against it. They would have been an absolute beast of a company today if they went that route.
Rothbard has gaps, but he's light-years past most.

Never trust "historical evidence" when it comes to economics. There are no controlled experiments, and the winners write the books. In this case, there are four concepts masquerading as two. See http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1058639.
Firefox 3.6 RC2 released
I like the #4 and #5 the best. I have never even smelled a startup but I know these two things are obviously true. #4 says rightly that having a life is very important. or else what are you doing this for?
They should start charging Google to index their content, not the readers. If I were an advertiser on nytimes.com I would be livid right about now.
I agree, but it's good they're experimenting. They need to do an exclusive deal with Microsoft or Google (like Bing/Murdoch: http://www.techcrunch.com/2009/11/13/murdoch-google-bing-mex...).
You can have the guys at mturk.com do the work for you. Offer them a decent compensation and they will return worthwile results. Maybe split it into a few different tasks, one for colleges, stadiums, concerts, etc. so they will be more focused.

For universities, you can get the list (although may not be complete) at ratemyprofessor.com. They all have websites over there that you can check out for more info.

Google Maps gives universities and stadiums a diff color in map view. Maybe there is a way to access that data and use it? I don't know.
Game-changing nanodiamond discovery for MRI
Wufoo + Free Incentivization = Cheap, Effective User Surveys
My prediction: A gorgeous interactive iTablet magazine app with the software written by Apple and the content provided by the NYTimes, Sports Illustrated, etc.

At least, I'm hoping the content producers don't try to make their own (as in iPhone). A standard iTablet newspaper/magazine app would make the experience consistent. In the iPhone apps, it's pretty fragmented right now in terms of quality and experience.
When we moved to San Diego, my girlfriend couldn't find a job and ended up working at a coffee shop and school for minimum wage. Luckily California requires that all jobs pay minimum wage, even if you make tips. With tips she ends up with maybe $15/hr, which is livable for us.

Working at a grocery store would drive me nuts. I worked at one in the summer in high school and I dreaded every single second. My singular purpose that underlies everything I do, is to not have to work a job like at a grocery store.
IMHO embedding in F# or Haskell isn't particularly useful, but embedding in C is pretty neat. You can add scripting support to an application in a day or two. This was gimp's trick. Arguably it is emacs trick too. Nowadays, It's probably better to use something like guile or lua.
This could easily be used to share development/design feedback with a team. One of the more frustrating limitations of working from home is the difficulty in showing a few someones a quick screen share. We've used iChat for this in the past, but it proved to be buggy and crash prone. This looks like it might fit the bill.
The newer Blackberrys have 'Documents to go' that allow you to read .doc when they are incoming and edit and send .doc from your phone.

The same is true for .ppt and .xls

Email is standard on all smart phones.
Evolved Electronic Brains on Acid make Art to Talk
This seems very similar to the magicJack femtocell except for not having to use them, so if magicJack can get FCC licensing for their any-GSM MitM device, then surely this could also.
An Empire of Wealth by John Steele Gordon.
You can do some pretty interesting stuff with the Objective-C runtime. It's like Java introspection/reflection minus most of the headaches/penalties. For example, dynamically find the values for all ivars with a name that contains the substring 'style'.

http://developer.apple.com/mac/library/documentation/Cocoa/R...
I'm a little confused about the license. HyperGraphDB is LGPL, but ships with Berkeley DB. Isn't BDB GPL? Could I distribute a closed-source app with this?
I wonder how performant this is, since I see no mention of benchmarks and such.

I'm currently using MongoDB to store a graph, and it's not that bad to use, except that pagination of a node's edges is unwieldy, atleast the way I have it set up.

But I don't see how to do it smoothly in HyperGraphDB either. I don't see a way to sort by edge weight within a query, and limit results to say the top 10, or skip them. So I'd have to load up all the edges to a node, and sort/limit/skip them myself?
However on issues like Tibet, pretty much all my Chinese friends, whether they grew up there or in the US, backed the government.

I think despite everything they're still quite patriotic. Probably due to a lack of understanding that an illegitimate government is an entity seperate from the Chinese people. They almost back the government as if it's a duty tof being Chinese.
Googlephone No Match for Kafkaesque Carriers
I really hope this works for them. I subscribe to LWN and don't mind paying for things that I find valuable (even news). I also like the idea of the reader being the real customer instead of the advertiser.

But I don't think it will work.

The problem is that the 50¢ a copy we used to pay was never the real money maker for newspapers. What made the business so fat was the near-monopoly control they had over many components of local advertising. That control is gone and it's never coming back.
to physically insert two actual spaces

Ohhh... Hardware Tab Expansion - the only way to expand for a true believer :-)
Why wouldn't publix leap at the opportunity and at least make him manager of the store. I can't imagine they get many MBAs at that level. Why not actually put his skills to good use?
Three reasons why Non Profits should Give a Tweet
This is my favorite monologue of all time. Inspiring. In it, James Burke sums how sci/tech is fundamental to changing the world. Then he ties Eastern & Western philosophical views. And the explains how the computer revolution will could radically change society: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mB8_wPei2ZM (5mins)

If you like Paul you'll like Burke. Here's his bibliography: http://www.amazon.com/James-Burke/e/B002N2NB36/ref=sr_tc_2_0...
Why are you focusing on whether or not it is shocking?

It is deceptive and wrong, regardless of your emotional reaction to it.
> Shame on her.

Why? Seems rational to me.
I clicked on an ad that led to this site once and was immediately displeased to find myself immersed in what seemed like a 90s web scam.

I clicked the ad because it seemed to be advertising a handheld GPS for pennies on the dollar, but when I clicked through the auction for that item had ended and some (probably fake I decided) person had won the item.

It's smart of Arrington not to associate with these guys. They are very intentionally misleading, and I think Arrington cuts them and their VC backers way too much slack
. Everyone involved in this venture should be ashamed of themselves, or at least of how the business is being run.
10 Nice Ways To Create Nice Looking Image-Border Using CSS
The circumstances of that match are still very very shady. Deep Blue prepared for the match using full knowledge of every game Kasparov ever played. Kasparov was not granted access to any game that Deep Blue ever played.
During the match the team kept on reprogramming Deep Blue, to better combat Kasparov's style.

Still, these days computer chess programs are probably better than most grand masters. I completely agree that that doesn't say much about AI though.
I think it's admirable that he took a job at Publix to support his family, but he really shouldn't put that on his resume if he wants a high-paying job again.

Also, this guy is a smart MBA? Why doesn't he figure out a way to make some money? Any capable MBA with roots in a community should be able to start a small business, particularly if his wife is making sure the family doesn't starve.
which is awesome, by the way
Chess is not where the action's at in AI anyways, so you're right, that idea is indeed laughable. These days, poker is hot new(ish) thing for AI research, with it's stochastic gameplay and psychological twist (bluffing and calling bluffs), and wide range of strategies. See, for example: http://poker.cs.ualberta.ca/
You're assuming he has a lot of skills. I have a business degree myself, and it wasn't very hard to get, and it doesn't guarantee I'm good at any one useful thing.

He may have gotten laid off from his six-figure job because of the economy, but if he's capable, he should be able to move down the chain, but stay a little above bag-boy at Publix.

Why can't he get a lower-paying office job? What's this guy's real story? Maybe it has more to do with unwillingness to relocate and the state of the micro-economy he lives in.
Schemes like unemployment insurances backfire by reducing the total productivity of human beings since people will not make much of an effort if the job being offered on the market is lower than unemployment benefit.
or the CMU speech recognition project: http://cmusphinx.sourceforge.net/wordpress/
SugarSync for Android Will Finally Allow you to Sync your Files
One of my major beefs with the Android platform is the lack of an iTunes-like solution.
I would not call that shady. All parties agreed on those conditions before the match, and of course Deep Blue was reprogrammed between games. Kasparov changed his approach based on Deep Blue's play, as well.
Having this discussion is great. I'm glad there are plans by PG to implement improvements. I have been a reader of HN for years now, but I rarely comment. Not because I don't want to participate, I do want to participate. And I want to participate civilly and without nastiness.

The reason I rarely comment is simply my own reading habits and the way the site works. I read HN on a mobile device via an RSS reader. I flag the threads in my reader I find interesting to look at further on my next work day when I'm sitting in front of my desktop machine.

However, by the time I return to a thread it's usually old and no longer active. At that point, I rarely see any reason to comment, as it likely won't be seen.

What I, personally, would love is a way to subscribe to a thread's comments in some way, perhaps via rss. That would help me to track the follow-up comments made on the few posts I do comment on. But, if there are others like me, perhaps having a way for people to more easily follow threads would bring more people into the discussion and bring more of the prolific commenters back to the discussion.

When I implemented an email notification system for commenters on my blog which notifies each commenter when a new comment is posted, community engagement skyrocketed. I used to get 4-5 comments a post and it's now regularly up in the 40,50,60 comment range. I also found that eliminating anyone who starts getting "trollish" from getting those email updates tends to make them naturally drop out of the thread because they think no further comments are being made.

Anyway, just my two cents. I may be way off-base on this idea, and if so, PG is obviously free to ignore it and I will continue to love HN all the same.

Look forward to the changes.
Sure, Blizzard made Starcraft, but everyone forgets they also made Diablo. Diablo II was grind central.
The simplicity of the Objective-C runtime is one of it's most impressive features. There are very few rules to the object system, and meta classes are an example of how flexible that is.

Combine that with the fact that the language is entirely implemented in C as functions operating under those rules, and you've got an excellent foundation.
The UI is minimal, and that is a very significant advantage. I don't have clarity around something that is superior. In terms of properties, though, the UI would be minimal and getting results would be as powerful as writing arbitrary SQL against a backend. If somebody comes up with something that meets both of those conditions, I think it'll be a game-changer.
They mention in the article that they had to move since his wife got a new job. So, they may not have the roots in the community. Also the local economy seems much worse than rest of the country (with unemployment being higher) and raising money in the condition is probably hard

Also, starting your own thing require a lot of skills/resources which few are capable of, with a straight out of college job and lots of years in the industry starting a business might seem more difficult than just hunting for a new job while working on a low paying one. And nobody said he was a smart MBA, he could be just a average guy (hard working one though) with an MBA
I don't understand what's he's trying to say, though I get the feeling that the author misses the point of why search is good. Good search has very little to do with the words - most search engines got that part mostly right, all independently.

What makes search great, the real underlying principle, is the link graph, the authority measurement. What Google was able to do was not just make a vast catalog, but to sort it by goodness.

You can wrap up that measure in a search box or whatever UI you want.
Sorry, can't edit it.
"Like Cardboard": The weird new Domino's ads that bash the company's pizza.
This is a great introduction to R for people that already understand SQL well.