skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
The "bad rap" is due to the the fact that the passive voice does not require the subject of the sentence to be explicitly stated, and so is commonly used as a means of being evasive and misleading.

"The soldier was hit by the sailor" vs. "the sailor hit the soldier" are both clear and descriptive, and effectively shift the emphasis between the soldier and sailor as you described.

But it's more common to see examples like this:

"Unfortunately, your funds have been misplaced. The cause of the problem is currently being researched. You will be informed as soon as the situation has been resolved."

...which deliberately avoids informing the recipient as to who is responsible for the problem, who is attempting to fix it, and who will inform them of the resolution.
this seems like a recurring theme every month.
Right, kick ass. Well, don't want to sound like a dXXX or nothin', but, ah... it says on your chart that you're fXXXed up. Ah, you talk like a fag, and your sXXX's all retarded. What I'd do, is just like... like... you know, like, you know what I mean, like...
> It's interesting how these guys got so much traction in so little time, even when in private beta:

FTA: In fact it’s the brainchild of a group of people formerly associated with The [infamous] Pirate Bay, including Peter Sunde Kolmisoppi.
What sensible alternatives are there for PayPal with international money transfers? Is a plain wire transfer too expensive? In Europe, I'd just do a BIC+IBAN transfer to another European country.
Anonymity's protection of nonconformists is the reason cities are the source of progress and villages are not. It is the only way you will ever hear What You Can't Say (http://paulgraham.com/say.html) from anyone who isn't willing to wreck their life over it. Any forum that requires a True Name is a waste of time for anything beyond small talk. It's not worth it to try to catch a few griefers (who will work around it anyway).
I actually like the name, it's descriptive and short and sweet. I think if he changes references to "Fake" to "Fake.app" it will remove any confusion.
Not that it helps anyone today, but Cultured Code (author of Things) has "Cloud Sync" at the top of their list right now:

http://culturedcode.com/status/
I phone interviewed with Justin.tv soon after they launched. A good chunk of the interview was asking me how I would use grep to solve various problems. It was an interesting interview. I liked that they were clearly looking for people that can get stuff done and didn't want to BS around about it.
Rate my startup: ChompStack, a mobile website builder for restaurants
http://www.chompstack.com

We all know how mobile unfriendly restaurant websites tend to be. Many of them are done in Flash, and don't work at all on most phones. Others force you to download PDF menus which take forever to load and have an annoying tendency to lock up my phone.

The irony, of course, is that I'm most likely to be looking at restaurant websites on my phone, when I'm around town looking for an interesting place to eat. There's nothing more frustrating than pulling up a restaurant website, only to see a Flash page that doesn't work, or a desktop website that you have to pinch, zoom, and scroll your way around.

I built ChompStack to make it easier for restaurants to create mobile friendly versions of their websites.

Any and all feedback would be greatly appreciated.

I feel like our biggest challenge with this service is getting in touch with restaurant owners and convincing them of the value of having a mobile website, most of them don't seem to be particularly interested in technology.
if version numbers are arbitrary, then on what basis can one say that a higher number is not warranted?

I'm just really angry that they're changing meaningless numbers as if they have meaning. They're such idiots for thinking the numbers matter enough to change them.
I find this page more convenient: http://code.google.com/apis/ajaxlibs/documentation/index.htm...
We've been through the internet of documents (Google). Then came the internet of people (Facebook). And the internet of places (Foursquare).

Next up is the internet of objects.
Quiet Structure (design beyond grids)
> afaik they mostly operate at a loss

As much as I trust your "afaik", I find it very hard to believe. For example, the "cheap hooker" raked £593m of profit in 2008 according to
http://www.rolls-royce.com/investors/news/2009/300709_2009_h...
CNN is always shown this way in airports and I fly so much that it now looks normal to me.

I assume my brain has learned to compensate.
ajax.googleapis.com is being referenced on so many sites now that many, if not most, visitors will have the DNS resolution cached.
The Chrome team uses version numbers in a very developer centric way. Any time they want to make a major breaking change they bump the major version number, irrespective of any marketing needs. This has the added benefit, as was intended with version numbering from the get-go, of making it dead-easy to determine which major features are in which release.
Not sure if that's supposed to be informative, clever, funny, or something else. It's certainly not communicating anything to me, except something about you - something I'm sure you didn't intend to say.
I just think people would be a lot more thoughtful if they had to own up to what they said.
A paper about Freebase’s RABJ engine
Guess what, the burger in that Wendy's commercial isn't edible either. I'm sorry, but this just isn't that big of a deal.
As long as this is handled well (i.e. truly opt-in, well-curated lists), it's a damn good idea. It's a good mesh of using the Internet to increase engagement in real life — the potential is huge for discovery of lots of unique places that many would probably never have thought to seek out before.
Probably would be better to show the category tags beside/below the author/comments subtitle.

I like it though. Rather than inclusive filtering like you have on the right hand side, is there any way to filter out the categories I don't care about? Maybe I want all of the blogs except Haskell and C#, for instance.
Um, what about Web2Py? I must say, so far I've been extremely impressed. It's polished, has batteries included, is very similar to Ruby on Rails in experience, and even has a built-in web-based IDE. (http://www.web2py.com/)
So all those other programming languages that come with arrays and not linked lists are completely useless? Mildly useless? Only kind of useless? Or is it the case that it really doesn't matter?
Startup Resources from Around the World
this page tells you how to use googles javascript to load the library, instead of providing links directly to the library's.
"If people had paid attention in 1995 we might have a Semantic Web by now"

Instead, some people who were paying attention made Google, instead, which I think is a better solution anyway.
I'd be hesitant to use your service without a referral. Your site doesn't list your restaurants, your fees, or your happy clients. It's just a Google Doc lead gen form. Why?
No, actually the bad rap is due to the fact that the passive voice sounds, well, more passive.

"The sailor hit the solider" inherently sounds more dynamic and active than "The soldier was hit by the sailor."

Taking the GP's example:

"The soldier woke up. He had breakfast. He was hit by a sailor."

sounds only marginally worse than the active version, but that's in great part because that's a lousy paragraph to begin with. If you actually write it with some sort of flair for interesting rhythm and verbs, it might become:

"The soldier awoke in the early morning and had a hearty breakfast at the inn, devouring some eggs and bacon that would give him strength for the hard day ahead. Then, as he stepped out of the inn, the sailor bashed him on the side of the head with an oar."

This is no great artistic creation, but it is at least a passably decent paragraph. Now turn the verbs into passive mode and see how it falls apart and becomes bland and, well, passive:

"The soldier awoke in the early morning and had a hearty breakfast at the inn. Eggs and bacon were devoured that would give him strength for the hard day ahead. Then, as he stepped out of the inn, he was bashed on the side of the head by the sailor, with an oar."

The second version is distinctly worse, and that's all because of the passive voice.

Note: Before you respond to explain how the passive voice is appropriate in many situations, yes, I do acknowledge that. The passive voice is great when you know how to use it. Hell, it's as essential to pacing the english language as short-selling is essential to maintaining healthy markets. In most cases, though people use too much passive voice and too little active voice.
We pulled all of these localized resources from the city specific StartupDigest's we publish. Thought it would be a good idea to put them all on page and accessible outside of the email newsletter.

Would appreciate your thoughts and if you have any city specific (national + international) blogs, news sites, or resources to add leave it as a comment below.
More than 640K of RAM? Bah.
It's a quote from Idiocracy; a Mike Judge film from 2006.
How Incubators Speed Up the Startup Process
I agree, PayPal is often over criticized

If what's described in the linked article is correct, they deserve the criticism. There's fraud prevention, and then there's organized harassment and extortion. The examples given are of the latter, and if it were me I'd just hire an attorney and file a lawsuit with enough zeroes in the damage claim to get wide press coverage and, thus, the attention of someone who's actually accountable.
Using HTML5 Microdata on Your Web Site
Actually, if his orders included killing civilians, then those were unlawful orders. And if he was obeying them that would make him a war criminal, no?
Cool. You're talking about their readability rip off (I use readability all the time). Does it also display the whole article on one page?
Do Start-Ups Really Create Jobs?
Google is great and looking up facts and even teaching but you can't put "Advanced Google Searcher" on your resume.

You can be successful without any formal education but the average person will be more successful sticking to school.

I totally agree.

I managed to get a lot of experience behind me before I officially started my career. I know that a few parameters made the situation available to me.

But one can't help think that perhaps ability/passion > education. Especially when the education isn't being utilized. So why are employers looking for educated persons first? I think it shows commitment. Commitment, ability and passion don't always run the same linage, though.
That's in the todo list, I'll implement tags next to the title, easier to know what the article is about.

I'll think about remembering your settings, since I really don't want to create accounts and stuff. Not easy to implement without accounts tho.
That's odd: I feel like I know exactly what you mean. :-P
Mountain View, CA.

RethinkDB (rethinkdb.com/jobs)

We're building a database for solid state drives, and are working on hard core technology - a highly asynchronous, high throughput system, with concurrency control algorithms, garbage collection, and lots of other neat components you won't get to build anywhere else.
Why only prereleases for IE and Chrome? Also that HTML5 test is bogus as its weights are completely arbitrary, counts things that were rejected by the W3C like Web SQL Database, and does not verify correctness (e.g., Chrome's implementation of WebSockets does not match the current draft.)
Write a game. ASCII Tetris or Pac Man or Space Invaders would be fine. Whether that is a simple afternoon activity or a somewhat epic undertaking might tell you something about the language.
I think as long as Greece's economy is resilient to a default, and the government able extract taxes from it afterwards, it will work.

The creditors will be screwed, but new ones will be ready to lend again to a government with tax revenues and no debt.

It depends how much of the defaulted debt is foreign-held, and how much is domestically-held. If too much the latter, the economy may not recover right away, putting them in a pinch.
Mountain View, CA.

RethinkDB (http://rethinkdb.com/jobs)

We're building a database for solid state drives, and are working on hard core technology - a highly asynchronous, high throughput system, with concurrency control algorithms, garbage collection, and lots of other neat components you won't get to build anywhere else.
Newsflash- nothing you do online is anonymous. It hasn't been for a long time now, and it won't be in the future.
http://vimeo.com/3829682
His comment is a quote from the movie Idiocracy (http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0387808/).

Of course I can't speak for him, but the premise of the movie is a slow steady decline in education leading to the above quote, which is given to the protagonist (after he wakes up in the future) by a doctor as a diagnosis.
I've read too many of these horror stories, and I've come to the conclusion that I will never, under any circumstances, use PayPal for anything other than small personal transactions. Even then, the fees are almost enough to make it not worthwhile at all.
True, but the number of developers who expect batteries to be included is not small. And those are the people who "* for dummies" markets to. And when your manager goes to Barnes and Noble and sees an entire wall of "* in 3 days", guess what language he is going to pick for his next project?
25 Years of the Model M
Leaving money on the table during an IPO is often attacked as a form of fraud. I recall it was a big issue during the peak of the Internet boom, 1997-2000. There you had a lot of startups desperate for money to fund their growth, and yet they gave away substantial amounts of money to speculators. There were clear abuses of "Friends and Family" blocks of stock -- these started getting handed out to anyone who could move the deal forward, with the understanding that the stock could be dumped on the opening day of trading. This amounted to a kind of bribe, an additional payment made in excess of all the normal IPO fees.

Wikipedia offers this:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Initial_public_offering

"The underpricing of initial public offerings (IPO) has been well documented in different markets (Ibbotson, 1975; Ritter 1984; Levis, 1990; McGuinness, 1992). While Issuers always try to maximize their issue proceeds, the underpricing of IPOs has constituted a serious anomaly in the literature of financial economics. Many financial economists have developed different models to explain the underpricing of IPOs. Some of the models explained it as a consequences of deliberate underpricing by issuers or their agents. In general, smaller issues are observed to be underpriced more than large issues (Ritter, 1984, Ritter, 1991, Levis, 1990) Historically, IPOs both globally and in the United States have been underpriced. The effect of "initial underpricing" an IPO is to generate additional interest in the stock when it first becomes publicly traded. Through flipping, this can lead to significant gains for investors who have been allocated shares of the IPO at the offering price. However, underpricing an IPO results in "money left on the table"—lost capital that could have been raised for the company had the stock been offered at a higher price. One great example of all these factors at play was seen with theglobe.com IPO which helped fuel the IPO mania of the late 90's internet era. Underwritten by Bear Stearns on November 13, 1998 the stock had been priced at $9 per share, and famously jumped 1000% at the opening of trading all the way up to $97, before deflating and closing at $63 after large sell offs from institutions flipping the stock . Although the company did raise about $30 million from the offering it is estimated that with the level of demand for the offering and the volume of trading that took place the company might have left upwards of $200 million on the table."

All the same, Wikipedia also offers a charitable explanation for the phenomena:

"The danger of overpricing is also an important consideration. If a stock is offered to the public at a higher price than the market will pay, the underwriters may have trouble meeting their commitments to sell shares. Even if they sell all of the issued shares, if the stock falls in value on the first day of trading, it may lose its marketability and hence even more of its value."
Steven,

Looks fantastic. I really like your UI -- very informative, yet clean.

I think that your prices seem pretty low, I am not sure how much feedback you have gotten from restaurants, this seems like a no-brainer for them...

Good luck!
Love this concept. Over time they can play with other nudges to get people to sign-up: requiring a Flattr account to skip an interstitial ad, for example (even if you don't ultimately choose to give a share to the content), or even (for some premium/early-access content) requiring a Flattr click.

This is the direction I thought now-defunct Contenture should have taken. Previous discussion links: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1117012
Or, perhaps, it's about a culture where little lies and cheats like this are accepted as "no big deal".
Not to mention the fact that the title is wrong.

"Many English speakers cannot understand basic grammar" should read "do not"-- as evidenced by the statement "Participants with low levels of educational attainment were given instruction following the tests, and they were able to learn the constructions very quickly."
This seems absolutely crazy to me. I was always taught put money into long term, stable investments when you are young so that you have the longest possible period for return.

The last paragraph I think is dangerous. Putting $5000 towards four ideas may teach you something but it's certainly not going to guarantee "Something is going to hit."
Is there something factually incorrect about it, or do you simply dislike what it implies?
Not 100% on this source's references, but it seems as though there are many people that have dropped out of high-school and managed to be successful.

http://www.school-survival.net/successful_dropouts.php

These are all popular examples only, so it doesn't match well for an overall statistic.
If you don't watch the full video, Altucher suggests keeping it out of the stock market and investing it in yourself. And he's looking for the SPX to run to 1500.

I'm in the market all day--speculating in the stock market is a pain in the ass right now. On the short term, HFT firms have changed the market structure, and many that haven't adapted have closed up shop-- see Schonfeld: http://bit.ly/9aKwJu .

By investing in yourself, if you're good at it, you'll guarantee smoother returns with much, much more under your control. You can directly affect your CR on your site, but if the carry trade unwinds it doesn't matter how good of an investor/stock picker you are.
I think "tips" is one of the neatest features of Foursquare, and I see this as the same concept only the information comes to you. When I am in a new city I'll sometimes pull up Foursquare to look for a place to eat/drink/be merry and I read through these tips. If that information was delivered to me based on groups that I consider myself to be a part of, I would be one happy camper.

Very cool.
Ask HN: Do small, brick-and-mortar businesses care about customer feedback?
I'm building something at the moment that really streamlines customer feedback for a particular type of business. What I'm offering is essentially an A/B testing service for real-world products. I've done my due diligence on this market, and while three or four other Web apps have started doing what I'm proposing, none of them are executing on the same vision.

Something that's been nagging at me, though, is whether these business owners actually care about customer feedback. The owner could make the argument that increasing profits are a sign that the customer is happy, but I've been toying with this counterargument:

-they may be buying from you because the selection in the area is limited. If another business offering the same type of product suddenly opens up, those customers are not going to stay loyal unless they're happy with your business. Customer feedback is a good way to gauge that.

Similarly, happy customers are the ones that make referrals to friends and family.

I'm planning on sitting down with several dozen of these business owners in the near future and hammer out exactly which features they'd like to see in this product, but I thought I'd ask this here: do you think brick-and-mortar business owners care about customer feedback?
I'm glad you did, it wasn't at all what I expected, but it was a compelling story.
When using this CDN for versioned libraries like jQuery, be sure to avoid using the "latest version" references[1][2].

In order for the "latest version" feature to be reliable, they have to avoid users having stale local copies for very long. Thus, they serve those with a much closer expires header, which defeats one of the shared CDN's biggest benefits.

When you reference the full version explicitly[3], it's served with a +1 year expires header.

// Not cached for long.

[1] http://ajax.googleapis.com/ajax/libs/jquery/1/jquery.min.js

[2] http://ajax.googleapis.com/ajax/libs/jquery/1.4/jquery.min.j...

// Cached for up to a year.

[3] http://ajax.googleapis.com/ajax/libs/jquery/1.4.2/jquery.min...
Google Go looks interesting too.

http://code.google.com/p/go/

"Go is an expressive, concurrent, garbage-collected systems programming language."

Already in production on some internal projects.
Great idea. A friend and I were talking about the need for this kind of product a few days ago. Your implementation looks very nice.
I pretty much agree, just one more thing to add. Disruptive innovations are more about the market and business model than the technology itself. That's why relatively crappy inventions can take root.

For instance, PCs were not good compared to mainframes or workstations, but they were bought by people that weren't buying workstations. This gave them the chance to build businesses and improve until they could later compete with, and displace workstations.

For Tesla, what is the disruptive market? I'm not sure. Their cars do the same things as other cars, with different inputs. If their "disruptive" niche is to be an eco-fashion symbol, and that gives them time to build a car whose TCO is 20+% less because of the difference in fuel cost per mile, then they have a shot.

For what could truly be disruptive to personal transportation is Better Place ( http://www.wired.com/cars/futuretransport/magazine/16-09/ff_... ). Sure, it's expensive, limited, and poor right now, but if it can work in Israel, Denmark, and Hawaii, and prove and grow the business from there, it can change things in a much bigger way than Tesla can.
By your logic we should all be over at 4chan to discuss startups and tech news. Hacker News is a perfect example of the good that can come from non-anonymity and 4chan is the perfect example as to why total anonymity will always lead to cesspools.
Anyone here have suggestions on what to do with excess money at that age besides starting a company? I'm 22 and use my excess money to max out my roth ira every year and keep the rest in the bank, but if there's someway to "invest in myself" I'd certainly be willing to consider it. I'm a PhD student in CS if it matters, but general advice would be preferred.
I believe you can work around this in IE by using document.createElement() in the head for any custom tag you want to use - see http://html5doctor.com/how-to-get-html5-working-in-ie-and-fi....
In order to submit content to be "Flattred", you have to become a paying member of the site -- a clever hook to pull in tippers at the same time they're pulling in content authors.
In general, the occasional underpricing could be dismissed as a mistake, but when there is a sustained pattern of it, you have to wonder if the underwriters of the offering are not trying to thicken their profits by opening the door to further speculation of their own.