skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Try taking a gold bar down to the gas station and buying a tank of gas and a hot dog. Do you have change for this? A couple of doubloons and a nugget?

It's battering. Gold is a commodity. So if things really did get that bad, gasoline, food, water or anything else (batteries), would be a much better bargaining medium.

That's what people don't understand when they make this argument. If you hold the physical gold, the value is up to debate and barter, your $1000 worth of gold just became $50? If you hold certificates, then it's just worthless paper.

So the scenario where gold works best is short of total collapse and in which you can get it converted to some foreign currency that is still accepted in you home country.

Again, in New Orleans, people didn't suddenly break out doubloons and start normal operations, so the short term is out.

Where is gold a reasonable investment for the "doomsday" scenario? I'd really like to know, because logically I can't think of a good reason to hold gold.
You won't have too much trouble as long as you keep to the center of the city. As in pretty much any Eastern European country, anybody under the age of 30 can speak english more or less acceptably. And expect to get ripped off by taxies if you don't speak at least one local language.
They would need resources, and they would have to compete for those resources with the dominating manufacturer. If you own resources, why would you give them to the person who has nothing to offer in return? You won't.

So it will be a group of people who own resources, one guy who makes food and one guy who makes clothing. These are the only people who will get to eat.
I'm sold on CSS resets. When I add an h1 tag, I expect it to be styled exactly the way my CSS styles it, and nothing else (e.g. a default 1em bottom margin in some browsers but not others).
Terry Pratchett was fond of saying that one-in-a-million chances come true 9 times out of ten, but I believe in that he was referring to fiction and not internet crazies.
I am not suggesting that people shouldn't move out of their parents' house. I do think, however, that the system is built in such a way that a false-choice of specialty encourages people to move outside of their native regions for no particular reason.

Staying within a region is not the same as saying that someone should continue to live with their parents. Undoubtedly we have too much of that right now.
Is Jason Calacanis on crack?
Please stop implementing page curls, especially for reflowable unpaginated text, especially if you're not using flash and have rich text layout support (as you do in Cocoa).

Please do this instead: http://amarsagoo.info/tofu/
Antipodean? :)
"changed the way programmers... get their answers" != "changed the way I get my answers"

Clearly, based on their traffic, they have changed the way many, many programmers get their answers.
Nationalized Groupthink
It's getting better, but StackOverflow is still pretty dominated by C# and .Net questions. If you're using something else there is a significantly smaller chance that they'll turn up in your search results.
It's a lot more than "something with HBase" :)

It'll be hosted in the cloud (SaaS-style), or you can run it in the datacenter.
Mobile network operators are just big dumb pipes in the sky
StackOverflow is a help when you don't find the answer with Google. It's not really new: it's more a successor to Usenet which is getting quite dated -- especially since most of the old folks have abandoned it.
Ask HN: How to grow user submitted content based site?
As a fun side project I built a site which lets users make and take quizzes. I've now hit a wall where users seem to be happy to take quizzes but no one has made any. I tried seeding the site using MTurk; the results were hilarious but not very useful. Does anyone have any suggestions for motivating users to create quizzes? Should I raffle off gift certificates maybe? The site is at www.quizfiz.com for reference.
Just a realization I had today, that the mass majority of people subscribe to one of two ideologies, each of which tells you the other people are inherently bad. This is my attempt at rationalizing some reasons to why that is.
I'm not sure that's true. There is no value in gold, it's imaginary and over time, people have tended to give up beliefs in imaginary things.
"IMO, this suggests the introduction of basic welfare state funded by the increased prosperity. But we can also just waste the extra productivity with a huge military, increased litigation, and a truly massive prison system."

I'd suggest education would be a preferable alternative to either of those.
So, number of jobs is the only variable that matters? Compare the lifestyles of the 7900 old-style weavers to those of the textile factory workers. Who lived longer on average? Who ate better? Who had time for family? Strictly in terms of money: what was the wage of a spinner and what was the wage of a textile worker?

I'm not saying that machines are bad, I'm saying this argument leaves out an awful lot of info -- unless you take on faith that more jobs == better.
One problem that seems to have come up a few times is their inability to make serious revenues. This is a perennial issue for sites aimed at developers that don't sell products - coders + advertising don't mix.

I get the impression Joel's looking at expanding the SO model into other non-developer/non-geek niches where advertising could work, but I'm not convinced he's proven the revenue model enough to make it a tempting investment just yet. Anyone know any different?
A lot of those Google results are now coming from StackOverflow. Arguably, they've done a good job of centralizing programming Q&A and making it manageable. Certainly light years ahead of Experts Exchange.
When you were younger, you didn't know as many people and your parents probably didn't tell you about murders. Anecdotes do not overthrow statistics, as we've heard again and again.
I'm curious too. It doesn't even have to be so ambitious as a whole event.

What would be an example of a talk that's more interesting than anything at TED?

And why couldn't such a talk simply be given at TED? Because "white people" wouldn't like it? Why not?

Some concrete examples would be a great help.
Why geeks make good lovers
Check out the "Tags" page to see the popularity of various technologies on StackOverflow. Although C# and .NET are pretty popular on StackOverflow, I don't think they are disproportionate to their overall popularity in the developer community.

Look at how StackOverflow has displaced Experts Exchange, though, and it tells a clearer story:

http://www.alexa.com/siteinfo/stackoverflow.com+experts-exch...

I don't think there is ANY other general-audience programming site with more traffic.
So, first you say I shouldn't be prejudicial against prejudice, and now you say that pointing out that someone is probably poor or probably uneducated, based on evidence, and while arguing against prejudice for those things, is prejudicial?

I just wish that I was being trolled, so that I could have more hope for humankind.
Okay - is anyone actually surprised by this?

Publishers clearly gave Apple a lot of leeway in order to generate some competition for the Kindle - but I doubt dropping DRM would be one of them.
This brought tears to my eyes. I know exactly what he is talking about, and he described it better than I ever could.

I saw a talk by someone from Stanford Hospital on diagnosing lung cancer a few weeks ago and the statistics are dismal. Most people have nodules in their lungs that will show up as false positives on scans. The window where a possible tumor on a scan is large enough that it's worth risking a biopsy and where you catch the tumor early enough is very small. By the time a patient has symptoms, it is too late, the cancer has already metastasized and spread to other parts of the body. Across all forms of lung cancer, median survival time is less than seven months after diagnosis.
if there is only one person providing food, at that point it becomes economically viable for individuals and consumers alike to produce food

Not if companies own most of the arable land and IP on harvesting machinery.
Sorry, I'm not sure what you mean. What did I implement that already exists? The only method I added to UnboundMethod was origin, and I don't see a method on that page that does that.
"without question"

I question. You clearly take that as virtually axiomatic, but I question. Gold's ultimate value is that it is pretty and shiny, and industry has produce metric shitloads of prettyshiny since the last time gold had any real independent value as uniquely prettyshiny.

Your gold is only worth what people will give you in return for it. If society collapses, who is going to trade you gold for food? You'd better hope enough people buy your propaganda about gold's value because it's going to be your only hope; the market for gold jewelry is going to be pretty small and effectively saturated.

Gold has no value anymore. Yes, historically it was valuable, but times have changed. A lot.

God help those who are long on gold once we start asteroid mining. Be sure to dump your gold holdings before then, ideally several years before; once the market figures out what that means gold will plunge even before the asteroid gold hits the market. (By "plunge", I mean that I could see it losing 99% of its value in less than a year. No joke.)
How to get a feedback on your biz idea & strategy every Thur,8am PST
This month, one of Silicon Valley entrepreneurs, Sramana Mitra, launched an initiative to help 1 mil of start-ups to reach $1mil in revenues each. I'm one of her global volunteers helping her to achieve this goal. Sramana is an entrepreneur with 15 years of experience. Her free online strategy round-tables are designed to provide an instant feedback on your biz strategy and to help you to clarify your vision. The link is to my blog that documents our journey. Post your questions there, if you have any. Enjoy:o)
Good point, but don't ignore the opportunity created on a continuous basis because of these "Uscan machine" scenarios.

The extra value created here can be traded for things that would have previously been unattainable, which in turn grows other industries and markets. A good example is the relatively recently materialized cell phone industry, which was viewed as a luxury not but 15 years ago, and is now practically ubiquitous. This has added $40-$100/mo to the average functional adults expenditures. While it may have replaced the $50/mo spent on the home phone line, you're replacing that with $40-$100/mo for each person in the home. Mobile phones increase our productivity by saving time and nowadays allow us to make more informed decisions on the spot.

This example continues because there was a fundamental shift in the type of labor employed by these mobile phone companies. In the early days of the industry, specialized salespeople pulled large salaries selling expensive phones and highly trained technical people answered technical support calls. Now that costs have dropped massively and reliability has drastically improved, these people have been replaced by relatively low wage employees (customer service reps and salespeople), and opportunity has opened at the "bottom."

I do agree that we waste a ridiculous amount of our capital on societal "overhead" that could otherwise be put to good use.
This response isn't all that awesome either. Lets have a better go..

1. Google Buzz 1.0 is better than Facebook after six or seven years.

Clearly depends on your opinion - define "better" for a start. We'll leave this one.

2. Facebook’s history is one filled with stealing other people’s
innovations and doing them better (i.e. Zuckerberg has stolen every
idea Evan Williams and the Twitter team have released). How ironic now
that Google has out “Facebooked” Facebook. Google

Again a pointless, umm, point. Im guessing most people will agree here that ideas are fairly worthless - execution is everything. It is a matter of opinion whether Facebook executed them better. Onwards again...

3. Google has excellent privacy record and Facebook is a disaster.
Most folks do not trust Zuckerberg and Facebook any more because of
their privacy record (filled with lawsuits) and because they steal
every good idea they see (i.e. Twitter’s innovations and FourSquare’s
checking in).

Probably a fair point; though Google has had problems in the past Facebook's have been much more public (for the average user). Irrespective of that the security idiocy this time round in the launch of Buzz means previous good will has the potential to go out the window. Even if you still trust Google with your privacy (which I still do, as it happens) the product Buzz is going to be heavily tainted from the outset. This will damage pickup for Google.

4. Google Buzz auto generates your network–this is MUCH better
process than Facebook’s.

This is probably the crux of the thing. Yeh it didnt work out well and the new way is no better than Facebook offers. But I think it misses the point and ignores the only really clear argument he could make: google has the content. They have a LOT of content, lots and lots. And most of it is great. it's different content to Facebook (and stuff I am more interested in as it happens) and there is scope in the future for a wider variety of content too.

5. Google Buzz is way faster than the sluggish Facebook–this is a
HUGE advantage.
Can't comment as I never properly tried Buzz for any length of time - but again this is somewhat subjective.

6. Google Buzz puts relies and updates into your GMAIL as
threads–this is BRILLIANT and a HUGE advantage.

Hmm. I dont think Buzz really fits into an Inbox style workflow - I actually think this is it's biggest flaw.

Ultimately comparing Facebook to Buzz is difficult - they serve different purposes and hold a lot of different content, despite occupying similar arena's.
The rich text situation is somewhat different on the iPhone than it is on OSX/Cocoa. There is no NSTextView, for instance. The only "easy" rich text solution on iPhoneOS is a UIWebView - which isn't exactly cheap in terms of CPU utilization. Ironically, a visual effect such as a page curl is likely far cheaper due to the GPU support than reflowing a bunch of rich text.
There's an arugment in favor of elite brand-name degrees, presumeably over state universities, or vocational degrees:

"The research of Till Von Wachter, the economist at Columbia University, suggests that not all people graduating into a recession see their life chances dimmed: those with degrees from elite universities catch up fairly quickly to where they otherwise would have been if they’d graduated in better times; it’s the masses beneath them that are left behind. Princeton’s 2009 graduating class found more jobs in financial services than in any other industry. According to Princeton’s career-services director, Beverly Hamilton-Chandler, campus visits and hiring by the big investment banks have been down, but that decline has been partly offset by an uptick in recruiting by hedge funds and boutique financial firms."
Don't forget to add a doctype. It can make the difference of night and day.
As intended by the founders -- they didn't want things being done quickly.
Thanks for that. It seems like Adobe could actually refute the accusation pretty well if they wanted to. My impression from the exchange you link to is that Mr. Nack (the Adobe guy) has a point, but I can't say that I understand it, since he's only written a couple of sentences.

It looks to me like some of the folks at Adobe are genuinely trying to be open, but others aren't, so it looks like the genuine folks are lying, since you can't tell who's really doing what. It's weird, because I don't see how Flash could possibly win in the long term without becoming completely open. (I do think a non-open option can win, but it doesn't look like it will be Flash.)
I thought FairPlay was alive and well on video files sold through iTunes?
Death is almost a taboo in our society. I don't really know how to handle it, or what to think about it. It's just sad.
Surely the person who produces food wants more out of life than just producing food?

That's the way it's worked out in the real world. About 1% of the population produces all our food. And that frees the rest of us up to make movies. And write novels. And organize the world's information. And allow people to live 30 miles from their jobs. And let them cross the country or travel the world on a whim. And live in climate-controlled boxes with nice furniture.

That's also the long-term solution to unemployment. Eventually, somebody figures out something else that the rest of the population would like to have, and puts all of those out-of-work workers to work doing it. The computer industry didn't even exist 50 years ago. The automobile and household appliance industries didn't exist 50 years before that. The oil, railroad, middle management, engineering, and office worker industries didn't exist 50 years before that. These have all been born out of workers being freed up from previous shrinking industries (eg. manufacturing, domestic servants, farming, textiles) and put to use in new emerging ones.
It was a joke. Forgot what site I was on.
It looks like it's just an undocumented Core Image filter applied to the layer.
How to Monitor Your Rails/Passenger App with Munin (Open Source)
That's a bit silly, it's structurally unlike usenet. It's advantage is that due to its structure it has the S/N that usenet once did, which is much to its credit since usenet collapsed under the explosive growth of the internet yet stackoverflow appears to just get stronger with growth.
That they aren't doing this is why Jobs called them lazy. They are lazy. There is no reason it should take 40% of the CPU to show a video in a flash embed on a laptop.

If they can't optimize any better than that, how are they ever going to see success on mobile devices?
The Lies We Tell Ourselves to Deal with Fear
Can you give a brief example?
One problem that seems to have come up a few times is their inability to make serious revenue. This is a perennial issue for sites aimed at developers that don't sell products - coders + advertising don't mix (well).

I get the impression Joel's looking at expanding the SO model into other non-developer/non-geek niches where advertising could work, but I'm not convinced he's proven the revenue model enough to make it a tempting investment just yet. Anyone know any different?

Note: On another post, someone reminded me of the Careers move, so that's one easier-to-monetize stream at least.
Awesome because #4 clears up some confusion I've had lately.
Intuitively, it seems like they're on the right track with the "careers" integration. The biggest side effect of establishing a rigorously scored, well-categorized question/comment/answer database (besides helping people find answers to questions) is that they have a whole lot of data about the abilities of a bunch of people on many topics. If they can't sell the answers, they can probably sell the answer-ers.
I wonder how this modifies their StackExchange offering. Does this mean that if you are doing anything beyond a internal knowledge base Stack Overflow is now a competitor?
That's the theory. In the actual world, unumployment keeps a pressure on salaries that increases the difference between rich and poor (which leads to problems with consumption and credits...), capital saved by the share holders isn't properly reinvested in real economy (financial investments in companies are algebraically negative...).

In other words, automation and technology are tools in human's hands, and we still have to fight for our material/educationnal/environmental/human desires.
It seems to vary a lot by area. In my usual day-to-day Ruby mode, I rarely come across Stack Overflow. For a couple of weeks, though, I've been building an iPhone game and SO seems to come up all the time for Objective C and iPhone framework stuff.
Well, who will the create robots that maintain the robots?

AIs? Cyborgs?

Now, robots can create all that stuff and maintain it all. Who will it sell it to?

Even if robots can create all the stuff and then sell it, who is responsible for the entrepreneural function?

AIs? Cyborgs?

If robots take over every single jobs in the world? What will really happen?

Moreover, who will own these robots? Maybe robots become cheap enough that everyone own bots?

If we become machines, than what are robots?

Robots and machinery aren't free lunch! The automation thread is just getting started, and we have not figured out how to automate entrepreneurship yet! And even if we do, we might already become machines!
Another fun realization: Neither side's collection of opinions makes any sense. Both from a compositional view (e.g. small government is good, spend more on crime and defense) an internal consistency view (e.g. we want to support free speech, so long as its not bad about certain groups).
Using Green Tea Diet Drinks To Get Healthy & Benefits of Green Tea Beverages
I'm slowly trying to learn Estonian from the Byki software package, but as a general rule, anyone young can speak english just fine, and even old people (My landlord is 60+) have a passable grasp of the language.

Dealing with the phone company has been simple, they have a menu option from the Estonian main menu to choose English, and although not all their staff speaks English, they can understand you when you ask to speak to someone who can.
If you come up with a short list of alternate email providers, please post as I'm in the same boat for this and other reasons.
Yes, it sort of depends on the professionalism of the LA Times reporting, but Jobs has been making the rounds of enough different publishers (and presumably had to share something of how "protection" is going to be handled). Certainly likely that some of those publishers loosened their lips to a LAT reporter.
Does anyone know how they manage to pack so much information about what's visible from every angle into each spot on the board? This seems like quite a step up from holograms that I've seen in the past.
Not necessarily. The idea that higher education should be organised with all the best professors &c. in one place, and students come from all around to a centralised place of learning, isn't crazy at all. And, as gfodor pointed out, those 4 years are character-building.

I think the article raises some issues but in far too aggressive a way. There are problems with the way students are forced to pick a career path so early, but the assertion that "any system that asks you to devalue a relationship with place or with extended family is evil" doesn't stand up to much scrutiny. He doesn't consider any of the benefits of spending time away from home, and doesn't really back up his claim with anything at all.
I am so glad people finally start seeing Google for what it is. A huge evil (at least explicetely not "do no evil") corporation with a dangerous market majority on many things on the internet. Embrace alternatives!
This response is almost as over the top as the article it derides; but it does have a point - the original article uses a bunch of superlatives without much justification. I am willing to accept that feature x is 'brilliant', but only if you offer me some evidence to that effect.
Thanks. Original thread - http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1127413
Although the Joel Test is a good idea, I wouldn't pass up an opportunity just because it didn't fit into Joel's box. YMMV but I find it better to apply these to the situation rather than as a "by the book" technique of filtering out job opportunities. There are tons of great small startups that have yet to hit their stride yet. You could be the one to show them the folly of their ways and help them hit that stride.
Gold _has_ been a solid investment for the past 8 years. It went from a low of $255 in 2001 to a high of $1,213 in 2009. So a 475% rise in 8 years.
Is First-Mover Advantage a Myth? (with graphs)