skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I wonder how many people are employed by Spolsky's company, and how long they've been employed? I wonder how many houses those salaries have bought, dry cleaning orders made and paid for, restaurant meals consumed, youth sports supported, and personal abilities grown?

Now that he has time for some real work, that place is going to be a power house!
Yeah this is like house flipping.
Dare Obasanjo, a Program Manager at Microsoft and son of the former President of Nigeria [1], has run into this same issue on his (ahem, non-notable) blog: "[I]t irritates me that I have a Wikipedia entry with a giant banner that claims I'm lying about my parenthood" [2]

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Olusegun_Obasanjo

[2] http://www.25hoursaday.com/weblog/2007/03/13/WikipediaWhosYo...
The So? is that Alex is a member of our community and some people here will care about why he chose to stop.
Maybe I missed the point, but I thought that McCartney's point had to do with witnessing the distress (and the killing) of the animals, not with the specific practices.

So I thought that if you're willing to kill the animal yourself, then maybe you're able to condone the slaughterhouses even if you see them through a glass wall

(maybe it will diminish your appetite, though :P - I wouldn't want to see it while eating!).
And again! I suppose some people don't believe they should have to justify themselves.
While it's great to see this stuff get more exposure, I'm kind of tired of seeing it framed as an Apple vs Adobe battle instead of just people with taste vs Adobe. You don't have to have an iPhone to want a site that works well without that horrible plugin.
Google's cache of the article: http://74.125.95.132/search?q=cache:www.serpentine.com/blog/...
P'sha is actually "pshaw" and it goes back to 1656: http://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/pshaw
Most college newspapers actually outsource the content management and hosting for their websites to a company called College Publisher (owned by Viacom).

College Publisher takes 100% of the advertising revenue in exchange for hosting the site and providing a CMS for "free". It's a small but lucrative niche for Viacom.

By not giving up 100% of its online advertising revenue, this paper is actually well ahead of its peers.
Yeah that's right- we random people are jackasses, only the famous have got their shit together and produce valuable stuff. All hail twitter, and all the other technological wonders on techcrunch (that amount to a few lines of sql and jquery).

Criticism is what makes science function and is what made the west great.
Does your google history really affect the ads you see on one independant website ?
Love this quote:

There were times when I lay down on the floor
at night, close to crying, and said, "I'm done.
I can't make payroll." Then my wife would come
over and kick me and say, "Get up and figure it out."
Some of these are quite cheap, from $1 to $27, in bulk.
http://www.alibaba.com/showroom/touch_screen/--4401---------...
Support the Startup Visa Initiative with a Tweet
No problem. My business partner actually came up with a different solution, completely independently of Startup Digest. He hadn't heard of it before, and so http://pghtechevents.com was born.
That page was last updated about 6 months ago.
The Largest IPOs of the Recession (and how they have faired)
Why aren't some of these problems solved by property rights? The article shows case after case of nearby property owners having what seem to be clear cases of health problems and other property violations caused by the pigs. If there isn't a causal link that can be shown in court, then we don't know this is the problem.
Pretty light on actual information...
I suspect it's also that there are a lot of features of C++/Java/.NET that you just don't need for personal projects.
I recently saw the movie Temple Grandin, a bio of an autistic woman who works with cattle. Her website concerns humane and efficient treatment of livestock. Some fascinating articles.
http://grandin.com/
Yeah, I wish he'd explained what actually made it so fast.
Or a link to your website that redirects to the manual. So if the manual is moved, your app does not break.
I wonder how many people have spent their hard earned cash on spolsky when they could have installed a free bug tracker. And the supposed geniuses he hires could be doing something really genius, like rocket science or brain surgery, and not worrying about pointers (after all magical garbage collection has been around a good few decades).
It's also about branding and imaging. First, NPR gets its name out there more by always having it attached to the URL. Second, I'm much more likely to click an n.pr link that was passed along to me third-hand because I know it belongs to NPR, whereas I tend not to click bit.ly links because I have no idea where they link to. Another benefit is that if they own the link, they can track it.
In this regard, you are absolutely right. The decision not to use College Publisher a few years back was very smart. However, the system is relatively old and tough to extend. These are solvable problems, assuming you have a capable web staff to handle it.
I think it's a mixture of that, the similar reason that if the url shortener bubble pops, tinyurl or bit.ly could go under, and the branding. n.pr, especially if you've ever seen it before, lets people know it points to NPR's site even though it's shortened. Same with 4sq.com, post.ly, etc. One of the big disadvantages of url shorteners is that you have no idea whether it's the story tweet claims it is or child porn.
There are a bunch of companies (check out Scoble's YouTube feed for a few) that do this for a few hundred dollars.
Fear Kills, a Graphical Investing Example
I would trust the author's judgement in matters such as "I hate pastrami". If (s)he had said "... it turns out all pastrami is horrible" I think you would have a stronger case.
I didn't know Xobni was made by a Penn State grad!
Stuff like this makes me really want to publish a magazine called "Citation Needed" or "Articles for Deletion" that would just contain short articles by experts on whatever was speciously put up for deletion that month, just to flip off feckless deletionists. It would be worth it for the Wikipedia citations alone.
How to contribute to an open source project: a git+GitHub flow
Necessary conditions for a movement includes 1) an idea which is fundamentally easy or makes a lot of sense 2) lots of people discovering that idea at the same time and exciting each other, 3) an idea that lends itself to the improvement of one's social-status/geek-cred, so they share it with others. It's very much unpredictable.

I'd liken this to winning the lottery. And that's why articles like this are discouraging, because you are trying to find the magic and you invest your time, listening to the very end, but you find that the magic isn't really there at all.
7 Reasons For Apple To Acquire Adobe
Sea level spike?
Is China trying to “lock up” natural resources around the world?
Hmm,

Does this action actually make Nokia's suit look like a pre-strike in a war that Apple had implicitly declared?
PubSubHubbub and Twitter
I'm sure the tech industry, the self proclaimed vanguard of innovation, can do better than turn blogging into 140 characters and call it a day.
Is it time to defend our rights against copyright?
They show trending repositories, too, if you click on Explore: http://github.com/explore

The pages with the most data, however, are the individual language pages: http://github.com/languages/Python

I discovered this because my project happens to be on the Most Watched list for Python at the moment. ;)
Why some viruses jump species, and others don't
who was it? I remember there was a guy from the Tar Heel very involved with CoPress for a while.
Presentation software sucks
Bachana to present at AIIM 2010 on differentiating open-source Web CMS
isn't attoparsec a haskell parser? is it lazy? i am wondering if it's fast because it's not actually doing the parsing... (ie it's returning thunks that will require more evaluation before providing, say, an AST).
Perl in the eyes of a Ruby programmer
Rackspace Cloud Servers and Shared IP Groups
Deadly Inflammation, But No Sign of Infection
Penn State has given birth to several prominent startups: YNOT Advertising (LionMenus), Xobni, and Weebly (YC).
If you want, you can add FanGamb (DreamIt) to the list :)
Very interesting, it reads like anonymous banking mixed in with identity. I've been wanting to know if anonymous internet cash would ever take off, and the only organisation staying around for any time I've noticed is eCache:

https://ffij33ewbnoeqnup.onion.meshmx.com/
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ECache
I think people miss this subtle point, which is it's about volunteer's time and effort, not disk space. I want Wikipedia to contain as much information as humanly possible (and by "humanly" I mean across our species), but I recognize that it's a finite number of volunteers managing all of it. For that reason, it's inevitable that some articles will get cut.
Who woulda thunk selling umbrellas could be so interesting? :) A 7-stage interview over 18 mths was a bit much, but there are some useful entrepreneurial insights there...
Find any better options?
As a business owner I might prefer to carry liability if it also gives me access to demographics and contact information of the users, and users may not necessarily care since they don't carry the liability.

This may turn out to be a tough sell, both to merchants and buyers.
I signed up because it looked good, but the one-comment shills at the bottom of this thread make me distinctly nervous. Does anyone know what's up with this?
Network Ubiquity To Drive Innovation
Weird stance from someone who lists themselves as the "creator" of a Custom Google Search box in their HN profile... http://techielifeissues.blogspot.com
Twitter trends reader built with Apple's PastryKit
From what I've read, this kind of thing (an organized movement of people planning to get into Wikipedia and influence votes) would make a lot of editors cream their pants in anticipation of all the bans for "canvassing", "sockpuppetry" and "meatpuppetry" they'd be handing out and how heroic they'd be defending wikipedia against such heinous infiltration.
Nexus One Multitouch issue: the technical discussion thread
HTDP starts off pretty basic, but it's by the same people as SICP (a famous textbook), and if it's anything like that book, it's "surprisingly deep", so don't dismiss it too quickly as "too easy"...
Brewer's CAP Conjecture is False?
Intelligent men 'less likely to cheat'
It will be 2 billions in ten years when linux + new gui has conquered the desktop (or what is left of it) and mobile devices. The difference between 2 billions and $20-30m (or whatever imaginary sum you suggest) is called profit (or rather some share of it).
Curiosity is great. When you aren't motivated by money, what else is there? For me it's curiosity.

Also, Scott Adam's post reminds me of this little passage (from http://yudkowsky.net/rational/virtues):

"The first virtue is curiosity. A burning itch to know is higher than a solemn vow to pursue truth. To feel the burning itch of curiosity requires both that you be ignorant, and that you desire to relinquish your ignorance. If in your heart you believe you already know, or if in your heart you do not wish to know, then your questioning will be purposeless and your skills without direction. Curiosity seeks to annihilate itself; there is no curiosity that does not want an answer. The glory of glorious mystery is to be solved, after which it ceases to be mystery. Be wary of those who speak of being open-minded and modestly confess their ignorance. There is a time to confess your ignorance and a time to relinquish your ignorance."
I've tried cooking some cheap pork recently and have to admit that about 50% of the time it's left me with a vague sickly feeling regardless of how I prepared it.

This article has pushed me over the line; I'll probably toss the batch I have. It was one of the bad ones anyway.
Be sure to add the following to your vimrc

:source ~/.vim/ftplugin/html/sparkup.vim
Peter Norvig dubs holy PageRank 'over-hyped'
pg could correct me on this if i'm wrong, but i get the impression that harj is already vetting all the applications.
Xerox made a business decision and was paid by Apple. Now, we can debate if Xerox's management made the correct call, but you can't say Apple "ripped them off". It is interesting comparing the situation with Microsoft since most of the problem came from badly written (from Apple's perspective) contracts.
And my advice to you about giving advice: Explain why he should do as you suggest. What's in it for him? What's in it for you? The tone of your comment, espcially the "thanks" at the end makes this seem like a request for your benefit rather than a suggestion for his benefit.

Is that the case? If so, you may find it more effective to explain why his blogging about stopping blogging is harmful to you. It may be that another solution presents itself. For example, if you aren't subscribed to his blog but are annoyed to have this post taking up space on HN, perhaps the solution is to appeal to HN readers not to upvote this kind of post rather than to appeal to the author not to write it.

Likewise, if there's something in it for the author, explaining that will be a lot more effective as it will appeal to his self-interest. He explains quite clearly that he writes the blog for himself, not for you or I. Therefore,he presumably has already decided that this post is a personal benefit for him. If you can think of a compelling reason for him to eschew such a post, it's best to tell him so rather than making him guess.

That way you will get what you want by helping him get what he wants. Win win!

JM2C on giving advice...
They also host an iPhone application contest, and the highways around BYU are plastered with billboards for Omniture. They do a great job of promoting the company to potential talent. Example billboard - "The Internet - Al Gore invented, Omniture improved."
Let me just say just because we have lot of ideas doesn't mean they all need to crystalize. I've learned that I might be thinking of an idea for a month or some whereas someone else might have thought about it for four months, tired & failed so they will criticize the idea and drive it in a different direction. Not every idea needs to crystalize.

I do agree that blogging every other day is not going to help either. I would say blog like Dustin Curtis. Treat every post like a book.

As for my street cred: I quit blogging in 2001 after 3-4 years of blogging. Now, thinking of doing what I just proposed above. :-)
People vs. Process: The Wrong Side of Venture Finance
Well, starting with the famous UI lawsuit... http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apple_Computer,_Inc._v._Microso...
IPhone Development: Android SDK from an iPhone Developer's Perspective
How to Handle a Narcissist
Ben Huh changes jobs every 3 months
Livestream Calls Out Ustream and Justin.tv for Profiting Off of Piracy
We need more than one person to maintain a Wikipedia page. Multiple people should be able to vet an article's accuracy. I think the concept of notability sometimes isn't that the topic doesn't deserve an entry, but rather that there aren't enough sources to make the entry obviously accurate.

(Granted, I understand sometimes the argument is that a topic doesn't deserve an entry.)
Time for New Twitter Metrics - My Suggestions
"Security staff use the X-ray machine...."

It's not an X-ray!! And I thought you always had the option of a pat-down if you refused the machine.
"We used to be the niggas rocking polo shirts, Louie back packs, paper denim jeans, and exclusive Adidas from Sporty LA. We were the underdogs."

I laughed.

If those "niggas" are the underdogs, what should we call the "niggas" dying in Haiti?
I don't think anyone is arguing that articles need to be deleted because of concerns over disk space (even though if all criteria for inclusion were dropped, the number of useless articles would skyrocket).

The real problem is the danger of relevant articles becoming lost between (and becoming filled with links to) the more numerous irrelevant ones.
This might be true if everyone was able to publish top quality albums or illustrations and art- but what if everyone just made their own greeting cards instead of buying them? The world would probably be just fine if not better.
Their interactive route map still requires Flash:

http://www.virginamerica.com/va/travelInfo.do?pageName=route...
Way too much indeed. We should remember that blogs are written for an audience and that audience may not be HN. If a post doesn't satisfy us as a community, the fault is not with the author's composition but with the choice to submit the link to HN.

A similar thing happened to me when I wrote a rememberence-day post. Some people reasonably suggested it wasn't Hacker News. I explained why I thought it was tangentially relevant. There was a discussion about that, but nobody suggested that I shouldn't have written the post, we were merely discussing whether it belonged in HN.

I can understand the argument that meta-blogging doesn't belong in HN. But I don't believe it shouldn't be written in the first place.
> So, just because there has been some excess, we shouldn't see patents, as a whole, as a bad thing.

You say 'some' excess, but it's my understanding that the vast majority of patent applications and patent lawsuits fall under the 'abuses' that you're talking about. How often is the patent system really protecting the little guy vs being used as a tool by large corporations to oppress the little guy?
It seems unlikely to me that that advantage outweighs the disadvantage of having to survive an extra pass, and the disadvantage of pushing busy people to make a decision on you when they are particularly busy. (My experience is that busy people become good at saying no out of self-defense.)
Many researchers also have for-profit companies on the side, and care about whether the results they publish in their day job are good or bad press for those companies. (Especially common in biomed.)
Aha. The reference passed over my head. Slightly too young for Monty Python to immediately spring to mind. (Now if it were a BtVS reference...)

I did accept his premise of "not bad, just different" because he laid out his explanation below. Not catching the humor in the reference, I thought he was trying to lay out a broader "Ogg is dead" theme that I didn't see any support for.
Honestly, I think software people have a largely skewed view of the patent system in general. I used to be in traditional engineering (mechanical/electrical to be precise), and the amount of R&D dollars that has to go into any major innovation is astronomical.

The amount of testing, regulatory costs, tooling costs, etc etc, makes bringing an innovative thing to market very, very expensive indeed. Most of these things are also trivially easy to reverse engineer - the patent is the only thing preventing a company's competitors from cloning the tech, avoiding all of the costs associated, and discouraging innovation overall.

The trick is software patents - software largely doesn't cost a lot, not compared to big heavy machinery requiring onerous certification and government authorizations. 3 guys hacking for a month straight is peanuts compared to, say, the amount of money it would cost to bring a new fuel injection system to market, yet the software these guys produce can be equally valuable from a marketability perspective. This is where patents fall apart - the point of the patent system is to encourage R&D spending by allowing protection of its results, because being simply first to market is not a large enough advantage in many industries to be profitable. It is, however, true in software, so I'm personally dubious of software patents in general.

Just some perspective - I dislike the "patents are evil, always, every way!" kneejerk reaction. It has a very valid role in a lot of industries that aren't well represented or understood by people on HN.
Back to dominance: Understanding Asia's share of the world economy
There's quite a lot to say in response, but I'll limit the scope of it to two of your points, and I'll try to be brief with each.

(1) "My species is more important to me than theirs."

Our species is only more important in a very big way: we are the scourge of the Earth. We have destroyed our planet and its inhabitants beyond comprehension, and people like you -- likely among the more intelligent of our precious and wonderful species -- cannot find it in their self-pronounced greatness to be good. We are extremely important in that we annually torture and kill 50 billion fellow animals, sensitive creatures all, for the sake of our own convenience and culturally imputed preferences.

So yes, we are extremely important. Catastrophically so.

And by the way, your species-ism is shamelessly fallacious. You are not better or correct or more valuable simply because you belong to homo sapiens, and your fellow species members are not better or correct or more valuable simply because they belong to the same species as you do.

Moreover, comparing human value to pig value in support of factory farming is a complete canard. It's a moot point whether or not humans are "more" valuable, because we do not need to factory farm other creatures in order to live healthy, happy lives ourselves. Indeed, factory farming will be a primary reason why humans in the future will have horrible lives indeed, on a hellscape formerly known as the green planet.

(2) "The animals are domesticated, therefore are part of a symbiotic relationship in which they get to live fairly well, without so much worrying about getting to eat, breed etc, in exchange for being docile, and eaten at the end of the road."

You are so amazingly incorrect about this. The animals do not "live well." Here is a sampling of what is routinely done to animals on factory farms, in no particular order: confinement in spaces so tight they can't move; traumatic mutilation, including tail-docking, hole-punching, de-beaking, and castration; living in piss and feces, their own and others; rampant disease; unnatural food, including corn and other animal product waste, that causes them to be sick and so overweight that their bones break; and many more abuses besides. The animals literally go insane after a short while, and you would too, believe me. And yes, then, after they have lived in these conditions for they are slaughtered.

"A symbiotic relationship?" "Living well?" Couldn't be further from reality.
At my student paper in the UK we are all unpaid volunteers. Is it any different in the States?
A lot comes down to past experience as well. For good doctors, it's a learning process that starts in residency and never finishes.
Founders at Work Interview 2: Weebly - Live Now
The Daily Collegian gives "scholarships" (stipends) to all editors and some senior reporters. These stipends don't come close to a wage, but it's something. Giving something to all editors and some reporters and then giving nothing to a web developer is insulting.
Seems like it would be a lot of effort to move the furniture off every time you used the pool if you used the space for "alternative" functions. I think you'd also have to deal with the "What does this button do?" aspect of it and having people sink your furniture. Neat, but not entirely practical.
I wonder how many people have spent their hard earned cash on spolsky when they could have installed a free bug tracker. Good question, it makes me wonder how many people (besides myself) have bought OS X systems when they could have bought free Linux?
The Daily Show and Colbert to Be Yanked From Hulu