skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Well actually I agree. Well-stated. Open may form part of the ultimate successor to FB. It's 100% true the average Facebook user doesn't know, and doesn't care, about "open". But what being open wins you is support of the community, and in particular, "developers, developers, developers".

Take the (by no means parallel, but similar) case of iPhone vs. Android. The typical user could care less about whether iPhone is "open" or not, provided their apps work and their calls don't drop (heh). Still, Android makes a compelling case to developers and to handset manufacturers. Android gets huge points for being "open", and over time, I think that creates a head-leads, body-follows scenario where early adopters, tech evangelists, and people who surf sites like HN move to the new platform (whatever it is) en masse. Some time later, "normal" users then gravitate to that platform because the thought leaders have gone there, that's where the hype is, etc.

To put it another way: being open doesn't necessarily win you normal, everyday users. But it can win you the power users, the early adopters, and the thought leaders; and where they go, "normal" users tend to follow in time.

As for the "how do users host their own node" issue, I agree. This will never happen if people have to (my God, the horror) sign up for a web hosting account to have a Facebook page. But in an Internet where "websites" are torn off from the cloud at will, and where creating a "website" or "web identity" is as easy as pressing a button -- easier, in fact, than it is to create a Facebook page currently -- I think that's when you'll start to see user-controlled nodes become a real possibility for the mass market. Not before.
I tried to correct that with some upvotes. :)

Unfortunately HN (and other sites, not unique to this one) doesn't have a way to enforce distinctions between down-voting due to:

1. respectful disagreement
2. writer is crackpot
3. writer is troll
4. voter himself is being juvenile
5. typo
6. cosmic rays
7. cat sat on keyboard

Actually maybe there's a startup idea in there: deliver a product/service/tech that DOES enable reliable disambiguation between those cases!
so fix it :P
> disparate services which rely on users having their own control of their node (Dispora, DiSo) make no sense when 99% of most normal people have no web hosting or other way of hosting such a node

Facebook effectively provides limited, specialized web hosting supported by ads. There's no reason companies can't offer exactly the same thing via open protocols.

> Now, open doesn't equate to no privacy - but you have to expect and assume that all nodes will treat privacy the same, otherwise the system fails. With a closed system you simply have to trust one actor with your privacy - the host network.

With a federated system you have the ability to blacklist nodes that misbehave. With a closed system you have virtually no ability to influence the provider's behaviour. I know which I'd choose.

> Open/closed is [sadly] not what consumers care about

Maybe not directly, but an open platform creates the possibility of competition between application providers. Consumers didn't want Compuserve or MSN 1.0, they wanted The Internet.
There even some microwaves that are sold with a metal plate/ grate that can inserted inside to cook fish or vegetables on.

I guess the metal will absorb the microwave energy and heat up and then the food will get seared by contact with the metal, instead of directly receiving the microwave radiation.

My parents have one of those microwaves and when I saw it I was just as perplexed about it.
"It really did contribute to a burst in actual buying of products, thus, economic activity."

Which it took from future sales.

Whether it's better or worse than financial institution measures has nothing to do with whether it was good or bad. If they were both bad and it was less bad, it's still bad.

The argument that it was bad is ... the broken window fallacy. Perfectly fine working cars that could have been sold to people who can't afford new ones were destroyed (the engine oil replaced with a chemical solution that destroyed it after running for a short period of time).
That's actually the most accurate answer here.
Find a cure for old age. Millionaires would give you virtually anything.
When MySpace was deserted, it was because Facebook was the social network for High School and College students, so it had a cool, exclusive feel to it. Now Facebook has opened it up to the general public, and they're trying to make all information public, so they've killed that and I'm already seeing a newfound lack of interest in Facebook from High School students.
You are aware that government provides services in exchange for those taxes, right?
Blood Phones
Awesome work! I'm definitely using this over Google Reader from now on!

But there are few tiny details I hope will be fixed soon:
The "Original" tab is the default one - which slows down the whole thing if I open some content-heavy site, and the reason why I use feed readers in first place is not to have to watch those horrible sites at all, so it would be nice if we could change the default view.

The other thing is that there is no way to change the folder to which certain feed belongs. As well as someone before me commented, you can't delete feeds either.
Ed Moses : Clean Fusion Power This Decade - The Long Now
I had an ATI 3870 which was supported in 10.5 but ceased to be in 10.6 - a shame, since it outperformed the nvidia cards in core graphics by a large margin.
Exhibit number N on why the neo-Keynesians don't get much respect today (well, not counting those they empower).

And it was worse than I'd remembered when I composed the above; as Wikipedia says, "In Samuelson's 1973 edition of his famous textbook, he laid forth the prediction that the Soviet Union would catch up to the United States in per capita income by 1990, and almost certainly would by 2015 because of its superior economic system. Subsequent editions of his textbook would later push the date of his prediction back farther until the Soviet Union ultimately collapsed."
Ray Crok was 52 when he discovered a little restaurant chain called McDonalds while selling them milkshake machines.
How I sold 172 copies of my HTML iPad app in the first 8 days
Belief is not a monolithic thing
Does anybody know if there's an RSS reader that allows regular expression tagging across feed content? Eg, show me all RSS posts that contain "iPhone" or that match the regex "(?:iPhone|iPad|iPod|Apple|Android)" etc, as a simple example.
On the other hand, multitasking helps with apps that take forever to load since their state can be saved/loaded now. Work out the cost/benefit in your case.
The Long Now podcast series is one of my top rated. It's worth listening to every single one of them, especially the early ones.

Ed Moses is building laser fusion and he thinks it's gonna work. Also, you get to hear about the National Ignition Facility. https://lasers.llnl.gov/
In principle, you should be able to follow their progress on the project's posts page: <http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/196017994/diaspora-the-p.... Their latest post was 5 days ago, but "for backers only."
http://www.snopes.com/history/american/gauge.asp
Etckeeper - automatic version control for /etc
Same here. I have a folder for must-read feeds (mostly close friends and a few VERY high-quality, low-volume feeds) then I categorize the rest by interest. I've also leveraged my friends who filter out the relatively few rare gems from insanely high-volume feeds such as BoingBoing, Engadget, RWW, TechCrunch, etc. It's awesome. I don't subscribe to them, but I still get the highlight reel on the good stuff because I network with like-minded folks on GReader.

I do monitor some high-volume feeds (HN among them) and I skim the feed then share the good stuff that I think my contacts will like. I star things that I want to revisit and permanently bookmark stuff that's highly relevant to my work or hobbies, genuinely awesome or fascinating.
An interesting post. I'd be interested hear what kind of background you've got.

I think your remark on finance professors is quite wrong. It takes quite a lot of dedication to do a Phd. I'm not great respecter of academic prestige, but its a bit insulting to imply that people fail their way into a professorship.

I'd be more than happy to share some pointers on financial papers I've read and such. Just talk about your background and what you know. If you think 'a random walk down Wall Street' is correct, it isn't. Have you seen the derivation of Black-Scholes? Do you know what most high frequency trading is based on?

I'd also be interested to see what type of stuff you like to read.
I do think that it's a pretty major issue, although I also don't get the impression that Ruby is displacing Python. If anything it seems like the momentum from Rails is petering out a bit.

The Ruby community itself does strike me as more energetic though. All the activity on github etc seems a lot more impassioned to me than the coolheaded & practical world of Django et al.
You can keep adding data points to your spline/polynomial interpolation, but that doesn't mean the model will be any better. In fact, for the purposes of predictive power, it will probably be worse.

I'm not extremely well educated on the subject, so somebody correct me, but these predictive models have always struck me as just complicated splines. Add a thousand data points, and the "predictions" for old datapoints look really good. The problem isn't with the math, it's with an inappropriate application of the math based either on fundamental misunderstanding of extrapolation or on a fundamental failing of human psychology in not realizing that the model was built on the data, and not the other way around.
http://www.copyblogger.com/ is an interesting read on that topic.
After trying a lot of choices TwitterTim.es is my favorite. It creates a personal newspaper from links popular among friends-of-friends of my Twitter account. It produces very very relevant results for me.
negative findings (and publishing those results) are just as useful as positive findings.
This link works: http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/196017994/diaspora-the-p...
The most important thing in your life is you and the brain you are carrying around in your head. If your experiences have made you smarter, you DO have something concrete to show for the years you've put in.

Entire countries have had everything destroyed, but have come back to be very successful. And this happened because of what they carry around in their heads.
Plug: For dynamic US state intensity maps I created the tool http://www.flashusamap.com/statistics.php
Open source distributed open protocol networks made possible through public funding are always best developed in total secrecy.

Naturally.
"You make a good point but as I thought on it for a while I came up with this question: Do kids want to be the same kind of adults as their parents?"

My opinion is yes:
They want cars and motorcycles, and houses, and be respected, find friends, find love. The tools they use are just that, means for getting a goal.

I have been teacher too,in general I love kids, and I think is not kids wanting to change, is adults "hating change", halting grow when they get in their comfort zones once grown up.
If you're doing what you love, you've already won.

I feel a similar way pretty often. I have a couple of visions of software I want to build that are far out of my technical reach. I've been prototyping them, on and off, for about eight years too, depending how you count.

They've all failed. I start with a flash of optimism, and code until I realize I was wrong. I then stop, and rethink things until I think of another guess.

This is exactly how great accomplishments happen. You may be working on an impossible problem, or you may be working on a 20 year problem. Or maybe you're lucky and it's a 10 year problem.

But even if your goal is impossible, it's very likely that if you work on it for 20 years, you will solve a 20 year problem. It might be slightly askew to what you thought you were solving, but it will happen. It's almost inevitable.

Regardless, I wholly support what you're doing. Keep going. And read widely... explore... make sure you're playing in the margins of your field, and exploring odd projects far outside the scope of your work. It's those places that you will make that accidental discovery... that in all these years of trying to "beat the market" you made a fundamental discovery in artificial intelligence, or network theory, or whatever.

And yeah, if you're doing what you love, you've already won.
/FishSlap!
The problem of reasonably determining what someone is interested in from what they've previously read, skimmed and skipped shouldn't be "AI complete."

It only involves matching patterns to key-words. It might not be easy and the results might not be perfect but it seems possible. Using data from friends and finding the best correlates could help too. You could use the Netflix algorithm or other magic.

I suspect that's why today's readers don't satisfy - they aren't there yet and it's easy to imagine they could be.
Crap for everyone or just me?
Agreed. I put up a side project at http://beta.crunch3.com, which was an RSS-on-twitter concept. The interface is "slidey", similar to Pulse, but it gets relevant feeds from twitter, and takes screenshots like Google Fast Flip. I didn't continue development on it, so it's a little slow & the server will probably melt.
I didn't mean it in an insulting way. I'm actually starting a Masters/Ph.D. program in computational social sciences in the fall, hoping to fully immerse myself in an environment that also finds markets fascinating.

I have derived Black-Scholes; I study market micro-structure; I read as much as I can on anything related to social systems from volatility surfaces in options pricing to more generic machine learning methods such as PSO.

(I'd like to respond more, but I just noticed I am 20 minutes late for my fathers birthday party.)
I highly doubt that facebook can be killed by building any open protocols, there are already protocols like foaf+ssl that could be used to build an open social networking, but that doesnt make it facebook killer. People use facebook because there are lots of other people using it and they don't care about openness as much as a geek do. Facebook would be killed only by time something even cool looking appear. And why do we want to kill facebook, anyway.
Sorry, but the author is disqualified by this sentence:

"Now there were no external links to these AWS subdomains but, being a domain registrar, Google was notified of the new DNS entries and went ahead and indexed loads of pages."
just as Roman Chariots defined the Space Shuttle’s booster rockets

Can you elucidate?
Kkloud: The simplest file sharing service around - but also mostly unknown
My 3Gs works just fine after upgrading to iOS4. I agree with @thought_alarm's comments regarding the lack of memory being a likely candidate cause.
At what age do you think Alice and Mindstorm are usable?
The main thing that catches my attention on Alice is it is targeted at High School or College level, but the article talks about his 11 year old son.

Where are the programming tools for 6 to 8 year olds?

(I started in BASIC that early, but then again I was programming C by 11, so I'm probably an exception...)
Disclaimer: I'm not saying this to start a holy war...

Try Ruby. It gives much more freedom than Python, not to mention countless way of shooting oneself in a foot (which you know already from the C family ;)
Long-Term Capital Management always springs to my mind.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/LTCM
What are the four states that is not in an economic crisis right now?
I find it inspiring that he's stuck with it, and wonder how's he's made a living in the meantime
I agree completely. If you love X (and it's a social activity), keep doing X and odds are pretty good you'll eventually meet someone you like. Worked for me.
"According to polling performed by the Pew Research Center, Republicans who are college graduates are considerably less likely to accept the scientific consensus on climate change than those who have less education. These better-educated Republicans probably aren't ignorant; a more likely explanation is that they are politically driven consumers of climate science information. Among Democrats and independents, the relationship between education and beliefs about global warming is precisely the opposite -- more education leads to greater acceptance of the consensus climate science."

I object to the terminology. Just because someone is cherry-picking information to support their chosen ideology doesn't make them "not ignorant". It makes them willfully ignorant.

Part of the problem with American political discourse is that we don't do enough to marginalize non-factual arguments -- from both sides of the political spectrum. Pretending that people aren't "ignorant" if they're filtering facts through a political sieve doesn't address this problem. Everyone has freedom of expression in the US, but we should all be doing more to make it plainly clear that some types of content are inferior to others.
Www.Netvibes.com is my favorite.
Heh, I was about to say that Slashdot already does something like this, but I am pretty sure they aren't covering cases 6 and 7. Cosmic rays and keyboard cats...now there's a startup problem I can sink my teeth into. Thanks. :)
Taleb's empiricism implies resisting generalization from data and limiting the derivation of general rules from particular observations as one can be missing hidden properties. Thus he believes that scientists, economists, historians, policy makers, businessmen, and financiers are victims of an illusion of pattern. They overestimate the value of rational explanations of past data, and underestimate the prevalence of unexplainable randomness in those data. -- Wikipedia on Nassim Nicholas Taleb

People project patterns onto data when in fact, they don't exists.
I can't imagine how awesome that was for the students.
Clojure's n00b attraction problem
It sounds like despite your ideas of what failure is, by age 25 you've learned and applied more than most people ever will.
the comments are where this starts to get really interesting.
I don't think he was being insulting. He was just explaining that the incentives discourage anyone from publicly disproving the efficient market hypothesis.
No worries. Sorry I responded so adamantly.
Everything can be seen: a percentage of first year, a percentage forever, percentages that increase based on total volume, ranging from 1% to 45% etc...
This is wrong. Unless you're using an OLED screen (pretty unlikely), black usually requires more energy to display.

Also, there's no way to determine screen technology through normal JavaScript (without plugins/addons), so changing it to make the script only apply to OLED screens would be infeasible.
your cable operator has to pay ESPN a monthly fee

Your ISP has to pay ESPN a monthly fee. I imagine mose cable companies don't, but as noted in another comment AT&T definitely does.
Well you could read David Ogilvy's book... or you could ask a bunch of hackers who don't generally pay that much attention to such things.

Just an idea.
(This is from 2008)
Read copywriting books:

-David Ogilvy
-John Caples
-Claude Hopkins
-Eugene Schwartz

Many of these have large sections devoted exclusively to writing headlines.
Constantly washing Bath Towels
"Fooled by Randomness" is a great book. But I sometimes feel about it the same way I feel about people who say lotteries are a waste of time: some people do win. And sometimes, despite everything, a transient pattern does repeat. How frustrating!

Edited to add this, which is sometimes also brought up:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Illusion_of_control
I think this is referring to the standard width of rail cars, which are required to move some component parts. Very, very generally, rail cars are the width they are because they started in Europe, and they had to fit on roads, which were built to accommodate older cars, which had to fit in wagon wheel ruts, which had to fit in Roman chariot ruts.
I'm not sure it's fact, but it's a common story. I heard it from Prof. Channing's ChemE lectures on Stanford's iTunes U.
Both US states and Greece have the same root problem. In neither can the political leaders inflate the currency to get out of the consequences of their years of fiscal mismanagement. The trick of currency inflation, since the advent of fiat money, has saved many administrations around the Globe.
This project is over hyped. Over expectation may kill the project. What is supposed to be a facebook killer may end up being a disaster.
...much better than state...

or could be worse, idk :)
Andy Warhol INterview:
is that the kind of deficit where taxpayers will have to take it up the ... ?
Mine is now very slow at getting back on wifi at home after the phone went to sleep. That's annoying!
I had the same problem with 3G and iOS 4.0, but after a hard reboot it became fast again (Hold the sleep button for some seconds, and push the slider). It took me almost a week to figure it out (during which the phone was next to useless), but now it seems as fast as 3.x.
Reasons why your startup needs an API
Reading how people come up with great stuff in matter of hours always makes me feel miserable.
These kinds of posts is a reason I hate reading mashable. Well, not really hate, but prefer other blogs over them because the content is of lesser quality.
Do you by chance have a link to this guide?
Idaho, Idaho, Idaho and Idaho

but seriously, they didn't seem to say in the article
You can also kill Safari (and all other running apps) by holding the sleep button until it shows the slider screen, and then hold the menu button until you get the home screen.
Seems like it'd be a better bet to apply all your skills to creating value (wealth) instead of just trying to push it around a smidge more efficiently.

In other words: find a real problem and solve it, increasing global wealth in the process, and collect the economic reward.
I heard that they got some office space in SF with the help of Pivotal Labs.
But if you're a hacker, and you like doing it (like I do), you can bring new OS support. For instance, I wrote patches to get my system up to speed on 10.6 the week of its release. Lots of other people now use my code. That's rewarding.

Like anything, it's a tradeoff. Do you want to learn about deep osx internals? Or do you want to go back to your day job writing webapps? Both can be rewarding; it's a function of your free time and how much you want things to "just work" vs how much you want to learn.
I keep seeing these stories, but all of it sounds like pseudoscience nonsense to me.
I agree with your claim that recommendation algorithms aren't AI complete, but for different reasons.

"It only involves matching patterns to key-words." False. Recommendation might be far trickier.

Nonetheless, if you can do recommendation perfectly, it still doesn't mean that you can solve NLP, machine vision, control (robotics), planning, or any of the other major AI tasks.
IMHO it's the lack of obvious manual control over the special sorting algorithm that causes readers to suck.
Could you elaborate on this? In which ways is "a random" walk incorrect? In what is high frequency trading based?
Agreed but HN readers are not their primary targets. For an INTJ the key to mass marketing is to understand why patterns that you don't like work on people unlike you.

P.S. I'm not sorry for not using another pattern on you.