skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
> What does it mean to say it is bad?

How about this: if in advance of the behavior, you intend to partake moderately, and in the event you consistently overindulge, and after the fact you regret your excess, then something about this behavior is bad.

I'm leaving aside some of the other points you bring up, but if you've got a habit that consistently leads to dissatisfaction and regret, I think it's fair to call it a problem for that reason alone.
Amusingly, I can't read it because I get an error: "the service you request is temporarily unavailable. please try again later.".
Many of the manufacturing jobs in the US are unionized. The unions can make it more difficult to fire people.
I love the idea. Love it. Like, really excited. However, I'm not prepared to use a service like this in a hosted environment. Too many risks: you go out of business, security, privacy, etc. Plus the information just feels to personal to be sitting on someone else's server. I would love to see a quick daily prompt like this added to Macjournal or similar software.
Very little compared to reddit. PG said recently that HN has 60K unique/day. Reddit has around 8Million.

In addition to that, the software behind HN doesn't do nearly as much as the reddit software: there is no automatic checking of new messages, there are no sub reddits you need to work on, there are only so many votes to be processed, etc.

I have no clue about who pays for what, but I guess PG pays.
No, a commodity is something you purchase based solely on price without regard for any differentiating factors related to provider. Think crude oil. Oil's price goes up, oil's price goes down, but ultimately you're only thinking about the price, not whether that oil comes from one large drilling conglomerate or the next. Oil is oil, and a plane ticket is a plane ticket.
Nothing to see here. New up and coming search engine contenders don't list every site Google and Yahoo! do as a way to differentiate themselves from the well-entrenched competition.
10 Heuristics for User Interface Design
Now wait a second; Google is stealing Yelp's content? Since when does Yelp "own" my reviews? When Yelp begins paying for the content others are generating for them then we can consider the moral outrage of this "theft".
That said, I'm sure there is a target market out there who will be more than willing to use the product in its current format. I'm looking forward to seeing where this idea goes.
But entrepreneurship is inherently stressful, for sure. Moreso than any other profession.
When and how to add proprietary software to your desktop Linux
And to Google's credit, they don't block competitive apps from their market. Go ahead and make your own map software for sale on the market; Google will happily list it.
Well, his bio page suggests that he may well: http://www.tbray.org/ongoing/misc/Tim
Wow...this is hard to believe. Numbers like that make me wonder if the cost of going with ruby or python (in reddit's case) or insert-your-slower-dynamic-language-here outweigh the benefits in the long run. How can anyone bootstrap a company and scale to the size of Reddit without quickly running into a "must fund or sale" situation?

If it's truly a python issue, it should not be taken lightly by entrepreneurs. I hope it's not...I'm an avid user of both ruby and python, and want to believe they can both be used to create successful and maintainable (in terms of effort and cost) sites.
or cannabisseur (see my other comment)
Now that there's no uncertainty about the legality of it, maybe more effort will go into providing stable jailbroken environments.
Actually, I bet you it's a "we hit the database on every pageload" problem.
Another idea, is to take the best comments: http://news.ycombinator.com/bestcomments and ask those commenters to discuss them on video, or whatever. There's film called Waking Life, check it out: http://www.youtube.com/results?search_query=waking+life&... You could give HN readers some version of their own Waking Life.
Do they just walk up and introduce themselves like: "Hi, I'm Bob. Oh, and I'm a vegetarian." ? Or is it more like: "No thanks, I don't eat meat. I'm a vegetarian."

The second version doesn't really come off as smug, unless you're just someone that is easily offended. Interpreting that as anything more than an explanation of why the person doesn't want to accept your offer of meat (or something with meat) is spending too much time reading into it.

Some people get offended at conversations like this:

smoker: You got a smoke?
non-smoker: Sorry, I don't smoke.

Whether or not the smoker thinks that the non-smoker is being smug has more to do with the baggage that the smoker brings to the table (e.g. perceiving all non-smokers as looking down at him/her for being a smoker).
How much will I pay for SFO to NYC? Well, that depends...is it more than two weeks out? Less than two weeks out? Is it a popular day to travel? Convenient route? Who else is flying? So many factors that make it difficult to know when to buy and what to expect to pay...

For example, something I've noticed recently: the SFO to NYC red-eye will be cheaper than the evening flights up until about 3-5 weeks before the day of travel. Then, the red-eye will suddenly jump to almost double the price of the other tickets.

All I can figure is that more than 3-5 weeks out, most of the people buying tickets are tourists, and tourists tend to not like taking red-eyes. Once you get inside the 3-5 week window, that buying pattern switches to primarily business travelers. For a business traveler, the red-eye means still getting in a full day of work before leaving, so they tend to favor that schedule.

The fact that the price fluctuates so rapidly, and depends more on the buying patterns of other consumers than on the product itself, makes plane tickets look an awful lot like a futures market! And you know what else is sold on futures markets?

...commodities.
That's actually not terribly surprising. Reddit's always been extremely conservative with ad space, and it seems like they could offset a lot of that if they started running more "traditional" ad slots.

By their own numbers, they do about 14.3m pageviews/day. Let's assume half of that is AdBlocked. A single 300x250 at an exceptionally low $0.05 CPM would yield $3,575/day in ad revenue, or $107,250/month. I'll guarantee that reddit could pull far, far higher CPMs. Like, an order magnitude or two higher.

Edit: I'm off by an order of magnitude, see below. Point stands, though, that there is a lot of ad money they're leaving on the table.
I don't do any graphics programming and so I don't really understand the various features of OpenGL or DirectX. If they hadn't said that OpenGL 4.1 is better than DirectX, the article would have meant very little to me, but I understand your point.
Not everyone else -- there are artists, the religious, the geographically isolated, the military, martial arts devotees, and those who are just too down and out to participate. Come to think of it, Anathem includes almost all of them in the story and leaves the normals out of the picture entirely.
I take the lazy approach and just watch the twitter feed of the updates come in over growl. Low intensity management.
Unfortunately it really doesn't matter what's in an OpenGL spec, nor how it compares to Direct3D. What matters are which features the hardware manufacturers choose to support and how well they do so. If the past is any guide then OGL will continue to lag Direct3D for a long time to come.

Apple are probably the biggest supplier of high-end OpenGL capable hardware+ outside of the PC market, but unfortunately neither they nor their hardware partners offer full support for OpenGL 3.0 - despite all Mac's manufactured since late 2008 being capable). Even older games such as Portal or Half-life 2 run about 50% faster under Windows & Direct3D on the same hardware.

I've developed with both Direct3D and OpenGL on multiple platforms for most of the past twelve years, as well as using platform-specific APIs like libgcm on the PS3. At the end of the day they are all just tools and a means to an end. Those with the best support and tools are the ones I most enjoy using. Currently that's Direct3D, with an honorable mention to libgcm on the PS3.

(Unlike the Ars article suggests, nobody serious is writing games on the PS3 using OpenGL)
I would assume though it would be even easier here than on reddit to get people to donate towards server cost should the need ever arise.
Wow, I think the statement is just a bit of fun.
Data entry: 300 forms take an average of X hours to do. After X hours reading Reddit and not entering forms, 0 forms have been entered. Simplistically, X hours have been 'lost'.

X hours of data entry have been lost. X hours of participating in the Reddit hivemind have been gained :) Steve Yegge once hypothesized that Reddit-like websites are the first incarnation of a new breed of superorganisms, which evolve into something called Rivers: https://docs.google.com/Doc?id=ddv7939q_20gw8h9pcx
Yes, they all do run something called D3D, but it's not exactly the same across the board.

Not only that (it's expected to be different), but you actually need to work in a different way for each platform.

For PC you have to handle losing/restoring the device, reloading the assets, etc. Making multithreaded D3D renderer is pain in the ass (the MULTITHREADED FLAG is just going to ruin your performance).

For the consoles, I can't comment as I'm under NDA, but it's just different.

Granted, if OpenGL was on the consoles (it was in some form), it would've had the same differences - mainly - a console is a single-application that runs almost as a kernel - so you don't have handle certain stuff (on PC you have to handle fullscreen/losing/restoring the device, etc), but you have expectations for other (no visible slowdowns, jerking, etc. which are prevalent in the PC games)

So let's not start a religious war here :)
Last year, there was a Wakefield/Wi-Fi Alliance study that found 76% of travelers would choose an airline based on wi-fi availability.

I'd imagine Wi-Fi Alliance might have some biases here.

Since in-flight wifi is just a satellite connection, I'm sure the overall available bandwidth is fairly limited. Charging for wifi is a good middle ground for airlines as a way to make a few extra dollars but also to keep usage to a level that the uplink can handle.

Are their any airlines that currently offer free wifi? I know that SWA did during their testing phase a while back (which only consisted of 3-4 equipped planes) but they eventually started charging for it like everyone else.
Which people in Brazil are we talking about, that had such better diets 50-60 years ago? In 1950, the life expectancy from birth in Brazil was 50 years (a big improvement from before 1930 when life expectancy was about 33 years; by 1975 the life expectancy was about 60 years, and today it's about 73 years). Part of this was high infant mortality and poor access to healthcare, but another big part of it was that Brazil, like most of the world, mostly consisted of chronically undernourished people.

(These data are eyeballed from http://www.gapminder.org/world/)
These are things that, as pg put it, I don't want to want. I don't care what changed on HN in the last 15 seconds, so why do my fingers type this reflexively when I've opened my browser to do something else? I was just here, I've already read the stuff I'm interested in. I don't want to be here.

Yeah, I know about noprocrast. It doesn't stop my fingers from typing h-a-down-enter .
Agreed. This old article from Wired (http://www.wired.com/wired/archive/1.06/1.6_amish.html) describes how the Amish aren't just rejectionists. Unlike the rest of us, they have a tradition of thinking deeply about technology before adopting it into our lifestyle.

Especially in the hacker set and in certain aspects of urban professional culture, the idea is that you let technology inform you of how you should be living your life. This is madness.
Amish Hackers: How the Amish actually use and build their own tech (kk.org)

86 points by whatusername 196 days ago

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1046378
If you're not time bound to the absolute latest, also check out the new http://hackerbra.in - it will shade down the snapshots you've already seen in its history
Very interesting perspective.

I would take the moral relativist approach to arguing that these things are bad. Suppose a hypothetical person who spends time on (e.g.) Facebook when there's something else they themselves would prefer to do with that time. Would the addiction be bad for this person?

If so, we only need to point to the existence of a statistically significant number of such people to substantiate the argument that their Facebook addiction is a "bad" thing. Unless we have reason to believe that Facebook addiction in general (not Facebook itself, just addiction to it) has benefits, we can transfer this to Facebook addiction in general.

Here's one person so identified: http://www.cnn.com/2009/HEALTH/04/23/ep.facebook.addict/inde...

To my knowledge, nobody's done a study of this, but I find it more plausible than not that there exist many people who spend time on Facebook that they would prefer to use doing other things.

I've picked on Facebook quite a bit here. This is not in any way meant to be a dig against the service or company; Facebook is just a convenient example.
I think that people tend to watch more TV with less enjoyment when it's just a cable stream into your house. I think that people don't end up tending to things like channel-surfing. It's hard to plop down on the couch and watch whatever happens to be the 'best thing on' when the video is on-demand and you have a choice in the matter. This is the same reason that so many people felt liberated by things like TiVo. It allowed them to just tell TiVo what they liked to watch, and they didn't have to worry about gathering around the TV set at a time specified by a channel's scheduling selections.
<sarcasm>wow what an amazing pearl of wisdom.</sarcasm>

why does this sort of self evident junk get the front page?
A History of Wall Street Journal Hedcuts
Yep. That's why you shouldn't have pylons noobs running a site like reddit.
How did you get from "It costs this much" to "Dynamic languages are bad"?
Thank you! Testing now.

Redshift is nice. But, the colours in xflux feel better. Nothing quantifiable though.

I spent a little bit of time a few months ago trying to dump the gamma tables to compare. Only accomplished reminding myself why I hate low-level X.
Bad architecture or poor design crosses languages. It's entirely possible and done every single day, to emit a broken system using even the most optimal code.

That said; this looks, sounds and smells like database scaling issue more than anything. It is interesting to ponder the long-term costs of running a site like this on EC2 versus your own maintained server farm.
Hacker News User Base Changed? (plot of user start dates)
Amish businesses don't fail
There IS a 4th status: undefined. If there are no laws on a specific something, then it is open for interpretation. A judge may use existing case law to rule that a specific something is merely an extension of an existing something (eg, email vs. snail mail), but until that ruling (and depending on the jurisdiction), that something is in a legal gray area.
Famous founders. Famous seed investors.
Why Aren't All Google Apps Made Equally Secure?
I changed the title from "Why Amish Businesses Don't Fail", because they don't actually say why, at least not in this article. They speculate it has to do with Amish values. Well, no kidding.

I wonder if Amish financing is Biblical, following the proscription against usury. For purists, that would mean no interest rate at all.
As long as only a minority of users use this, great. Otherwise, if everyone's reading through things like this, WTF is voting the stories up in the first place?

Part of what makes HN good is that most people hit the site and help with the voting. The more people who move away to reading HN remotely or through feeds.. the worse the voting situation gets.
It's a bit like putting cancer warnings on cigarette packs. Sure it educates the target demographic, but it's not going to solve their problem.
Was trying to think of other ways that this could be measured. Maybe by looking through posts and creating some method of categorizing the urls referenced (tech sites vs. news sites). Thought maybe that the user's karma might somehow serve to indicate the relative merit of a post - but only the current value of karma is available, not the value at the time of the post.

Any other ideas?
Reddit's actual CPM is 8$. One of the admins said that Conde wants to keep it a premium brand and they don't actually set the CPM. I'll try to dig up a link. It's also why there's tons of cross reddit advertising, and adverts that are paid are only seen for a tiny bit of time.
I agree with your main point but your math is off by an order of magnitude:

(14,300,000 x $0.05 x 0.5)/1000 = $357.50/day

I still think Reddit could easily pay their costs by running ads, not sure why they are not doing so.
w8lvn, ex-k7qvf, ex-yj0vn.

30m rocks for mobile as well.
Keep in mind that Canada has closed out the IT/Developer category for immigration, so even if if you qualify on points and you're in IT/Software Development, you cannot get in.
Apple: Selling Ice Cubes to Eskimos
I have a screenshot of it here: http://toadjaw.com/screenshot?id=http://www.reddit.com/r/blo...
s/cross-platform/cross-vendor/

Did you notice you mentioned one desktop OS, one dead failed console, one successful console, one failed media player still on sale and an OS that hasn't hit the market and that has, consequently, no market share, all made by the same company?

How does that remotely compare with the breadth of vendors, device formats, architectures and operating systems OpenGL covers? My phone runs it. My laptop runs it, as does every high-end visualization system I ever used.
"I have finished the first chapters of how to prove it, foundations of computer science and algorithms book. Although I am interested, I find myself lacking the motivation to continue...And this adds up, days to weeks and then months. Then the cumulative depression rides me to hell. "

It seems to me that you may be overloading yourself, especially if you have a 9 to 5 job. One of my friends is working through "How to Prove it" (see http://technotes-himanshu.blogspot.com/search/label/htpi for his blog on his progress - just one book, not three books like you are doing ). He has a boring (but consuming) corporate job, just got married and is other wise busy. He works for a steady 4-6 hours or so every Saturday and that is it.

And from personal experience, if you are trying to "level up" technically on top of a demanding work schedule, a steady and regular series of small bites seems to work better than ultra intense efforts, which burn you out fast.

PS: If your algorithms book is CLRS that is a tough book to combine with other hard books and on top of a job!
Greylock Partners On Why You Shouldn't Start a Company in Boston
Cause a server with these languages has high overhead in memory and CPU to serve requests thus having lower throughput per server and thus needing more servers to sustain certain site-wide SLA and thus causing more money overall.
Yeah everyone who can is leaving, theres nothing happening there now(Ireland not Oz, stayed in Oz for a couple of months with my aunt, great place, love the poisonous animals). Will do.
That is interesting. Could be because there is only one review and that guy is some sort of super human. But really it illustrates the usefulness of the site over other sites that post a single persons perspective on a strain.
Former Body-Armor Executive on Trial for Fraud
Maybe the selfish elite are less likely to admit being greedy

edit: wrong italic markup
That's just the server instance cost. What about bandwidth and S3 cost? Bandwidth would cost a bundle.
Anyone want to do a Cambridge/Boston HN meetup?
Agreed, but I don't think there's much to worry about as it stands. PG said newsyc currently gets 60,000 unique visitors per day, and the # of ppl following these twitter feeds is barely 1% of that.
Yeah, it's cool but probably not worth getting cancer for.
As a calendar, showing September 1993 with an infinite number of days.
I know the reddit guys, and I can tell you it's definitely not that. Hitting the DB is extremely rare - almost everything comes straight out of cache (either memcache, or memcachedb for caches which are more expensive to rebuild). Execution cost is dominated by the python app servers.
What's the story?
.org Celebrates its 25th Anniversary
I mean my parents, my girlfriend's parents, my friends' parents, and almost every middle-class to upper-class person my age's parents as well. Not our grandparents, mind you.
Is it me or does Julian Assange look like 1 of Matrix albino twins minus dreads?
Here's an anecdote for you: our corporate intranet site gets a peak spike of a few thousand users every day, around lunch. (People browsing the web over lunch and the computers in-house all have the site as their fixed homepage.)

That web server is running separate from databases and other resources. It never sees load. We're using a static language, but even if ruby was 10x slower, it wouldn't matter.

On the other hand, change the contents of a stored procedure so that it doesn't line up with indexing properly, and page load goes from >0.1s to <4s.
Intel doesn't have a good track record in non-hardware (or non-cpu) endeavors. The way they can win in the phone arena is to provide the whole hardware aspect of the phone and leave the software parts to its partners, including Apple.
You're right, hadn't thought of it that way.
Will the 140-char limit drop next?
Internet use seems to be my "ground state", what I fall into when I'm done with the stuff I have to do. But recently I've realized that, even though it's addictive, I don't really find it all that relaxing. So I've been trying to reclaim my old ground state of reading books. The internet for me is like the concentrated form of reading a book: you don't have to stay with any one topic longer than it holds your interest. You can move from interesting factoid to personal anecdote to hilarious cat macro without "wasting" any time on background or depth.

I think the counter-addiction technology will have to be psychological. Perhaps research could determine if certain practices make people more resistant to addictive things, and it could become customary to have such a practice. Meditation, self-hypnosis, ritual, counseling, introspection. Maybe just doing things that are hard. I suppose there is a danger that any of those could become addictive. Maybe the best you can hope for is to have a choice of what you're addicted to.
Their user base is outright hostile to the idea.
I think you're onto to something there. People probably have good reasons to try and avoid mismatches in levels of drinking at an event. Drinking breaks down social barriers but in doing so it makes people vulnerable. Maybe if you can sufficiently signal your commitment to the social situation without drinking you'd do better - ie make a bit of a fool of yourself to show your uninhibited state. As an experiment perhaps next party the grandparent commenter goes to he can wear a ridiculous Hawaiian shirt or something.
Using _pi's figure of $8 CPM then we get 160 times this, $57,200 ?

No on seems to be mentioning other revenue streams, user stats, customised reddits, merchandise sales, ...?
I appreciate links to sources, but links are definitely distracting. Even if you don't click on it, a link forces your mind to imagine what's at the other end of that link and make a decision about whether it's worth clicking on.

If you frequently link to many sources within a single post, it might be better to use superscripts and link to sources at the bottom (which, incidentally, is how PG does it). These are still distracting, but considerably less so when they're used exclusively for citations, as opposed to digressions.
FundingUniverse matches entrepreneurs to banks