skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
If they really are as intelligent as you/they think then try pointing out to them their close mindedness [1]. I used to be firmly on the American right wing (i.e. didn't think other ideologies had much merit, if any) until I came to Europe and realized my views simply could not be reconciled with countries like e.g. Sweden doing just fine.

You can't discount something that works. As a programmer, I know that "works" doesn't mean that something is the best way or is even good at all, but it at least can't be discounted out of hand.

I wish there were a way to e.g. make pg's "how to disagree" required reading for anyone wishing to participate in political discussions (and vote for that matter).

[1] "Close minded" is often used as a kind of weapon by people unable to argue their point, but I use it to mean "unwilling to reconsider their position even when it's demonstrated to be untrue or at least incomplete".
I really wanted to click on it, which was very frustrating.

Usually when there's a new logo you can click on it and instantly find out why it's there.
When we were creating http://markiter.com

We did a blog post referencing a study:

http://blog.markiter.com/#turk

http://behind-the-enemy-lines.blogspot.com/2008/03/mechanica...

Which has been updated recently. Some high quality data presented in a clear way.

http://behind-the-enemy-lines.blogspot.com/2010/03/new-demog...
Their robots.txt allows all bots access to all pages and the ToS says that users retain "full ownership of any and all of his or her User Content and any intellectual property rights or other proprietary rights associated with said User Content." Doesn't that mean that you can scrape the content for the user?
Get ready for the 10th fall of Scobleizer
I noticed he uses the env trick for his shebang for ruby. I was first acquainted with this for Perl, and I've since more or less stopped using it since it caused about as many problems for me as it solved (funny thing, systems with the perl binary in a silly place sometimes have env in the 'wrong' place too :/). I'm kind of surprised that it made the jump to Ruby, since to my knowledge it came into use after the Ruby community had already finished borrowing from Perl that which it was going to borrow.
Strange? Sure. Useful? Probably.. But I really like the novelty of looking at AMT as a group real people and not just commoditized, bite-sized, labor. Opens my mind up to problems that might be solved with AMT.
Yes it's better than pagination, IMO.
My first thought was 'Find a way to create some matter and we'll measure it', but apparently they have a way. ;)
Researchers discover oxidation-resistant bacterium's defense mechanism
I'd caution making your survey "Hey would you use Web app A?" The Mechanical Turk users want to blaze through the survey as fast as possible and get paid. Clicking "Yes" gets them through the fastest and also lets them please the surveyor (the same bias as your friends or family).

Force them to make a choice. Present Web app A (real), Web app B (dummy), and Web app C (dummy). Make them rank which web app is best.

Set up the survey three ways: A, B, C. B, C, A. and C, B, A. Have a third of the sample take each survey. You would be surprised at the first choice bias with Mechanical Turk. Actually you wouldn't be surprised when you remember that these people just want to get the thing done.

Finally a good secondary survey is to make them rank order features for their worth. This helps find your MVP. (Read more about "conjoint analysis" if this interests you.)
>in fact the Sense UI seems more sluggish

>The battery life (which used to be great, much better than a buddy's Evo) is terrible as a result. Google really needs to reign it in.

I've actually had the exact opposite experience, it's super snappy now and the battery seems to last a full 40-50% longer. I've noticed in some forums that people seem to be having either your experience or mine. Strange that would happen on a fixed target, unless there's some differences in the guts of different revs of the Incredibles.
When we created http://markiter.com we decided to present users with two options instead of just asking vague questions.

You could compare a few pictures, videos, landing pages, etc. And get some a vote with a comment on which is better.

Forced more legwork on the user to actually create multiple options.
Why is it the author's duty to tangent that far? I'm not a fan of outsourcing myself, however even I can't deny there are both Pros and Cons that are evaluated on a case-by-case basis.

It sounds like you're wanting to the article to stray from the original content and either enter into an anti-outsource rant or ignore an elephant that everyone knows is in the room.
Buffalo buffalo Buffalo buffalo buffalo buffalo Buffalo buffalo. :-)

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Buffalo_buffalo_Buffalo_buffalo...
what is the moral legitimacy of government, if it is encouraged to to make its highly paid taxpaying citizens lose their jobs?
I think Amazon Turk could be better used for beta testing and early testing of word-of-mouth. First, ask some people to register on your site and then track what they do. Then, have them fill out a feedback form and tell you what they would have you improve. One iteration would cost you around $20. And if you do it once every 2 weeks or so, you can keep in touch with what your users actually want.
Not to nitpick but your about page shows that universitytutor.com was started in 2004 but your post shows that you started the site in 2008? Also the dashboard shows decreasing timeline which means you are either losing customers and below the 200 (can't guess the scale) subscribers or there is a simple error somewhere...

What are we missing ?
This is almost certainly written in literary classical Chinese (even if written recently). Basically, in Chinese, words that were once pronounced differently merged in pronunciation in modern Mandarin, though since the writing system is quite divorced from sound, the written forms never changed (at least, not until Simplified Chinese under Mao).

What that means is that a lot of classical Chinese literature has a bit of this problem, in that if you read it aloud, it is tricky to fully comprehend. (This poem/story takes it to an extreme, obviously.) For a long time, up through the early 20th century, it was fairly common for written things to be written in this literary Chinese even if the writer would say their ideas completely differently. A "write as you speak" movement has largely changed that: in modern written Mandarin, many words are two or three syllables long, and written with two or three characters. Etymologically, the words may have derived from compounding monosyllabic words, but in the modern spoken (and now also written) language, the sub-word syllables are simply no longer words in any meaningful sense.

(An analogy on a much smaller scale in English: many dialects of English merge /ɪ/ and /ɛ/ before a nasal sound, so that "pin" and "pen" sound identical. Speakers of those dialects will often say "straight pin" or "ink pen" (or "pig pen" or "cow pen") to distinguish which kind of pin/pen they mean; they may or may not make the distinction in writing. So the writing is unambiguous, the speaking is unambiguous, but reading a written thing is ambiguous. When it's just one or two words it's no big deal, but imagine that nearly every word suffered from that problem....)

EDIT: It turns out there's a Wikipedia page on the poem (naturally, should've checked that first). A lot of this is covered there: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lion-Eating_Poet_in_the_Stone_D...
I have to agree, zsh is a great shell. My only gripe with it is that compiling it on OS X is a pain in the arse because it depends on a weird documentation language called "yodl" which I haven't so far managed to install. It has some weird custom build system that doesn't seem to work.

It's a shame since I'd like the up-to-date git completions, but because I can't compile zsh I'm stuck with release versions :(
FreeScrub: open source photo metadata remover
A recording a friend of mine made: http://kassens.net/shi-shi-shi-shi-shi.mov
75,233,046 links to geocities sites to rank 42nd in the world. You would think Yahoo could do something better with (eg http://www.geocities.com/monkiineko/index.html) for all that incoming traffic.
1938 in 2010
Actually, it didn't expire, it finished with 104 of 200 answers picking "B - Paypal" http://pickfu.com/00PULC

Also, just to clarify, it's $17 for 200 responses.

Thanks for trying out PickFu!
Things you might not know about NYC
I think their site list is not varried enough. The fact that they're hitting sites with reddit, w3c validator and wordpress.org tells me they just built the list from their own browser history, or got tripped up about heavily SEO'ed sites in google results (those tend to be more 'social' as well.)
'Magic mushrooms' ingredient beneficial to cancer patients, report says
Project Management Life
turn your life into projects
http://www.mdbg.net/chindict/rsc/audio/voice_pinyin_cl/shi1.... (shī)

http://www.mdbg.net/chindict/rsc/audio/voice_pinyin_cl/shi2.... (shí)

http://www.mdbg.net/chindict/rsc/audio/voice_pinyin_cl/shi3.... (shǐ)

http://www.mdbg.net/chindict/rsc/audio/voice_pinyin_cl/shi4.... (shì)

For the falling-then-raising (shǐ) changing the "shi3" to "chi3" in the URL gives a better idea, I think, for what the inflection sounds like.
Anything by Vonnegut, Palaniuk, Douglas Coupland, or Neil Gaiman.
Evidence of the Pivot, by Fred Wilson of Union Square Ventures
> On the iPhone everything is near instant

Tell that to my 3G with iOS4. It'd be more appropriate to say "nothing is near instant."
what is that, two days in a row you have posted the same completely non-hn topic related personal blog entry?
Samsung unveils Orion, a dual-core chip for killer tablets and smartphones
A summary of a post that is already short and already a list is not needed.

edit: nevermind
Interesting concept.

But this makes me wonder:
http://toksvaerd.net/ is number 7 on the list for Denmark. It's apparently a site for parents of school children in a small town. The site has had about 300 visits in 2010 according to their counter http://www.counter.gd/Homepage-193570.html Are there really only 6 sites with more backlinks in Denmark? http://www.seoprofiler.com/statistics/top-backlinks/denmark
$2k is plenty for a thrifty, healthy single, but what about kids or health insurance or retirement money? I guess ideally $2k is just a starting point.
The muddled presentation is due a combination of factors.

One is that the scientists tend not to counter the pseudo-scientific idiocy that's rampant -- even though it's mind-numbingly obvious to anyone who isn't a complete idiot that it's pure BS with Star Trek style technobabble strewn throughout, the technobabble without any real science to counter it convinces the unwashed masses. The scientists would be doing themselves a huge favor if they spoke out more.

Which leads to point 2, which is that exactly the same organizations that fund a lot of that science are also going out of their way to muddle the message and stifle the scientists. NOAA has actually been intentionally altering the messages that the scientists have been releasing, and also preventing the scientists from speaking with anyone directly.

Combine that with the press and the government intentionally working to hide the message, and it's no surprise that most of what you end up seeing is pseudo-science rather than real science. It's not much different from the government's claims that the Gulf oil spill is 75% cleaned up...

http://www.amazon.com/Storm-World-Hurricanes-Politics-Warmin...
I agree with what you said, I just think it can't be allowed to continue. It causes more and more damage all the time.

Maybe someone could make a TV show where you have guests and talk politics, but if one of the participants commits a logical fallacy (e.g. you're "but they're just as bad!" example) they have their mic turned off for 2 minutes, get kicked off the show or something. There must be some way to begin associating arguing from emotion with being "uncool".
Have you checked out homebrew? Similar to macports/fink except much, much better, available here: http://github.com/mxcl/homebrew

In particular, their recipe for zsh compilation might help you even if you don't want to install brew itself: http://github.com/mxcl/homebrew/blob/master/Library/Formula/...
Most VCs are richer than most CEOs, especially when you consider most CEOs are in their first startup and haven't made it yet.
NoSQL Storage Systems Never Violate ACID. Never? Well, Hardly Ever
Struggles and changes at Google's DotOrg
What are you talking about? I get the same choppiness on my iPhone 3G (with 3.1.2 and even worse on 4.0) that you get everywhere else. The iPhone is not free from choppiness unless your using the iPhone 4 only. Even 3GS users have choppiness problems on 4.0
I use it in conjunction with my e-reader (Sony) and Calibre. I have a bookmarklet I use to send long-ish articles to Instapaper, then I read them on the reader.

To be honest though, it's basically just an excuse to use the e-reader.
IPod + iTunes Timeline
I'm glad danah took the time to write this; it's a compelling point particularly given her strong background in social factors and gender on the internet.

But I really wish she hadn't re-purposed the term ISP to refer to Craigslist.
> which was honest advice

Not really.

Gates already had a "Microsoft tax" in place for generic x86 computers, so, any sale of an x86 box running a generic Apple OS would also imply in a sale of an OEM license of DOS. At that time, Gates was developing Windows (perhaps doubting they could pull it off, thus, misleading Apple into spending money on something they regarded as very difficult or impossible) to compete with Apple's proprietary hardware/software stack.

Without hardware differentiation, Apple would quickly fail.

So, no, I don't think that was honest advice and, much to his credit, neither did Jobs.
That's a fair goal, but I think the strict adherence to only certain conversation topics wont come off as mysterious. I think it will come off as creepy or boring. For me, being mysterious is being involved in any conversation in a way that everyone enjoys and only later realize that you didn't reveal anything about yourself in it.
You don't have to make your code pretty to be a successful company, think about Microsoft and other huge code factories for instance.
Is say aglay din - Javed Chaudhry
For me the really compelling reason to use zsh is that it's "like bash, but without the gotchas." For example, $* just works, even if the args have spaces. You don't have to think about "$@" which still doesn't work sometimes.
Same problem here. Safari for iPhone.
The financial anatomy of VC firms came as a surprise. It wasn't till I read "mastering the vc game"# that I understood how fucked things are.

The strucure breeds mediocrity and the culture that founders hate.

Unfortunately, the people that need convincing are investors in VC firms. Bad returns are the only thing that will convince them. Many regard the category of VC as doomed to significantly shrink; this small chunk of finance in general can't support itself. There are more VC firms than successful exits.

# horrible name, good book
I really don't move my tongue when I say these in a row. Is this because I'm speaking with a Beijing accent? Apparently what's coming out for me is: ʂ̺ɻ̩. Or should that combination also force me to move my tongue?

When I lay off the accent and move the i to the front of my mouth a bit, I do seem to move my tongue a little. I'm not sure I'm doing it right though, the i's in non-Beijing Mandarin are actually always a bit stressful for me, but I'm pretty sure I'm pronouncing my "shi" correctly for Beijing.
Schmidt: Tablets Will Run Chrome OS, Not Android
I'm surprised that USA newspapers mostly support Keynsian theory. That's maybe 10th article I've read that agitates to increase spendings.

Is it universaly believed in America that the only way out of recession is by going deeper into debt? Examples from Europe (German, Greece) and China seems (IMO) to contradict that there are similarities between Great Crisis of '20 and this?
I'm very happy with the MacPorts package myself:

pilif@celes ~ % which zsh
/opt/local/bin/zsh
pilif@celes ~ % echo $ZSH_VERSION
4.3.10
pilif@celes ~ %

building the port went flawlessly
Anyone could do almost anything without others' influence if given enough time, but that doesn't mean we can't appreciate those that move things along faster and those that bring the science to the forefront.

Einstein did a tremendous amount for related fields of research and the world in-general, not only through his work, but by becoming a superstar and elevating the role of science in our lives. If he could go from patent clerk to a world-renown scientist, then surely others could as well.
Do you define new arrivals as new accounts. It seems like a moderately competent spammer would look like a new spammer every time
git's completion especially has gotten so elaborate that it takes too friggin' long. And my shell's frozen while I wait. I just disabled it.

But why would you switch back to bash? Even if you don't use some of the advanced zsh features?
The oddities show that either the information is incorrect or they are not doing things in a way that current internet-sized HPC folks do it.

This is very interesting in itself.
There are many examples from our own history as well, such as the great depression.

The reason is that the media in the us is very heavily influenced by government and the political parties. It is much easier to publish interviews, opinion pieces from political partisans like krugman and government press releases than it is to go out and dig up news, consider an alternative perspective and write about it with some depth.
exactly... that's my first point: give them something to reach for, the end game.

my second point is that the VC is not really leadership so the example the VC sets is irrelevant.
This was mentioned in the article of course, but it bears repeating. I don't think there's any way around doing extra work when you target another platform. The UX guidelines for the Android and iPhone are different and you want to work within those guidelines.

HTML5 may be a way out of this, since the user is in a different contextual frame of mind, but if you want folks to think it's an "app" then you should still be aware of (and target) specific UX recommendations.
Sets off a red flag for me. When contracting, the companies with equity you might actually want are able to pay for your services with cash.

Different story if you were really excited about the project and the opportunity, really confident in your client's abilities, and wanted to become his full-time cofounders. But then I'd propose you divide the company equally three ways.
this looks like a very shallow and weak defence of noSQL in reaction to recent attention to the fact that noSQL == noACID.

Lets see, from the article noSQL solutions are ACID if each transaction updates a single record, if you have sharding and no replication and if you have fsync turned on.

The default state of SQL servers - MySQL non-innodb aside - is reliable i.e. ACID. The default state of noSQL solutions is unreliable, and only Voldermort seems to go some way to addressing that.

Is voldermort the only reliable noSQL?
Actually "readability" made it work.
http://api.rubyonrails.org/classes/ActiveRecord/Associations...

> This will load all comments with a single query. This reduces the total number of queries to 3. More generally the number of queries will be 1 plus the number of associations named (except if some of the associations are polymorphic belongs_to - see below).

Good call. Still, the difference between 1 and 3 queries is nothing compared to 3 and 100s (n+1 problem).

I wonder what AR can't turn that into a single query.
Thanks! It wasn't working in the UK even at dot com
Taking something that is visible and making it invisible makes a politician look good

This pretty much sums it up, although I don't think its just about making politicians look good. Censoring craigslist will reduce the amount of prostitution and trafficking in the world from the perspective of everyone not directly involved in prostitution and trafficking.
And there's still space for 'thorough' and 'trough' in that story...
My webapp: http://flashcarddb.com/
Bash is everywhere. It's simple. It's predictable. It just works. It does the things I need it to do. If you use the bash-completion functions in Debian you can even get pretty extensive completion features.
The article demonstrated a silent bug in a specific use case: merging a rename for a file which was modified locally.

I was responding to the generalization "don't rename files if you use branches at all". Things are not that bad. As I explained above, merging a change to a file which was renamed locally works fine: it triggers a tree conflict which is easy to resolve.

svnmerge.py was deprecated by the introduction of merge tracking in subversion 1.5, so I'm not sure why you are still dealing with that. You can migrate with svnmerge-migrate-history.py
Polyglot extension for Chrome - Learn a new language
Only the functional specifications.
Want to work on a tiny team that makes an enormous impact?
VCloud and APIs (video)
Look, the mere existence of a centralized buying and selling forum that 90% of the community has access to and is aware of is going to always foster illegal activity.

The thing is, if you own/operate such an environment, are you going to condone such things by giving them a place and label? Do you want to see an open drugs section on CL? Do you want to see children for sale on CL? They are all as illegal as prostitution for very good reasons, they significantly damage society.

No-one enters into prostitution willingly or happily for good reasons and there's never a good ending. PIMPS are mostly placing those ads, not your strange vision of freely-enterprising women happily renting out their bodies. They are given quotas to fill and they are kept "under control" by hooking them on hard drugs.

So please don't start making excuses that men and society in general are being held back by keeping prostitution illegal and that it should be freely available like buying/selling a car on CL.

Stop seeing CL as a victim. It's pretty darn silly.
VC Signaling is an overblown issue for most startups
http://www.seoprofiler.com/company/about compares to Google link: queries, which are indeed incomplete. How does your crawl compare to Yahoo! Site Explorer link: queries. The latter seem more complete to me.
Found this while surfing for new extensions, it substitutes random words on a page with words in the language of your choice, which is a great way to increase your vocabulary in a somewhat passive manner.
And the roll of electrical tape is to stop the very fragile and expensive splice rolling off the table.
Gyrowheel [video]
R.I.P. Available domain name finder tools