skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I like to distinguish between "vanilla fun" and "Nietzschean fun" (after the German philosopher). You get to experience the latter by simply pushing your pleasure button over and over like the rat in the experiment (drugs, sex, dancing,food, etc). You get to experience the latter by cultivating a sense of self-development through willing submission to some sort of (often painful) discipline which makes you grow out of yourself. You have be excited about growing, rather than trying to hold on to who you already were, in order for this "fun" to be fun; a lot of people grip ferociously to who they are and don't want to self-overcome, and so they can't really become learners. Math homework, physical training, etc -- all Nietzschean.

Don't get me wrong -- the former should be part of everyone's life. But so should the latter.
I have never been forced to choose between becoming a billionaire and holding onto my ethical convictions, and I suspect you haven't either. I'm not comfortable with either of us standing in judgment of someone who has.
Agreed.

BumpTop with a touch based interface would be much more appealing than a mouse. Seems like a good fit.
Sorry, but I still don't get it. Surely giving person X access to your home carries more risk than just giving person X your PS3. Is your point that you have less legal recourse or is there something more practical I am missing?
http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1291318
Signing a credit card receipt is not for signature verification. You are signing a contract that you agree to pay under the terms of your card agreement. Therefore, it doesn't matter how you sign as long as it was you. If you sign a multimillion dollar recording contract with a smiley face, you are still agreeing to the terms of the contract. Your signature doesn't have to match anything.

If signatures were for verification, then they wouldn't have you sign the back. That would be like writing your login on post-it note stuck to your computer.
This is very cool. Once you find out about chromosome pairs (high school biology in USA's public schools) a lot of things about Mendelian inheritance fall into place. But if you've got any curiosity, you start to wonder about the 23-pair vs 24-pair thing.

One question this article doesn't answer is "How does this work in a breeding population?"

Most chromosomal abnormalities cause spontaneous abortions, and the ones that don't (Down's Syndrome, etc) would seem to cause some pretty non-adaptive problems.

So how would a merger of 2 pairs of chromosomes start to breed true in a population?
Yeah, but 'only 256 mb RAM' might be for a lot of people that have got used to more.
Make sure that you don't put people in charge who enjoy talking about being an entrepreneur and who merely love the idea of being an entrepreneur. The entrepreneur society at my school (which I helped run) was about 50/50 among the membership. Once a few from the wrong side start running it, things will stop getting done (but at least everyone will look really good doing it).
I see HTML as very easy to read but bothersome to type.

You really can't compare the level of complexity of HTML vs. assembler or microcode, especially as HTML has no control structures like a for, a while or a setjmp.

Now, if HTML were not so easy to parse-at-a-glance, then you could had a point.
I've also never been faced with the decision to torture someone or not, that doesn't stop me from making moral judgement about those actions either. The point of an ethical system is to help you make judgements about decisions, if your answer to every ethical question is, "I've never had to make that decision" your ethical system is useless.
Tell HN: What a delight to have "down vote" power
When I opened HN today, I noticed something different. Yes, I now have the down vote power. The quality of HN discussion is the reason that keeps me coming back every day. I will use my power well to make sure that the goodness of HN comments will continue to thrive.
I've thought about this as well. Although I've never understood why it had to be a special card. But it would be nice to bridge physical store loyalty cards with online store loyalty cards.

You really only need some sort of global ID for the customer right? We'll why not try to make it a standard to use a QR code which stores an MD5 Hash of your email address? This way it can be printed on almost anything by anyone. The first time you visit a store and use it they ask you for your email address and confirm that code is yours and matches. Its also a way to control who gets your email. Then like you mentioned, you host an information lookup/recording service.

The specific thing about the idea that has always intrigued me is the idea of multiple companies knowing about my spending habits at each place. Make you can charge McDonalds more money for access to my BurgerKing buying habits. That would help McDonalds market things much better than just knowing why I buy at their stores.

The best part about the QRCode/Hash concept is that I can make my first one or a new one at anytime. I don't have to fill out some huge form while at the grocery store. I would also love access to my own usage history as a consumer. It could work well with services like Mint perhaps.
I assume that's sarcasm?
At least in my master's program, I was advised that an MS without a thesis was essentially a terminal degree. If you want a research job at Google, you need the PhD, and if you want the PhD, you must do the thesis.
It is my honour to bestow the order of the sacred upmod garter upon you for service to HN's tone and quality. Arise, Sir Cooper!
Reasons You Should Quit Facebook
I think this is the true business model for Foursquare in the end. Everything else is just the groundwork for it.
.. site appears to be down with database problems (???).
Interesting. Had no idea what a Poäng chair was, but when I Googled I saw that the tilt of the seat and back is pretty much how I set my chair.
Added the images now. Thanks for pointing that out.
"Error establishing a database connection" - pretty innovative.
I will only accept this as an accurate replication of Philip K Dick if it ends up doing meth and going crazy.
I was excited about the Embody, but when I tried it for a couple of hours I found that the whiffle-tree structure, which equalizes the pressure across the back, allowed my lumbar spine to collapse into C-shape. I was so disappointed...
If you are healthy enough that you can more easily move around, you may also live longer.

If you have assorted health issues you may also not be inclined to move around much. The "not moving much" may be the result of other health issues, not the cause of them.
(None, None) if you're in Python. ;-)
I have a Stokke Balans chair (e.g. http://www.ergodepot.com/Variable_balans_by_Varier_p/v100.ht...) which works really nicely to align your spine and allow you to move around. Unfortunately the pressure on your shins becomes uncomfortable after a while, and if your back muscles are weak it takes a while to be able to use it for a while without fatigue.
Something Is Brewing At BumpTop, Possible Google Acquisition (Update: Confirmed)
Where are You on the Financial Food Chain
Ask HN: How to market Fat Ninja Hot Sauce
Hey guys, I got a different sort of site then those normally submitted on here. I'm selling a physical product... my Fat Ninja Dragon Balls Hot Sauce. It's a home made hot sauce that everyone I've had try it says that I should sell it. It's very spicy, and has a smoky flavor to it. My wife and I put in on almost everything. We love it.

I've gone through the process of finding bottles, designing a web site:

http://www.fatninjahotsauce.com

hooking it up to paypal, designing a label, etc, etc. I'm now ready to market it. Anyone on here have any ideas for some cheap or free online marketing methods? Love to hear them.

Thanks!
"A couple years ago you’d have stories about kids in Manchester textile factories putting up with pure hell. It’s simply the nature of the beast."

"A couple of years ago" in this case would be a figure of speech. ;)
Carthage must be Destroyed
But it would be the same templating gunk that is used by the rest of your webapp, which most likely has more documentation and thousands more eyeballs looking at the code than Sass. Most people don't roll their own templating systems. They use an established library that's been battle-tested on websites before. These libraries have been around a lot longer than Sass/Haml has.
To rewrite or not to rewrite - The Sunk Code Dilemma
ZSync - Open Source Syncing Library for iPhone/iPad
I hadn't read it, but that's interesting that Patton knew Roman history! (I have a master's in Latin and Greek.)
as a guy who gets paid to write this shit for 8 hours a day -- Yes, and yes.
this could be easily fixed if Google would allow people to ban domains permanently in preferences.
AOL was the Internet giant that bought Time Warner. The new conglomerate then shed the AOL properties in Dec 2009. The quote makes it sound like Time Warner was the 'big dog', but in truth, AOL was. For a time.
MSFT got the press because AAPL isn't one of the buyers.
Aid plan for Greece worth €$145 billion
This thread caught my eye: http://www.mechanicslounge.com/showthread.php?t=4982
Maybe your key difference could be ship people instead of stuff. Kind of like an AirBNB but replacing Taxi's and busses instead of replacing hotels.
When you make a Facebook ad you can either do cost per click or cost per impression. If they setup with cost per click then Facebook isn't wasting their money.
Can't figure out why they're not just giving away the BumpTop Pro option. The crippled BumpTop free version is almost pointless with its limit of two sticky notes.
You spend 8 hours a day just writing HTML? That sounds horrible.
Ask HN: Cool OS Tricks
I was showing a coworker some stuff I was working on and did a few 'OS Tricks' as he put it, and it got me thinking - what other cool tricks are out there I don't know about?

So here's a couple examples to get the ball rolling:

Win7 - If you have multiple windows open and you can grab one of them and 'jiggle' it back/forth to minimize all the other non-selected windows; similarly you can drag a window to the left or right and have it maximize using only 50% of the screen.

OSx - In system prefs under Date & Time you can turn on 'Announce The Time' which makes your mac announce the time on the hour/half-hour like a post-modern grandfather clock.
They work for nobody. Facebook ads are a ponzi scheme. Everybody advertises once.

(admittedly exaggerated)
I didn't sign up with Facebook expecting them to be good at any of these things. I don't care about Facebook privacy: I didn't give them any private data. I don't care if applications can see my private data: my data isn't private and, more importantly, I don't sign up for applications. I don't plan on going into business with Facebook. I don't care how they treat their developer partners. None of this stuff matters to me.

Why am I pointing this out? Because I think my attitude represents a huge chunk of Facebook's users, and I think most of what's left over after you subtract that chunk consists of people who don't care about privacy period.

I use LinkedIn for business. I use Twitter for geeky stuff. I use Facebook for non-geeky stuff and to post pictures of my kids in their halloween costumes. It all seems to be working out OK for me.
Google Acquires 3D Desktop Startup BumpTop
A Bumptop-like interface would be pretty sweet on a tablet device running Chrome. This probably more a talent acquisition than a technology one - Bumptops's engineers have spent a lot of time thinking about UI metaphors and testing theories around them.
I did sign up expecting these things: and I was assured of them in their privacy policy at the time, so I was obviously meant to expect them.

Check out (linked to in the posted article_ http://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2010/04/facebook-timeline/
to see what others expected.

I have plenty of non-geeky friends and acquaintances who expected the same thing. This isn't something that only us (some of us, I should say) HNers care about: this is a gross violation of trust.

Excellent compendium of reasons to quit: thanks for the article!
Note the use of Google Wave for comments.
absolutely + amen.
I'm testing out FB ads at the moment on a CPM basis and the CPC I'm getting is much better than what I'd get most places. Possibly the ads that are being shown repeatedly are CPC paid ones ?
I'm also wondering about liability, though not quite in that way.

First, what If something happens to the package that I'm carrying? I'm not going to carry something if I'm going to be liable if I break it, that risk won't be worth the gain.

Second, are the people carrying stuff for you going to be classified as employees? I don't know much about tax stuff but if you run the risk of the IRS classifying all these people as your employees, you might be running into a lot of administrative and liability problems.
How has that strategy worked out for them?
Facebook sells targetted advertising: advertisers can direct ads at various demographic groups, like age ranges, genders, and geographic locales. Advertisers do not get any identifying data about users who see or click on their ads as part of the package.
It would be neat if this also included the percentage of the population that at each stage. I think it's something like 30-40% are at stage 1, another 40-50% are at stage 2. By the time you get to stage 3, you're at around the 90-95th percentile in income. Then it seems to increase logarithmically, such that stage 8 is at about the 99.99999th percentile.
Emerging Languages Camp
I'm aware of the history, and I'm sure the writer of that Economist article is as well. The quote isn't misleading: AOL was spun out of the conglomerate, not Time Warner. It's not really necessary for an article only tangentially about either of these companies to go into their history to mention that, in the past, one was worth a lot more. It's just not very important for the story. If the story had been about Time Warner and AOL, then that would be relevant background, but the story wasn't about that.
Old VC firms: get ready to be disrupted
Lose your teeth, lose your mind
I guess the pirate bay gets less page views - probably because it's a more usable site.
What is your CTR? I just started an ad campaign on FB and it's been only a week so I'm still tweaking my ads. The highest CTR I have gotten is 0.19 for males and about 0.12 for females which is paltry. My ads are in the online dating space so I would have actually expected a higher rate. The ads are not cheesy or shady so I'm a bit puzzled by this actually.
You can't buy computers with the P-Cards there. You can buy computer parts, but not an entire computer in a single purchase.

Many people send multiple trips to GimComputers to accomplish the purchasing and construction of a computer when needed quickly (As the formal computer request procedure takes weeks).
The waste is in CPC is not as much as CPM but the problem is even after I click an ad, it shows me the ad again. If you multiply my experience with millions of people, you will realise the financial impact.
Beautiful. Good work, I'll try it out soon!
> Facebook advertising should be very efficient (unlike Google Adwords) since they know everybody who has seen and clicked an ad (you have to be logged in to see ads)

Oh, I don't know about that ... Google tracks you through their cookie, and personally I'm logged-in all the time since I use lots of Google services.

Facebook does have an advantage ... through their gadgets that get displayed on other websites, they know where you've been. But on the other hand Google knows what you're searching for, and it can also read your personal or work email (I see lots of companies migrating to Google Apps).

Personally I think Google has yet to take advantage of all the data they've collected. And I also think Google has a lot more evil-potential, fortunately they are still playing nice.
Ssoo... is it any good?
I was screwed, it was a bad experience, and I've learned.
Just to confuse you further, they auction off "bid bundles" (e.g., 300 credits, worth $225, just sold for $7.23). So they're even making tons of money from their own virtual things.
The thing getting in the way of understanding each other here is what the average use case is for Facebook. If it's not tricking people into sharing more than they intend to (as seems to the be case for you), then what are we complaining about, right?

I post and upvote links to these kinds of stories because I believe my family and friends do not use Facebook like you do, and are being tricked into sharing more than they mean to.
HN Members' Workspaces
Great idea. Any idea where I can get that kinda data?

Here's some initial charts:
(from wikipedia for the US)
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Income-curve-$10k.png

Here's a global chart:
http://maps.grida.no/go/graphic/population-by-income-level

and here's a distribution of wealth chart:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:World_distributionofwealth...
(could also an IP Acquisition)
Mine is not impressive.

http://pathdependent.com/garbage/workspaces/my_workspace.jpg
Steve Jobs, circa 2020: "Thoughts on country roads"
"here's an example, but don't buy it online if you haven't tried it:"

That's my problem with all these chair discussions. I don't have a problem buying a chair that works great, or a chair that doesn't "look like a chair" (as the article mentions), but I do have a problem dropping $800 on a chair sight unseen.

I'd have that problem no matter what, but being 6 foot 4 inches (aka "99th percentile height", or at least I've seen one source place that as the 99th percentile cutoff) really doesn't help. The probability of spending $800 on a chair that simply doesn't go high enough is too large. But I have no idea how to try a wide variety of chairs out for any reasonable period of time.
15 Applications For A Better Facebook Fan Page | Inspired Magazine
Are you suggesting it hasn't?
As someone who used a setup like this (Perfect Chair + Ergoquest reclining workstation) at work for several years, allow me to share my experience:

One's head and neck are pushed slightly more forward than normal and don't have their normal degrees of freedom; this causes some stiffness over time.

One can sometimes "flip up" one's elbows to rest on the armrests, as when reading, or resting. Over time, this tends to "bang" them against the armrests, which can really hurt the ulnar nerve, which is unprotected on the "backside" (upper portion) of the elbow.

If the chair has a fixed angle at the knees, you'll need to get up from time to time and walk around--or at least, I did. The fixed angle prevents the lower back from moving around much and doesn't allow one to "stretch" out.

It's tough to keyboard comfortably in a reclining chair. One ends up disproportionally compensating for poor ergonomics with one's chest muscles. In addition, your shoulders tend to roll forward. Either of these can cause thoracic outlet syndrome over time, which is like carpal tunnel syndrome, only it affects your entire arm.

It is for these reasons that I switched to a standing desk, where my body can move the way it was designed to. Keyboarding is still an issue, but if you buy a split keyboard Datahand you can mount each half near your hips and keep your shoulders back.
Find some college students and offer $100 to anyone who can drink an entire bottle. Film it. Put it on youtube with a link to your homepage at the end of the video. If it works, run a whole series of hot-sauce-abuse videos. Just make sure you get people to sign waivers first.
Exactly. See my recent 50+ point comment [1] that says basically the same thing.

I really think that the vast majority of Facebook's users just don't care. Remember the Beacon debacle? That big group had what, 300k people or something? A tiny part of the userbase. I could be remembering these details wrong, though.

1: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1311406

edit: I bring up the score because there's obviously a lot of "OMG FACEBOOK SUCKS" posts going around. But obviously there's a lot of people that also disagree. It's not all just Facebook hate, or my comment wouldn't have gotten voted up in the first place.
Google may be having trouble finding good programmers. The Aardvark acquisition and this one as well may have just been an expensive way to get some good people.

If you look at the HN thread about which companies are hiring, you'll see it's basically every single tech company under the sun right now.
Nelly Furtado - 2 Мая 2010 - Музыкальное видео для меломанов
The videos looked amazing, but in practice it's just a mess.

On the other hand, I thought that a side-effect of 20 years of acclimatizing to the industry-standard GUI might be difficulty switching to such a strange, physics-based 3D interface. It may be another issue of learning curve vs. post-learning benefit. I didn't give it enough time to really tell.
What video card does it have? The problem I'm having is specific to ATI's proprietary driver when used together with Compiz.
This crappy pic shows my workspace until a few days ago. We had a break-in this Thursday so I'm not sure what state it is in now..

http://imgur.com/8VRv2.jpg
Thank you for taking the time to write and screenshot this.

I generally see great promise in the ad platform.

FB lets you target based on occupation (or likely keyword match in their profile) in a way you can't with Adwords, which for some markets, is pretty cool... in theory.

In real life, everybody I know is finding FB too expensive to leverage, and posts like yours are explaining why.

As somebody else in this thread pointed out, even if FB cleans this up, they're risking alienating all advertisers away from ever trusting the efficacy of the platform.

If low inventory is the problem, they should be giving early advertisers more of a "free ride," with cheap repeats.
my work space

http://anil-bkdsb.posterous.com/my-work-station-1
FB is not good for ads. Its good for apps. If you build an app you are far more likely to convert than with the ad network. We don't recommend FB ads to clients anymore, and instead promote the FB app approach.

People on FB come to socialize not to buy. You have to get under the skin to get that conversion, and as so many of the app providers will tell you, it takes a lot of repeat impressions to get a conversion.
"Contentment defines your peak."
Having a universal government-issued ID number makes it easier for both government and non-government organizations to track various aspects of your behavior. If you don't intuitively understand how that's problematic, I'm not sure I can properly explain it.
So if humans can compute the first few Busy Beaver numbers, does that mean we're not Turing machines?
Here was mine over the summer http://imgur.com/0tDH1.jpg. My workspace now isn't as spacious. My dorm room is, uh, a little messy...