skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Brevity magazine is thinking about charging $2 to $3 dollars to submit articles to its editors for consideration. It is a not-for-profit magazine.

I think this topic is similar to the post about a newspaper charging for comments.

Publishing is in crisis. I know many web types don't really worry too much about these inky-fingered paper dinosaurs, but it worries me. For whatever reasons, the web gurus of the late 90s told everyone to win eyeballs, and now we have free content, free comments and free submissions. Not even the price of postage is a barrier any more. We seem to be suffering now from an internet that is burdened by too many contributors, too much information, too much noise and not enough signal. And what the publishers will tell you, too few readers.

So perhaps a paywall will help to balance this out. In the past submitting a letter or an article or a book to a publisher was the "entry barrier" to participation. Now it is easier to do via a website or email and the price disguised within the ISP fee.

And if publishers do not charge for submission, how else do we reduce the overwhelming deluge of poor quality submissions?

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1518265
For whatever reason, Y Combinator has engaged enough people to have a kind of 'following' that seems to be like other start-up investment groups. It may be due to PG's writing or it may be because we're all part of the community here, but people here WANT to see Y Combinator start-ups do well.

So it makes sense then that TechCrunch would cover every single YC launch, because this site is going to drive a boat load of traffic their way.

If it makes you feel better, people who read hacker news shouldn't be your target group anyways. The 'winner' in this market will be the people who engages webmasters who are inexperienced and wouldn't have heard of A/B testing before landing on your page.
Programming in C++ made me realize how naive C is, in both good and bad.
I just woke up, so you can't hold me responsible for anything I say in the following statement:

Yes, I do think it can work, with strong marketing. This kind of business is like an ugly guy trying to pick up women. It's a numbers game. The guy will have to network and get in front of a lot of women before he'll get a yes. But there will be plenty of women who will like him - just like there will be plenty of folks who would appreciate the services of 1-888-WASHMYDISHES.

To increase revs, why not start up an associated business? Perhaps 1-888-YOURBBQFTW. BBQ masters will arrange BBQ parties, order the food and BBQ the meat and vegetables to perfection. Then bring in your 888-WASHMYDISHES people.
It's just hard to sustain public interest when it isn't getting particularly worse, isn't getting particularly better, isn't going away, and we are not in imminent danger. If we felt threatened and outraged like we did in past wars, people would be hanging on every word out of the news.
Really?

There are always complaints about women in technology. Yet when I spent my Saturday nights in an underground lab, there weren’t a lot of women in the lab. The bar and social spots on the humanities side were full of them though.

Is it okay to have double standards? If we make women only organizations to promote things, is it okay if we make men only organizations?

If there are complaints about too little women in engineering, why aren’t there complaints about too few men in teaching or humanities?
Easy, they have money and other people want a slice of their pie. The "I'm entitled to it" arguments like this come first, the more indirect arguments come later.
That's what I meant also, just my English is twisted sometimes :)

I meant "as good as anything else" in the sense of "better or at least equal to any other story"
Interestingly the top rated answer was given by the gentleman who got turned down by Google

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1520323
Ask HN: Is the Wild West Internet dead? Should it be?
I think the agenda, or "schooling" as some call it, is being slowly pushed by interested parties to regulate the internet. I think the elite is being lobbied to "school" the public in resisting less a more clean, comfortable, orderly, internet.

Personally I see some value in such arguments. There is a reason why we have laws and rules and the internet has perhaps become too mainstream, too important, to be allowed to have so much freedom. Society would perhaps be served better if certain things were more regulated, if web pages can be more trusted and have more authority.

Even if some regulation is not imposed, some of what I might call more complete reflection of society in the internet is already beginning to be established. Big players have established themselves and most probably do engage in cut throat swim or die attacks and defence on their smaller competitors thus slowly creating an oligarchy as is evident in many fields. Thus stifling freedom as is evident in many industries.

Yet I also have this romantic view of the internet, sort of a place bright and dark which counteracts cultural, conventional, societal, "restrictions" by providing the platform and means of overcoming them. Information is no longer hidden under pay walls, no longer does one need to be rich to read of so much history, ancient philosophy, or other books. No longer is knowledge the prerogative of those born in a wealthy family. Nor does one need to be near a library and be charged constantly for being overdue. Yet this seems to slowly be changing. The "schooling" seems to be working. The public seems to be less resistant to pay walls as they were a while ago. The spirit of "pirates", their pioneering efforts to allow information to be free by making it clear that restricting it in this platform is not possible because of the many ways that technology allows us to subvert such restrictions seems to slowly be waning.

Have we therefore seen the best of the internet, or will be able to enjoy the best of it for only a little more time?

Is the internet as we know being killed? And if so, is that desirable?
I made a similar comment about a year ago when in one write-up, PG was saying that in a certain domain former Google employees would be suitable applicants to YC. I said that this creates the same credentials based mentality that they were talking against in the beginning.
I've never been convinced by the argument that opening Google's algorithms would make it really vulnerable to spam. In the short term, I don't doubt it would, but I suspect a million eyes on the code would find and fix the bugs (where bugs are the easily spammable weak points), much as they do with crypto algorithms.
Why Old Spice matters - online performance art
I'm not sure I agree with the somewhat lax use of "semantics" here. It appears to be mixing notions from formal semantics with (not formally defined) ideas from linguistics.

Also, it's a nitpick, but the frequently repeated phrase "HTML language" belongs in the same box as "ATM machine" or "RAS syndrome".
And yet, if you talk to managers, they'd complain at length about the inability to find even mediocre people.

Most states in the US have "at will" employment laws meaning that its easy to fire a person after a couple of weeks if its obvious they're not working out.
How To Run Your Own Name Server With ISPConfig 3 And Fast Hosts
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Great article. Mark is so damn smart. He essentially covered the same topic on This week in VC so if you like to watch a video of the same topic:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tNaZfLV-5SA#t=41m38s
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How is that a strawman argument? He is stating that he does not blindly follow google, nor does he criticise google at every turn. He is a sceptic. As you say most of us are. We use it because on balance we like it. If we saw any evidence to suggest that something is wrong, then we will not like it, thus do something about it.
US was lucky that it was such a big spill.

~ 15.000 barrels per year spill in nigeria since 50 years. won't fix. (half of what deepwater spilled per day).

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Environmental_issues_in_the_Nig...
The Price That Cannot Be Bartered
Maybe this isn't generally true, but I tend to find coding itself to be quite straightforward — it's the design and architecture that takes up the time.

It takes an inordinate amount of time to get to the simplicity beyond the complexity — and sadly it's taken me about 10 years to go through that process.
First, do some research, which I suppose this is what you are doing by asking HN. Second, come up with loads of ideas, then decide which ideas you prefer most and try out some of them, like not fully implement them, but just sample them, then, see which works best.

Trial and error. It works every time :)
Michigan health insurance plans
Health Insurance Plans for Michigan that allow you to see any doctor you choose are inevitably more expensive than managed care policies.
I am still not sure how unicode works in Ruby. Therefore I never dare to do any String operations like regular expressions or the the chomp/split he does.

The pragmatic book mentions something about kcode (I think), but Rails seems to use something else. Back when I last tried, I couldn't find any definite answers to this.

Maybe Ruby 1.9 solves this problem - but is it ready yet? Again, last I tried, there wasn't even a MySQL driver for it.
His book "Modern C++ design" is about the fascinating beautiful and downright frightening things that you can do with C++ templates. It is worth a read.

However, to support what Zed is saying, Scott Myers (of Effective C++) was astonished about some of the things done there.

C++ doesn't follow the principle of Least Astonishment in any way that I can think of. And that is not good.
There are plenty of Blacks outside Africa and I hear that in South Africa there are loads of whites.
What if my site is better, but my competitors site ranks higher? Definitely the case for one of my sites.

I know for a fact that the "just provide good content" line by Google is complete bullshit.
Can you give an example of stop-the-world garbage collection?
I'm a long time HN user and a member of Mensa

Growing up, people around me always said I was very smart. Though deep down inside, I didn't think I was all that smart at all and always felt like an impostor. I took the test to prove to myself that I'm not a fraud.

Becoming a member helped eradicate any lingering insecurities I had about my intelligence, so it did have some therapeutic value. But I never renewed my membership after the first year because I couldn't seen any benefits in doing so. With the advent of the web, it's easy to interact with smart people with similar interests, and mentioning your membership can only hurt you professionally (see jeb's comment).

In my opinion, most college graduates could become members if they chose to do so. The requirements are not all that high and nothing to get a big head about. I walked out after finishing the first test (of two) and still scored high enough to get in.

One last thing. I think an obsession with your IQ suggests a subtle problem with your psychological attitude which may prevent you achieving success in life. Focus less on who you are" and more on what you do*, smart is as smart does.
I'll second this. They really are doing a great job.

I'd like to add that I really like their funding model. I feel like it is very sustainable and I don't have to worry about them loading the site up with ads or something to make it work. Our interests are aligned because it's paid for by the developers themselves. They make awesome tools for me, and I pay for them.

I feel like this is an important and underappreciated aspect of their service.
Not advocating either way, but it was always (and still is) interesting to read what Erik Naggum had to about Scheme's Lispiness: http://www.xach.com/naggum/articles/search?q=%22scheme+is+a+...
Continued fractions provide an interesting representation. See, for example, Mencer's Precision of Semi-Exact Redundant Continued Fraction Arithmetic for VLSI, http://portal.acm.org/citation.cfm?id=892637 . See also,
Mark Jason Dominus's article, http://perl.plover.com/yak/cftalk/ .
If that's what they were really looking for, then they're really just testing whether you can figure out what they're really looking for, whether they know it or not. If you want someone to demonstrate their thought process, you give them a tricky problem and just tell them to solve it out loud. If it's a good problem, they're not going to be able to fake having an awesome thought process.

"I'd google it" is exactly the right answer, as far as I'm concerned. Unfortunately, it's never the answer interviewers want to hear. Regardless of whether they've asked good questions, it's invariably one of the most common responses interviewees will make when they don't know the answer. Whether or not the interviewer had a justified expectation that you should know the answer, "I'd google it" immediately gets you downranked by association with people who don't know their shit.
He is a guy who has written some great code (Mongrel) that is valued for being clean, correct and fast.
Smartphone, the Eater-of-Gadgets
The one at the back of Superfreakonomics is weird. I thought that suddenly I was reading a different book. It honestly doesn't feel like the same authors.

Could it be a kind of ad? Can you approach a powerful publisher and buy yourself a chapter in a book that is likely to be a best seller?
There is no other language for crafting large-scale, high performance tools is demonstrably false. There are high-volume low latency world-class financial systems written totally in Java.

The seriously complex and high-performance ITA system is written in Lisp.

And if you read Coders at Work, some of the criticisms of C++ suggest that the reason behind many of the C++ features is that Bjarne didn't want to say NO.

And I am happy to leave that particular niche of badness to C++ its own self.
Mba for it Professionals
MBA for professionals include a lot of varied subjects in online professional courses like Finance and Accounting, Human Resources, Information Technology, Marketing etc. MBA for professionals follows a different kind of format
So does C++ have any price to pay for say vtables?
Now that is a worthy goal to set for a budding entrepreneur: becoming a future philanthropist.
I wonder if there's a name for this phenomenon. You can often guess at some things' decade of origin from the suffix. "o-tron" "o-matic" for instance were 40ies and 50ies.
Five steps to finding a business angel
I think Google recruiters trawl places frequented by programmers and invite them in. A few years ago, when I was more involved in free software, I got an email out of the blue asking me to submit a resume. I was certainly not as visible in the communities I frequented as this guy appears to be in his.
Just return it and wait for the inevitable iPhone 4s with insulative coating.
Interesting.

Search engine providers who are also advertisers have a agent problem -- there is moral hazard. Anybody who has money betting on where an item shows up in a result list should not also be able to create the list. This is like going to the Ford car dealership and asking for an analysis of all the types of cars to buy. Even if the Ford guys give you an independently-created report recognized as the world's best authority on car purchases, it doesn't feel right. In ethics, if it looks wrong, it is wrong.

Having said that, regulating anything that returns a list is idiotic. Even regulating Google because of it's gatekeeper status doesn't work -- these things always sound good for the edge cases, but once you let the camel's nose in under the tent, the rest of the camel is soon to follow

I think what's called for here is an industry-sponsored certification program. Use outside auditors, establish quality metrics, create a set of public ethical guidelines. You can always have trusted outsiders check your work against those guidelines, even in IP-rich, and trade secret areas. Companies do this all the time.

Google's (and Microsoft before it) main problem is that it is successful. Lots of political-type folks see that success and imagine all sorts of ways that the government can/should get in there and muck around. In this case I'm on Google's side.

But as far as thinking Google is somehow magic, that SEO is evil, that "writing good content" is all you need for rankings? All of that is bullshit put out by Google to make themselves more of an authority than they actually are. They run a program to put things in an ordered list. People are going to hack the program. Neither of these two things are good, bad, or especially interesting. The interesting thing here, to me, is the degree of Google fanboy-ism that some folks have. Wish I could bottle that up.

Google is just an advertising agency who had some cool ideas on ranking a decade or more ago. They are not a bunch of knights riding in on white horses. Oddly enough, their success is the very thing that's hurting them.
Wrong. Please read my original answer again carefully. You are falling in exactly the myth I'm trying to debunk.
Master's of Wine certainly can. Quality is part of the test, as is the ability to tell variety and region.
From http://www.mastersofwine.org/en/examination/index.cfm
Practical - three twelve-wine blind tastings, each lasting two and a quarter hours, in which wines must be assessed for variety, origin, winemaking, quality and style.
The beauty of sorting
Stupid me, should have looked at the actual tweets. I used twitterfeed to push the RSS into Twitter.
I have a lot of respect for Walter Bright as a programmer and language designer, but I am more likely to try Go.
This is a faster version of a 30 minute video entitled "Sorting out Sorting," produced by the University of Toronto.

Here's the 30 minute version of the video
http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=3970523862559774879#
Dude, unsuccessful writers think people want "good writing" - they don't. They want to be entertained, inspired, informed, distracted, improved, whatever - you don't need a mastery of language to do that. In fact, if you let your mastery of language get in the way of entertaining, inspiring, informing, and otherwise serving people's needs, then that's quite silly.

> But it's the sort of silliness that might evince a response that is not, you know, good.

Start by cutting out words most people don't know. I read between 3 and 10 books per week (closer to 10 lately) and I don't know what "evince" means. Start spending less time looking smart and more time serving people and you'll go much, much further in life.

Ignore this advice if you're secretly a best-selling multi-millionaire author who has inspired a lot of people who don't normally read to pick up a book instead of watch TV. In which case, carry on using the big words to bash other best-selling multi-millionaire authors who are inspiring a lot of people to read who normally don't, and entertaining them for doing so.
If you look at the data you'll notice it's very noisy. And I bet the noise is entirely (or mostly) made up of race.

Note that one of the things they did not control for was race.

It's racist to say this, I know, and more importantly it's not nice. But if you are going to make a study, you have to deal with reality.

Control for race, and then check the correlation with parasites.
Yes, but this really depends on the person.

I used to rent out a single family house, with thoughts to expand to multifamily. Along the way I realized that I couldn't find any good software to manage small rental properties and that there was a good sized market for it (bounced the idea off other people I knew doing the same thing).

It's not a technically difficult application and there was definitely money in it, but as much as I tried to focus, my heart simply wasn't in something so boring and I eventually gave up.

Some of us do need to feel passion, or at least strong interest, to build a business around a concept.
Why don't companies just hire people after a quick discussion at 50% salary for the maximum of four months and see how they do.

If, after four months, the people turn out to be "smart and get things done" and the company wants to keep them, they'd get the missing 50% from the first four months as a one-time bonus and 100% salary afterwards.

It costs something but it also costs a lot of time and money for both parties to engage into this mutual guesswork game called job interviewing. It might even cost everyone less as I bet many candidatepeople would have to be fired after only a few weeks or days.
I also found http://www.root-dnssec.org/
And that's EXACTLY the point!

Your competitors are working the google game. If google was open with how they rank sites it would get much much worse.
I've seen you talk about this on the Io list for a while now, but you never seemed to have posted a link to it. Glad I can finally take a look at it :)
Apologies for being ambiguous, I'm talking about a product that's not a web app. How do you market software to people without a twitter/facebook account? It seems the focus on everything launched here is web, and web-based. How do you market technology for normal people?
I think the danger with getting sued is even one single successful claim will cost the company in millions, not to mention the publicity.
Javascript... Yes, even V8.

Side rant: it's part of the reason that my Palm Pre will sometimes just hang for a second at the worst times, such as when I go to answer the phone. :(
I don't get it. People keep talking about the grip of death, etc. If you have an iPhone 4, hook up a length of wire between the two antennas and tell us if the bars drop immediately. As a bonus, go get a voltmeter or a scope and tell us exactly what's going on.

Yes, human body can conduct electricity, but your conductivity will depend on amongst other factors, your gender, age, body fat percentage, hydration level, etc. A piece of copper wire is not going to have these problems. So show us once and for all what's going on.
I've been interviewing people for 15+ years and I've only had one person ask that question and he was by far the worst candidate I've every interviewed for a developer job.
well i was talking about the jvm and the web container like tomcat im going to use pure java and servlets no ruby or scalla things ..