skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I don't think that an "agree/disagree"-axis would be very useful. If you disagree, just reply and explain your disagreement. That adds more value to the discussion.

I'm not interested at all in the number of agreements or disagreements to my statements. I'm only interested in those who agree/disagree and care to elaborate on their point.
Supplier fraud (sourcing using sites like alibaba.com) is also a big problem on the Intenret.

It's hard to establish trust on the Internet, especially when dealing with people from other countries where you don't know which institutions you can turn to for help (i.e., who is the Better Business Bureau of China?).

People will send money to a Chinese supplier and often get nothing in return. Places like Putian in Fujian province are the Chinese equivalent of Nigerian scams.

You'll order a set of iPhones but get a pair of shoes. Why? So that the seller can prove he sent you something (to Paypal, Alibaba, etc.) and then it just becomes your word against his.

If I may, I'd like to make a shameless plug for our startup. iSafeTrade.com has an inexpensive service to help buyers to vet Chinese suppliers:

http://www.isafetrade.com/chinese-business-registration-chec...

Sample report:

http://www.isafetrade.com/chinese-business-registration-chec...

The report includes information like if the supplier is legally registered and authorized for foreign trade by the Chinese Ministry of Commerce, how long they have been in business and when their website was created, which province/city their phone number is located in, etc.
Don't forget men are from Mars and women from Venus. Personally, this seems like a study that validates what the author assumed ahead of time. I can damn well tell you volunteering made me miserable each time. Sometimes, "No good deed goes unpunished."
"This is not one of those lame mathematical tricks..."

Er, you keep telling yourselves that.

Also how is "13 Mar 10 / Welcome to Pi Day Magic: Sunday 14th March 2010" going to give anything but 14.3 - they forgot to non-standardise their onsite dates.
Cartoon: taliban ipad
Hmm, good points... thanks.

And yes, the original was based on CL, but it was exponentially more difficult to operate.
I'm not sure if you're disagreeing with me or not.

Medieval Iceland was a violent place, and the threat of violence was much more overt than it is now. But it was not a society where disputes were primarily settled by killing.

> the research says that old Scandinavia's local ting was a bit more of a negotiating place for feuds than a governing/judging assembly.

It was a place to negotiate disputes (which sometimes ended up as feuds). It was a place to recite the (complex and sophisticated) law code of the saga period Icelanders. It was also a place to show off your prosperity and the quality of your alliances.

I have to reiterate. If you are at all interested in this stuff, read a saga for yourself. Whatever else you end up concluding, you'll get over the idea that these people were a bunch of doltish brutes.

> Life on Iceland was certainly even harder than in the rest of Scandinavia.

I'm not sure why you're certain of that. Iceland was settled by Scandinavians after all. People don't usually emigrate to a place where life is harder than where they started.

> That would probably have left less time over for that time's main sports -- pillage, etc.

Several times in the sagas you read of young men going off to raid and plunder, sometimes coming back to settle down at the farmstead. They pillaged, just not each other.
It has nothing to do with CC.

It's about the opinions of other people. You're prohibited from making the submission yourself as your opinion of your own work is considered to be too biased, end of.
"the Apple Store routinely fails on anything but Safari"

What?
here's the hacker link to it: http://dilbert.com/fast/2010-02-28/

I see there's still a Linux/Unix link at the bottom pointing to this layout.
Windows 7 isn't out yet (and, if Zune HDs Marketplace for apps is any indication, it will be just as closed as Apple's), and WinMo 6.x has approximately no real app store. Look:

http://client.marketplace.windowsmobile.com/

It's been that way since early 2009. Is it going to be yet another thing like Origami, Courier, Surface, et al. that Microsoft hypes up only to abandon or leave stillborn?

Bottom line, Apple, not without corner-case controversies, is far more flexible in 3rd party Smartphone development than Microsoft has or could ever be.

Now, Google Android, on the other hand... that's like the Wild Wild West of device freedom. So much so, that hardly anyone makes money. Where are the big-time devs creating world-beating technology on the platform and sopping up revenue like crusty bread at the bottom of a steak dish? I've looked EVERYWHERE for it, I even have "android marketplace revenue" bookmarked in Google News and check that every once in awhile. I see people selling 20k units a month at #1 on the entire Android store, which is what Apple top tens sell in less than a week or even a days worth of sales. That's a marketplace estimated at 10 Million users, and only a few hundred thousand are actually buying anything. In fact, android users buy about $1 on average of apps per month, while iPhone/iPod Touch users spend about $5 a month, and that's an ecosystem with fast-approaching 100 Million users hungry (and more importantly, willing to pay) for content. It's a no-brainer for any developer.
As wasteful as the proposed Constellation program was at least it would have gotten humans out Low Earth Orbit again.

Is Obama's plan for increased commercialization anything more than moving around the pieces that are already there? Most of the parts for the space vehicles are already made by subcontractors, aren't they just changing how the oversight is done?

Even with those rules changed NASA is still going to be responsible for the astronauts. It'll take years and billions of dollars to man-rate vehicles that we wouldn't have thought twice about using back in the 70s as long as they didn't explode on the first couple of test flights.

Maybe money flowing out of the Space Shuttle program will get us there sooner, but with the US rebooting its space program every time time a new president takes office I'm starting to think the Chinese are our best hope for getting to the stars.
>Regardless of whether or not my bank or any bank is taking advantage of its customers (and I am not sure they are), this zero interest rate environment is worth thinking about.

Is the bank paying large bonuses (UK banks are paying bonuses bigger than their profits) if so they can afford to pay their creditors for giving them money to use.
don't hire Americans to do commodity work (i.e. PHP CRUD)

This is why Americans are saying they are from overseas to get the jobs. If the price is the same, what does it matter where they are from? Speaking a common primary language and being in the same time zone has value.

When I offshore work, I send an email and have to wait until the next day to get a response. When the worker is in my timezone and I get quick responses, the project success rate improves.

I agree with the other points and have been on both sides of the payer/worker transaction.
I disagree. I think flattery backfires, because most people can detect it. Flattery is what comes out of your mouth if your thoughts are not genuine. Dale Carnegie doesn't promote ignoring people's faults. His book is about how to work around or correct people's faults without insulting them.
Sweet, like it enough to come back and use it on your own ?
If it were as simple as asking people to only disagree with a thoughtful response comment, it would have already been solved.

The participants we actually have often can't be bothered to do more than a grunt's worth of disagreement. This gets channeled into downvotes, which carry a slight 'sting' of moral judgment, and spawn big threads like this one every so often.

An outlet for one-click-disagreement separate from one-click-censure could help remedy the actual problem without requiring an unlikely change in the behavior of the mostly-anonymous, distracted downvoting hordes.
TiVo's Last Stand
Really liked this demonstration. I wonder what the effects of this are on investors when evaluating a unique idea.
"They live in Eastern Europe and are poor. You live in America and are rich."

OK. I know it wasn't supposed to be anything like that, but this sentence sounds really bad. I actually got the idea that the coding business of any sort can get you in a pretty good position, financially. One of the reasons is the fact that you are not dependent solely on your local market. And there's also the lower cost of living.
NASA has two options:

1. Massive budget increases to fund missions to the moon and Mars.

2. Realign its goals to match the budget they have now.

The Bush-era plan to return to the moon without actually paying for it was the worst of all worlds. Obama's plans may not be inspiring to those who want to relive '69, but I respect that he's willing to tackle problem realistically.

We've also got to face the fact that human spaceflight is a prestige project with no scientific value. It's time to force NASA to focus on science. If people want to fart around in free fall, then that's something for private industry to concern itself with.
I've done that twice today. It's driving me nuts actually. When I downvote an idea which I think is "useless" and a waste of time to read- I don't want to accidentally upvote the person instead.
I saw a DVD of the Apollo 11,12,13 landings and it was a joke - just a bunch of guys jumping around and cracking jokes. The automated Mars robots looked dignified in comparison.
I've been down the full text search path a few times; never fun, too many compromises and too much work. Just last week I used Sunspot solr http://github.com/outoftime/sunspot for a new site and wow, what a breath of fresh air. Its the first turnkey FTS I've found. Sunspot is a ruby lib built on solr's ruby lib. But it comes with solar embedded in the gem, scripts to startup/shutdown, complete config files...it just works!!! Add to that, my new app needed to do FTS for Chinese. I was expecting headaches and digging through Java XML hell...nope, it just worked.
Thank you! The original link brought down my tab in Chrome.
That's cool if you're happy with OS X. It's just that I know many OS X devs who use ubuntu in a VM. I'm personally happy with a full install of Ubuntu and Emacs instead of textmate while others prefer OS X + textmate or emacs or vim or what have you, to each his/her own. I was just stating an alternative, I didn't know that was trolling.
Previous discussion on one of Scott Adams's related blog entries: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1161770
Extra points for being able to make $4000/mo from an online bingo card creator. I never, ever, would thought that was possible.

The long tail indeed...
The last man on the Moon, Eugene Cernan, said it was "disappointing".

I kept re-reading this and saying, what? He thought going on the moon was disappointing?? Ooooooh, "it" == "Obama's decision". :)
Why would a cab driver have an expectation that his location be private when driving people around in a cab? That makes no sense.
How To Create Multiple Streams of Niche Profit Free eBook
How To Start With Internet Marketing Free eBook
Not sure if this is what the author implied, but it's important to remember the reason why so many people have cable and satellite are programming options.

When you ask yourself, do I want The Office or The Office AND Hannah Montana, quality (of compression, anyway) isn't important at all.
I wonder what it will be like using a keyboard without a mouse. Will there be keyboard shortcuts in mail so that you can burn through email without touching the screen? And then, at what point do you just end up with a laptop again.

I am trusting apple that this thing is meant to be used hands on.
I finally got patient and took some time to look at the help.
When you get into a text field, you just press Ctrl-i and the
text comes up in gvim.

I tell ya, this guy has gone whole hog with vimperator. I've
used vi for 30 years now and even I was a bit daunted at first.
I'm still a baby about having the various toolbars showing, so
I said:

:se go=mTB
:mkv

So, it looks like I have a trustworthy way to edit text areas
using vi.
You will have no gods before me

That's henotheistic not monotheistic.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Henotheism#Judaism
Ask HN: Rate my site
I'm no big fan of software patents, nor of blatant patent trolls, but I think that anyone who wants to gripe about the patent system needs to address the issue of companies like TiVo. TiVo invented a wonderful new kind of product, brought it to market -- and has never been able to make a profit, because it was lots of work to grow the market for a radically new kind of product, and so most of the market growth came from cable companies bundling similar products. Products that weren't licensed from TiVo, but were simply ripped off of their designs.

I'm still a happy user of the TiVo that I bought five or six years ago. (I'm going to have to decide what to do about this new-fangled HD television thing, though.)
I'm not sure we know that's true yet.
I should say "relatively rich." It's true some people in Eastern Europe are wealthy, but their wealthy is the equivalent of our middle class, so it's a different scale. And also, the people getting their start on rent-a-coder aren't the rich ones.

I wrote this because of something I saw. A friend of mine has a popular iPhone app, and he was pressuring some overseas consultant to lower the final price for some work because he wasn't happy with the result.

I don't think you should be leaning on your workers after the fact - it's up to you to ensure you hire quality worker, and pay them bit-wise so you are both happy.
She is comparing the manufacturing output of the U.S. and China in dollars, not actual quantity of stuff. But China is engaging in a policy of actively devaluing the yuan relative to the dollar precisely in order to prop up manufacturing and exports. Thus the quantity of China's output may actually be considerably greater than America's, but the price of the output may be lower due to China's weak currency policy.
Foreign and speak poor English != stupid. I've had very few cabbies who didn't clearly know what they were doing, regardless of whether I could understand them or not. And the idea that they don't know the geography? What is it, exactly, that you think cab drivers do?
What on earth has twitter got to do with it ? I think you're confusing RoG with the article author.
I now use Vagrant for App Engine and it's a breeze to set up. Since the working directory is mounted by the vm textmate works as always. I only have to ssh into the virtual machine to run some python scripts since locally there are some dependencies issues.
So you conclude that I am James Grime? If so, you are wrong. There are several people here on HN who have done some homework and found out who I really am. I am not connected with PiDayMagic, and I am not touting for twitter followers.

Feel free to flag, down-vote, or whatever, that's your prerogative, but your accusation is mis-placed.

Feel free to email me to make your accusations clearer if I've misread what you're saying.
Creative and amazing bridges from all over the world
Nice, but why do you only allow US zipcodes?
Call me old-fashioned, but is pedo-bear a reasonable image for this site? You may regard it is a cool joke, but I regard it as a distraction.
Think of...

- a few real people you like, and would like to know better

- the most convincing people you know

- the best leader you ever followed

How do those people fare alongside Carnegie's recipes for success? In my case, I'd say "not too well".
Well, if it's good enough for the Olympics...

http://boingboing.net/2010/02/06/pedobear-official-ma.html
7 of the Best Free Linux Medical Imaging Software
My favorite criticism of the ipad came from a morning show host who is somewhat tech savvy was asked by his co-host if he wanted one he responded:

"I already have one it is called an iphone."
Easiest place to start. Internationalizing will take more work, but it's on my list.
Ah, sorry, you're absolutely right. I watched the movie in German, never for a second thought they would have translated the title for the English release.

It's pretty obvious they would have translated the title too.
We've been here before.

After the implosion of the Japanese asset bubble in the early 1990s, Japan set effectively 0% interest rates in an effort to stimulate the economy. This led to what's known as a 'carry trade', where investors would borrow free money from Japan, and then invest it in higher-yield investments abroad.

After the collapse of the American equity markets in 2001, higher yields were hard to come by. So, all that liquidity went looking for a new home and largely landed in mortgage-backed securities, credit default swaps, and their associated derivatives. Of course, a lot of these investments yielded only a few percent, so investment funds would often leverage up 20x-30x to get a respectable rate of return.

When those investments started to unwind, they unwound hard. The end result was that the Japanese carry trade contributed to the eventual devastation of the American financial system. Which, ironically, means that we now have 0% interest rates. The great cycle continues.

Now, the Japanese carry trade certainly isn't the whole story, and there's a lot of other factors that were in play. However, there's no doubt in my mind that the BOJ's 0% interest rates helped us dig the hole that we find ourselves in today.
Is mig33 still around? I thought they laid off almost all of their staff and took their assets back to Singapore where the founder was from.
Ask HN: What's up with these "I made ___ in ___ hours/days" posts
Alright, maybe I'm missing something, but I don't understand the "I made ____ in ___ hours/days" posts. I am completely behind the "Look at this site I made", but the "in X hours" part confuses me.

1) Persistance is one of the most important traits for an entrepreneur. We're in an ADD society, and things do not happen overnight. It's easy to throw together a website, but it's more difficult to stick with it, refine it, get people using it, and most importantly, get them paying for it. These posts often strike me as demonstrating ADD, moreso than anything else.

2) It feels like misplaced gloating. I think it's great that you're smart, entrepreneurial, and able to create prototypes quickly. But it's really not worth gloating about how fast you can put up a prototype, most people on this message board could do the same if they weren't working on their real ventures. If you absolutely insist on gloating, it would be better to do so about how many millions of users you have, how many millions of dollars you made, or how many days you were able spent on a beach last year. If your weekend project can achieve high marks in any of those categories, then I'd definitely want to hear about it.

3) Is it an attempt to demonstrate intelligence/ability? In today's programming landscape, there are so many automated libraries and frameworks that it's pretty easy to put almost anything together (want to put up a site that links satellite images, recent macroeconomic trends, and real time XYZ events, no problem). Combining some subset of available frameworks and libraries doesn't demonstrate intelligence or ability, even if you can do it in a weekend.

4) If it is really that brilliant of an idea, don't rush it. Go in stealth most for at least an additional weekend, and thoroughly plot out how you'll turn this into a feasible product.

5) Is it an attempt to demonstrate how entrepreneurial you are? A better way to do that would be to pick one random idea, have the confidence that it's so good that you are willing to commit yourself to it 100%, pursue it regardless of what other people are telling you, and make it work.

6) Is it an attempt to get into YC? If this works, then maybe I'd understand it more. There seems to have been more of these over the past few weeks, so maybe that's what's going on. Although, it seems to me to make you appear more ADD than entrepreneurial.

I'm completely behind your entrepreneurial aspirations, but I'd rather you really commit yourself to something, work out the kinks, get users using it, then post "Look at my startup". Then I can have faith that you've really thought it through, and it's more worth HN's time to really understand what it is you're trying to do so that we can make some valuable recommendations or questions.
Apple’s Spat With Google Is Getting Personal
You could, I suppose, contract the author of the silk icons for the icon you want.

If I were a more cynical man, I might even suppose that was exactly the reason for producing a royalty-free icon set -- to drum up business.
Nicely done, plain and simple.

You have what looks like the back-tick character sitting below your google ad box on every page.

I would change your screen name to something else, like SiteAdministrator. Creator is a little too Old Testament. :)
Another one of these. And this one seems to be used by older people.

The only one of these that's really good is mylifeisaverage
First is impression is the share links overwhelm the design. If share was just a simple link I don't think I'd been as bothered. The issue is they stand out too much.

(I personally don't care for share links so take my impressions on them lightly)
Poll on Hacker News Brand Awareness
you really think the customer knowing a driver's location, or someone seeing them go past on the street, is the same as a centralised record?
Interesting article. Some inaccuracies:
- "Rentacoder does not have skilled developers from western countries. What it has are freelancers from countries like Romania, India, Pakistan and Russia."

Nope. It has developers from all over(I live in Lebanon). Freelance programmers are simply programmers that don't work exclusively for one client. I am guessing you don't mean this in a bad way...

- "The availability of particular skills is very limited."

I started my freelance career on RAC 4 years ago. 6 months into it, i was taking on bigger projects using some of the technologies you mentioned(I'm a python guy but also do C# and Java...). Roughly 8 months into it, i was working with start ups and people were contacting me directly even though my rates are not the cheapest.

I no longer look for gigs on RAC, but its certainly a viable lively hood if you're picky with the projects you take on. The trick is to always be honest and decent, the way you should behave in real life.

I also found it funny that some Indian companies started outsourcing projects to me.
It's only a distraction if you can recognize it, which slots you into a pretty miniscule percentage of the population.

That said, I realize the responsibilities of being in the public view, but right now the site is hardly in anyone's view, so what's the harm ?
Obviously broken? Aren't you demanding too much of it?

Also your math doesn't demonstrate that much: the incentive for trying to be the first is big (25x an insightfull comment) but there aren't that many opportunities, and it establishes competition for a good thing, having fresh news on HN.

You also tell that the referred mechanism would be gamed by people who would post old pg essays. Then again your scenario is wrong. The mechanism can be implemented to work so that the PG essays as not enough for the demand of points. And if you tell me that people would post other things just for points, isn't that the whole point of the voting/karma system?

There are problems, but I think the karma system is not obviously broken. It's true it's hard to create the right incentives to fight those problems. But HN has done it so better than everyone that I'm confident it will get better soon.

On a side note, has anyone ever tought of dynamic partitions of the community to address the problems of exponential grow and dissolution of identity?