skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I've read a very good book on the subject, Pink Brain Blue Brain, in which the author writes about what are the really physical differences between genders and which are social differences (basically nature vs. nurture). A good read for anyone trying to understand where science stands as of today on the gender gap questions.

The main theme of the book is, there are differences, but not as dramatic between genders as between two individuals; and much of the differences may be alleviated by paying attention to stereotypes when raising or educating children.
This is very cool stuff.
Facebook and farmville are the ghettos of the social media world

They are more like the soap operas of the social media world. In the 70s, 80s, and 90s the decision maker in the household would have nothing to do at 2PM in the afternoon. Companies like P&G and Johnson & Johnson sponsored soap operas to blast advertising about household products at the key decision makers. Hence the term "soap" opera.

In the early 2000s we saw the rise of mommy bloggers. P&G, J&J started advertising on blogs. Suddenly, the key decision makers became sneezers, too. They were purchasing product but they were also writing and evangelizing products, too.

The last few years we have seen Farmville and other social games. Here's the result of a quick Google search for P&G and Facebook.
http://www.insidefacebook.com/2010/01/23/facebook-roundup-pa...
Farmville becomes another channel for these brand to get their product in front of consumers.

Social games should be called soap games.
or How we gamed Google to lay the foundation for our success

Would they have had the opportunity to lose $4M if they hadn't gamed Google?
Touche' I probably need to think through that line a little better.
Keep in mind that the contractor/employee dilemma exists whether your worker is offshore or local. It may actually be better if the employee/contractor is offshore (from a US perspective), because you would not be liable for most of the taxes/deductions required of an American employee.
One question I ask myself now before commenting is: Will this comment significantly improve this conversation?

I try not to comment if the comment is merely:

1. clever and amusing
2. expressing anger/disagreement
3. disproving a wrong but unimportant claim made by another commenter.

Besides these, submitting, upvoting, downvoting, not voting and flagging are enough to make HN more interesting for myself.
TL;DR. Sorry, I'm not going to read a 500 page dissertation on the philosophical points of Anarcho-communism, and all the various forms of Anarchism. If you want to bring me around to thinking Anarchy would be anything other than Mad Max you'll probably need to give me a bulleted list of reasons why.

I guess what I'm asking for is some evidence, not philosophical links from a huge, wordy FAQ.
This is extremely relevant. I suspect those of us who are saying "this advice is non-portable" have in our heads the scenario of an unfocused company, taking needed resources away from their main product to put into the development of their "byproducts."

Making the correct judgement of when the "byproduct" is sellable is key. The problem is that many companies do not make this judgement correctly. They insist, rather, on "maximizing" everything that is done, to the detriment of their main thing.

37signals themselves have posted about this in the past, sort of: "work on your best idea." If 37signals had been running workshops instead of working on Rails or Basecamp, resulting in fewer people in the Rails community or using Basecamp, then Fried's idea would be bad. They didn't do that -- but from what I'm hearing, many of us have (and are) working for companies that do behave this way, and so Fried's advice sounds bad. It isn't -- it's just missing a crucial component about judgement.
I thought there was already a dictator like that, named Steve Jobs. ;)
The title should say: "Reminder: Kindly (re)read and follow the HN guidelines." Describing one's own reminder as "kind" is presumptuous.
I had not heard of Khan Academy before today. I'm impressed by the breadth of his knowledge. He's a math expert so I understand that, but being able to lecture on a high school level on all the other topics on the site is pretty amazing.

I checked out one of the videos on the Napoleonic wars. It's a subject I have interest in and have read about, but there's no way I could give a lecture on it. Khan gave a very nicely prepared lecture with plenty of details.
I'm a bit surprised that you published this to your bingo blog and not Kalzumeus.com. Aren't you worried about your stereotypical user clicking it by accident?
I guess I should probably assume that the answer is no, but does this work with Internet Explorer 7?

Either it doesn't, or I can't figure out how to proceed.
I think that the user expectation when clicking Like next to an antelope chair is to register approval of an antelope chair, not to sign up for the I-can't-believe-its-not-mailing list about antelope chairs. Your savvier users probably understand that Liking is semi-public rather than anonymous, like HN upvotes are. (Your savvier users clearly do not include some of my younger cousins, grumble grumble.)

Compare Antelope Furniture's desire to deliver news about its new sales to their legal requirements for handling things like email. Someone has typed in their email address (which is only used for receiving communication): can you assume they want to hear about your sales? No. Someone clicks a thumbs up. Can you assume they want to hear about your sales? ... Really?

I mean, pretend for a second that HN makes its upvote buttons into functionally equivalent copies of Facebook like tomorrow morning. Do you think the #1 thread in the morning will be titled "Wow, cool"? (Particularly after somebody with multiple kilokarma gets the bright idea to hit the broadcast button?)
In your case it might be less useful, though you are making a lot of extra actions (?). Sure, you might achieve the same doing it your way, but people tend to reduce the number of (redundant) steps.

Two big pro's for prldr for me are:

(1) As titles of posts do not always explain the content in a good way I do not know if I will read it, using preloaded rss (prldr) I can quickly open all items consecutively without moving my mouse, just pressing "j".

(2) When I find something interesting, or at least think it is, I can scroll in my item and still use "j" or "k" to jump to the next item when I decide the article is not what I expected / want at the moment.

Summarizing, prldr might not be the thing for you as it is now, but I think a lot of people are not using their (google) RSS Reader(s) in such an advanced way as you are.
For anyone using Rails 3 with haml, upgrade haml to 3.0.18...

bundle update haml

I lost a few hours looking for the issue where form_for was silently failing.

Great support though. Here is a discussion of the issue and resolution.

https://rails.lighthouseapp.com/projects/8994/tickets/5493
*Half a bank ;)
Hacker News is starting to feel like programming.reddit.com a year ago. Now, Reddit is getting more and more like Digg a year before that. Digg certainly looks like Youtube comments one year before. Now, Youtube, that surely is now just like Myspace some time before. And Myspace now is somewhere close to what the AOL forums used to be. But AOL - don't look at the AOL forums! they now look as bad as Usenet did when everyone joined there, before they were Google groups, before they were called DejaVu, when all the newbies had just spoiled all the good old newsgroups.

We should all return to Usenet. There's nobody there, and we could build a cozy place with no trolls and newbies, and share really interesting stuff and discuss it intelligently.

But I'm sure the dumbfucks will follow us around, from here to the end of time.
What do you need the URL shortener for?

Actually I don't use them here; never have. I just noticed a post having been killed, and saw a followup from HN staff explaining that using a URL shortener will cause a post to be autokilled.

I don't care about URL shorteners. I am concerned about what the rules are, and particularly the rules that are not explictly stated in the HN Guidelines.
The only way in is via direct link to that URL. I put it there because I happened to have Rails code written to do most of the work here (back from when I implemented Like buttons for the site, prior to understanding what they actually do), and because I'm positive Nginx can take the load (it is 100% static content after the first access) but less than sanguine about my Apache setup.
I think what this really says is that Dell is happy to release average, "me too" type products that really add no value to the market segment.

I dont see that the major PC vendors carry alot of weight in this segment anyway, so why the mediocre device? Seems to me that Dell has been caught completely off guard by mobile devices and still really doesnt have an answer.
Seing that there's this "Mark as Spam" functionality, I would guess that Facebook would quickly revoke the spammers ability to add like buttons to their page once enough people clicked that spam button (or even make any further business with Facebook)

IMHO, not that big a deal. Then again, I don't use Facebook, so I can't really know.
I won't argue that the guy is a very talented and eloquent speaker. My point is different: he may be very erudite, but the depth of his knowledge in any of the subjects he's teaching (except maybe some subjects in EE and finance) is not going to compare with that of professors in the respective fields. Certainly, the fact that he's addressing these subjects at high-school level, does a lot to level the field for him.

By the way, I'm not sure how listing his credentials is supportive of your claim that "his ability to teach far outperforms the majority of university professors."

Finally, it's not the anonymous 'majority of university professors' that I'm comparing him to, but the top people in their fields at the top American universities. Those people must excel both in research and teaching, otherwise they simply don't make it there.
Beware of Parkinsons Law: "Work expands so as to fill the time available for its completion."
Understanding JavaScript’s this keyword
I don't like what Dell is doing but they are damaging their own brand more than they are damaging Android.

I'm not sure that's the case.

I'm not sure it's not, either...

How much users think of their Dell Android-running phone as "my Android phone" versus "my Dell phone" versus just "my phone" isn't really clear.
As long as someone has opened up a guideline discussion....

"Resist complaining about being downmodded. It never does any good, and it makes boring reading."

Agreed in full.

However, downmodding without constructive criticism leaves the downmodded with no sense of what to improve in the next comment. A downmod could easily be due to underdeveloped point, style, or disagreement about an opinion. At least 2 of the 3 reasons can lead to better future comments.
Yes, but I don't see this as being helpful. Be honest. Did you reread the guidelines? And more importantly, do you think the people that didn't read the guidelines the first time around will reread it because of a thread like this?

All in all, I think this is less about helping newbies integrate into the site and more about giving "old-timers" a chance to vent.
My Reflections on Node.js Knockout Competition
Hiring two SEO companies is a terrible idea. You know they'll compete, and the one that uses the most aggressive (i.e. black-hat) techniques will probably win.

I generally turn down SEO projects when there's another firm involved.
Couple of interesting points I'd noticed (reading the colophon page):
* Using Geo location to map a conference in a location tree, so you can (presumably) drill up and down the tree to find the right 'level'
* Node.js - sound like a real time twitter stream for each conference
* Solr for faceted search. Sound like an improvement over upcoming.org in helping find interesting events

That's a neat collection of tools.
Among guys, the fighting is often playful and we can actually build a relationship during competition. I thought that among women, fighting is almost always destructive to a relationship. Guess I'll have to rethink that.
To the best of my knowledge, teaching professors take course evaluations very seriously. If grants and papers is all you care about, then you take a different track (scientist vs professor).
I wonder if they could have had $1M in business without getting greedy (or any SEO whatsoever).
That's the point, why work with alternatives if you can bear all your stack with great dynamic and fast frameworks. Endorsing pycurracy is the worst part of your argument, this framework is terrible, its codebase is far away from mature, its TOTALY regex based what makes the testing experience painful.

I love python for many reasons, but I ain't convinced yet for web and tests
400% Conversion Rate Improvement in 3 Days by removing 1 image
Google is expecting YouTube to become profitable in 2010.
Where States Get Their Money - Interactive Map
I think that reminding people to read the guidelines does not necessarily mean that HN is becoming bad.

I incur sometimes in posts that do not follow the guidelines and get a lot of downvotes. Half the time they are from new users that maybe do not even know about those guidelines, so maybe they do not even understand why they are getting downvoted. Of course they can learn it the hard way, but reading the guidelines is a lot faster and wastes less of everybody's time.

In the same way there are some posts that are not appropriate to this community. In the last days I did not find many interesting posts in the first page, but that's just my opinion and the community as a whole decides what goes up or not. Nonetheless some days ago I even found a link to thisisphotobomb.com (a websites of the cheesburger network, like the lolcats) and this is clearly against the guidelines. Again, there are the voting system and the flagging system, but it wastes less of everybody's time just to know the guidelines and it's better not to pollute the new posts section.

In each of these cases I think "you should read the guidelines", but don't write it because it's against them. But the fact that lately I've been thinking it more often, means that a kind reminder is not totally out of place.

Does this all mean that HN is becoming bad? I don't think so. It just means that we have guidelines we care about because they made HN a place we all like.
Implement and succeed are very different things.
Wow... I wonder how far we are from having a marketplace for widely Liked sites to sell their ability to post to their audience. (Unsavory startup idea!)
Pioneers frequently run into a barrage of criticism yet without pioneers prepared to face the "slings and arrows of outrageous fortune" (Thank you Will Shakespeare), progress of all kinds would be stunted if not non-existent. Even Galileo faced challenges in showing his ideas.

So while we may agree that we would perhaps not recommend this link to someone specifically interested in our resume, we would be very happy to recommend the link to anyone curious about this new fangled technology called HTML5.

Congratulations Mark on taking this option for a spin: From this foundation, no doubt, much improvement can be developed as and whenever the urge takes you.
Home: WorldStill
The Clockwork Man - Steampunk goes casual
How do you recommend selecting keywords? There can be an order of magnitude difference in ROI between a high-competition, low-conversion keyword and one with the opposite characteristics. And should the average developer really rediscover the best-converting way to ask for a link?

Your presentation has lots of solid on-site SEO stuff, which is great. But if you're going to do an active SEO campaign--i.e. you're trying to get the maximum amount of high-converting traffic--it's not enough to have a site that's fully indexable. That's one coefficient, so you ought to maximize it, but it's not the only one.
Why does this article say it was published on sept 1st 2010?
Intel buys Infineon’s communications for $1.4B
I've heard essentially that same story from lots of people my whole life. My grandparents even tried it with my father. It never works.
Female Entrepreneur in need of Mr. Right - that is a technical co-founder
I checked out Divvy at one point. I recall not needing the extra power so I stuck with SizeUp.
There are several options for reading the top articles (Hacker Newsletter and Hacker Monthly come to mind)

But there isn't a nice way to see the top comments only. I like the Slashdot approach of highlighting the comments that reach a certain threshold, and hiding the others. (I hope that's not heresy :) ).

OTOH I like lots of stuff about HN more (being able to upvote from the very beginning, no comment threshold, etc).
There are years between XP, Vista and 7. Between XP and Vista, almost a decade if you really want to exaggerate. It gives plenty of time for the versions and their peculiarities to absorb into people's minds. Android is different. Google makes releases fast and there's hardly an era between them.

Most people probably don't know there are Android versions, the rest will assume there's Android 1.x and Android 2.x, and a mere minority will know that the 2.1→2.2 is greater than 2.0→2.1 partly because in 2.2 Dalvik has a JIT compiler.
Differentiation through user experience is becoming more and more important to success in the computer hardware business.

Ten years ago, a computer was a computer. For mainstream buyers there was this thing called a Mac but only your brother's kid, who wanted to be a designer, used one and it seemed kind of expensive.

Today, the tide is shifting and people expect more and more out of their bit crunchers, whether they're in your pocket or on your desktop. Smartphones, of course, are extra competitive because a lot of manufacturers are duking it out to be the best. Between Apple, HTC and Motorola especially, the bar gets set higher and higher each quarter. Who can jam in the most useful hardware widgets? Who can accomplish the tightest software/hardware integrations so features feel great to use? Whoever it is, they gain a bit more mindshare, a few more sales, a few more solid reviews.

And here comes bumbling ol' Dell, treating the smartphone like it's a commodified piece of tech and all they have to do is build it cheap and somewhat good enough.

Regardless of whether we're in the mainstream or not, the mainstream isn't stupid. $99 buys you a lot of (subsidized) phone these days -- whether it's an iPhone 3GS or one of the many solid, 2.x Android phones. Either option is just obviously, demonstrably better than Dell's little turd RIGHT THERE IN THE CELL PHONE STORE.

Dell took their eye off the ball and they think they can apply the lessons of commodity PCs to smartphones. Just like they did with MP3 players, they will find they're well out of their depth.

I think in the end this won't affect Android fragmentation by much for the simple reason that they're not going to sell many of them.
I'm thinking about how this would change my niece's learning path.

Obviously it would omit things like argv, files, the os module. I've seen working with IO to be extremely valuable. She was able to quickly write fill in the blank form letters and simple interactive scripts. But there is plenty one can do with just print and loops.

Unfortunately I see that raw_input(), dir(), and __builtin__ all raise problems. My niece was extremely excited to find out about all the 'hidden' objects that she could play with.
That might be the expectation of certain "Like" buttons floating around the web, however Like buttons (aka "Become a Fan") within the Facebook context have always allowed that Page or Open Graph Object owner to publish messages into your main news feed. Why would you want to create two different user experiences tied with one common button?
Still better than reddit.com/r/programming
The answer probably depends on how much money you are trying to raise and from what type of investors.

If you need thousands to tens of thousands of dollars and have a rich uncle then the answer is probably yes.

If you need hundreds of thousands to millions of dollars and you want to raise from professional startup investors then the answer is probably no (Chris Sacca from Lowercase Capital says something like, "I invest in URLs not business plans").

There are exceptions of course.
Twitter announces Site Streams beta
Can you talk more about your days teaching. This is something I would love to do but I know my Alma Mater would never let me do anything without a PhD. Where did you teach? What expectations were there for hours? What qualifications were they looking for?
Nearby Friends: New Cyber-Stalking App for Tracking Facebook Places Check-Ins
I think its getting pretty close to time for a revert back to Digg v3. Look at google trends for Reddit vs. Digg. When something's a failure, its a failure.
Your "takeover" scenario isn't true and cannot happen simply by having a URL change ownership. You need access to both the domain AND the Facebook user account or application to which the open graph objects (websites) are tied to.

Also, if you can get access to a Facebook user account or application, you don't even need the domain name.
I have degrees from MIT and UC Berkeley. I can attest from experience that at such institutions, while there are indeed some professors who excel in both research and teaching, the vast majority are there because of the quality of their research with teaching a secondary concern.

Also, I think having a huge depth of knowledge is really not that important when teaching introductory topics (as long as you don't get anything wrong!). Having tutored students for many years, I'm quite certain that the biggest impediment to learning such topics is motivation, which is addressed more by a teacher's enthusiasm and speaking ability than the depth of their knowledge.
The problem is that not everything can be fit into one page. We're talking near-total changes to the very most fundamental ways that we've built society, and so a bullet list should not be able to convince you.

As for evidence, maybe look at existing communities? http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_anarchist_communities

The Spanish Revolution is probably the most popular one cited.
"If this theory turns out to be correct the entrepreneurs who raised enough money in 2010 to weather a storm will be best placed to survive the second dip. Additionally, those who run lean operations and raised money from supportive investor bases will be best positioned."

Let's say you're a very early stage startup with no raised capital. Let's say you have two equally plausible options today of raising a convertible note with a cap of either $500k or $1M.

What would you choose?
Because while yes, you still need to practice a skill if you're incredibly athletic and want to be a professional, you cannot be a professional if you practice a lot but aren't athletic.
Given that widely linked sites are frequently bought after being abandoned and used by spammers (for link equity and direct traffic), I don't think that is far fetched at all.

A startup can reasonably achieve a metric truckload of likes (to the startup, to content, whichever), fail to achieve revenue, and fold in an N month period. The assets of a failed startup are worth close to nothing, and can probably be acquired for close to it. (Who at a shuttered company is in charge of re-registering the domain name, after all?)

All you have to do is one blaze-of-glory phishing scam, or something like "Save Twitrliciously! Donate $5 to help keep us open!", etc. (Not a unique risk, given that you could do that with just the web page, but it gets you instant distribution to a highly targeted audience and that is 90% of the battle.)

Facebook getting the memo and shutting down the site N hours later does not necessarily help all that much.
Wanted: R analysis of New Scientist magazine covers
Spoiler alert: When you tear down the projects and move everyone into the suburbs, the gangs go with them.