skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
My co-founder is moving on because he thinks "Priority Inbox" is too big a threat.

I would have thought it just introduces more people to the idea. It's not like Google will release an outlook/Mail.app/Notes plugin for it.
Yes, but most of the brands probably don't bottle in NYC. So they probably don't share this particular problem. But what do I know? Maybe they all have arthropods.
I think it also ignores that many of the blogs I find most endearing are from new bloggers finding their writing voice. I find that by the time a blog has become big enough to secure its author a book deal, or a paywall slot, its best days are over.

Of course that may be just my personal quirk.
Do you know how difficult it is? I had seen some stats but I can't find the article now. I applied to YC myself, but, being a single founder, I don't know what the odds are. Finding cofounders is hard...
There's an evolutionary process at work here. Once e-mail newsletters become passé, we'll see weekly fax shots, then snail mail, skywriting and, finally, personal visits at $1000 each. Then you realize you're a consultant.

I jest, I started an e-mail newsletter myself a week ago ;-) It's interesting to think where all this might go though. I bet if celebs could charge a few bucks a month to follow them on Twitter, there'd be a massive revenue stream there from gossip hungry admirers.
Read insane stories, comment on them or rate them.
Another issue is that "big" blogs often hire other writers to increase traffic and revenue. TechCrunch, for example. I still love Arrington's posts but some of his new writers leave a lot to be desired - I preferred TC when he was the sole writer and even though his posts are as good as ever, the SNR has fallen.
Of course you don't see it that way, you're just doing what you want to do, because you can.

"It's about having an idea, not complicating it, and executing the basics that matter in 24 hours" ... which is the freedom to fail.

Three things bought you the freedom to fail:

You're the President, so you have deep influence on the allocation of resources.

You value minimalism, so you limited the scope of the project to make it manageable. This decreased risk (while maximizing ROI, bravo).

You're open to an outcome that entirely invalidates the tool since you'll learn something either way.

Failure (and success) requires resources, investment and tolerance of risk. You demonstrated all three. That's the value of the freedom to fail and it's solid gold.

You don't see it that way, perhaps, because it's just how you roll at 37signals. Ask a puppy: are you trying to be really, really cute when you're yawning or are you just yawning because you need to? It will insist, as you have, that it's just doing what it needs to do.

The thing to keep in mind is that, sadly, not everyone can access the resources or commit to the investment required to get things done. Even if they do, cultural risk aversion may still paralyze them. I looked at your post and what immediately struck me was "Damn, that's good stuff. Some places are incapable of delivering this kind of thing. Why? Oh. No freedom to fail."

I guess the best luxuries are the ones you don't realize you've got. :)
I suspect most sites have many bigger issues than finessing label alignment for reading speed. Shortening the form itself could shave off seconds - or even tens of seconds when done right. Messing around with the label alignment probably only shaves off milliseconds at best.
I don't mean to spam you with Sallie Mae links, but clearly you can see the heading of this page...

https://www.salliemae.com/about/investors/debtasset/
Wholesale Glassware
While I agree with you, I notice that I eat disproportionately few carrots than their taste would suggest (they are pretty delicious), and it's mostly because of the inconvenience of cleaning them and their relative unavailability. If I had a vending machine with carrots, I'd definitely choose them over the other snacks most of the time.
(setq make-backup-files nil)

(setq slime-lisp-implementations
'((ccl ("/usr/local/ccl/dx86cl64"))
(sbcl ("/usr/local/bin/sbcl"))))
(add-to-list 'load-path "/usr/local/slime/")
(require 'slime)
(slime-setup '(slime-repl slime-banner))
I would be good to know how to change the language...
yeah! Looking forward to being a customer of this bank.
Yup -- they most certainly do. I think they switch around the name -> IP mapping in response to traffic rates -- if you suddenly get a surge of traffic, they'll move your virtual ELB instance to a physical load balancer that is currently lightly loaded.

Basically, they are doing load balancing for their load balancers. :)
I think I see what you're getting at here, and I agree that unstigmatizing mental illness is important. But does "everyone" really need "help" from the psychiatric profession?
I think Einstein's dissertation is a bad example of a dissertation that was not an immediate superstar. It was. Einstein could have taken this author's advice of stapling together his first three papers. Einstein's considerations about more precise calculations of Avogadro's Number lead directly to his novel technique(at the time!) of using Brownian motion to deduce that photons exist as particles, and not just waves. Then it only took a couple of years for that idea to morph into his famous Annus Miribilis paper On the electrodynamics of moving bodies, from which Special Relativity sprung forth. And the rest was history.
The new Apple TV for $99 | United States Post
Possibly, but it would create additional mental friction for users. Colors generally tend to have meaning in interfaces. "Are all of the blue ones related?"
> crazy stuff that apps do for "atomic save"

Care for an example?
I think its just a misleading choice of words. Article writers will often substitute a descriptive word for a proper name to avoid being overly repetitive - "the retailer" was probably just a reference to Brooks Brothers.
One-year-old pregnant with twins | United States Post
Personally I don't care what makes users fill out forms faster. I care whether the A/B test says that more users fill out the form.

That said, ideas like "top align the labels" make excellent fodder for A/B tests, and I encourage people to test that on their sites.
huh. since my teens my very basic philosophy has changed quite a lot. especially if you were raised with a philosophy that was unsuitable for who you are and what you want to do, I think it's pretty unreasonable to expect you to have something as complex as your personal philosophy and values figured out before the age of 20.

In my early and mid teens I was reading (and mostly agreeing with) skinner and marx. I actually felt considerable angst as it became clear I was going to spend my life building and/or maintaining computer systems- systems that automate away human jobs. I spent my late teens and early 20s on Rand and the like. Picking up (and even partially living by) some radical ideology is pretty common for teens, I think, and most of us grow out of it. Personally, I can't imagine holding some ridiculous rant one posted as a teenager against an adult; Me, I'd even tend to forgive (some) actual hurtful actions undertaken by those same teens, assuming that it appears that they grew out of it. I mean, testing your own limits and figuring out what sort of person you want to be is what being a teenager is all about.
Japanese Virtual Girlfriend Vacation
The article probably should have mentioned that squatting is still common in Muslim dominated countries.

We squat because that's the cleanest way to release waste. We also squat when we urinate, that way no urine is splashed back to your pants, which happens when you stand and urinate.
yeah, that would be the worry. Of course, if social networks produce real value, then those who choose to opt-out would be at a disadvantage.
> Reputation goes down the toilet the moment you start selling stuff on your blog.

I'd say there are a great number of exceptions to that. My blog has several thousand subscribers (for whatever you want to define an RSS subscriber as) that have been following my blog for years, they know I have been working at early stage startups for years and they value my opinion, even going out of their way to ask if I have an affiliate link for something I might have mentioned on Amazon before or elsewhere.

One guy even held off buying a big DSLR camera on Amazon for a few days until he was able to get my affiliate code from me while I was out of town.

People can have a voice that is valued online and sell stuff through their writing/blog. Affiliate sales on my blog alone pay my rent while I can run around doing startups with no compensation.

Ken Rockwell comes to mind too. He reviews cameras and has amazing guides. Each camera page has a blurb about asking readers to buy it from sites that have his affiliate code.

http://www.kenrockwell.com/
I like the idea, but next time I visit how do I see the new tweets because they arent ordered chronologically? With reddit and hackernews I usually click through the link and next time I visit I will see the different color link text so I can quickly see what is new. Just something to think about.
Good advice, but that banner across the bottom was so annoying that I actually opened up firebug and deleted it from the DOM.
Sod the d/vs, they really have utterly failed at implementing this properly.

In win7 on shutdown on various different computers I constantly get empty dialogs saying "waiting for the following windows to close:"

With an entirely empty dialog...

The actual offending programs are Outlook and Steam. But MS programmers screwed up the implementation of this patent.

Just another example of a patent being worth jack without implementation.
1. It would have been good to see some quantitative numbers to back up the assertion which sounds plausible

2. His own comment form at the bottom has side aligned labels (and no comments so far - so maybe he's right?)
Amazon announces 99c TV to own
Soapier, the company that makes Reddit soap, is up for sale
Troll much?

Lack of wide support for a published standard doesn't have any bearing on its openness.
Personality Judo: Being able to quickly identify and optimally deal with personality defects in others.

Everybody has problems, hangups, or just weird quirks. Masking off problems of people while dealing with them makes life easier.
Apple's September Music Event: Just the numbers
Students Help NASA Decommission Satellite
Netflix works great on Boxee (and Plex). Hulu blocked boxee, but there are still other apps that provide the same shows.

List of apps: http://boxee.zendesk.com/entries/193322-boxee-apps
I wonder how vegetarians, particularly vegans, in NY have responded to this, given that bottled water is often tap water.

Opportunity for a vegan stillsuit startup?
> Interestingly, they don't follow their own advice. The comment form after the article uses right-aligned labels.

Apologies, but these sorts of observations/criticisms are fairly common on HN (I remember someone saying "they don't follow their own advice" about the Stanford web credibility guidelines), and I have to say I consider them pointless. Observing hypocrisy and pseudo-hypocrisy is necessary if you're making a decision that depends heavily on someone's character, like electing a president, but it's almost always irrelevant when assessing the merit of what someone says.

People often have good reasons for not implementing their own advice, too. Maybe it was a higher priority for them to get the word out rather than make sure everything public they do complies with it first. Sometimes it's a cost-benefit problem: improving blog comment forms probably won't make much of a difference to their bottom line, but improving a new user sign-up form very well could. Comment forms are also fairly standard in what information they expect and in what order, so again, probably not a huge payoff. In Stanford's case, they already have the credibility that comes with being Stanford. Etc.
Surely if 77% of the population have something it is the 23% that have the disorder?!
Thanks for taking the time to track these down. (I love a rant with a happy ending.)
Of course. That's a pretty poor oversight on Amazons side.
Is it really that inconvenient to clean a carrot? Just peel it and eat it. I can peel a carrot quicker than most people can even decide what to have at a vending machine.
In the example they gave, they had 9 errors. 1 was something that leads to browser incompatibility. (Trailing comma at the end of the array. IE doesn't implement the spec, Firefox does.) 1 was something that often points to logic errors. (Inconsistent indentation.) And the other 7 were someone's idea of correct style.

That said, I suspect that this lint tool will catch some issues where technically correct code can make http://code.google.com/closure/compiler/ unhappy. If you're using the Closure library, that's kind of the whole point.
Nice, but it may be more effective to limit advertising of unhealthy food during cartoons and shows targeted directly at children.
With iswitchb, once completion is exhausted try using cursor left and right to switch between the remaining alternatives.
Share Addoway Deals with Friends and Earn Cool Rewards
That's not very convincing coming from them. They said that they're huge Apple fanboys, which means they're willing to sacrifice technological freedom themselves for other types of gadgets. Why is freedom so important for an HTPC-like device, but not for other devices?
If carrots actually tasted like they were supposed to, sweet and carroty, it wouldn't be so hard to get kids to eat them.

Especially baby carrots, which are the junk of the carrot world, do not taste good.
Sugar acts somewhat like a slightly addictive drug, that may cause them to prefer the other foods in addition to the advertising.

See http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2235907/?tool=pm...
The longer I live in the "real world" the more cutting carrots while watching bad television has become a part of my routine. I can really eat them faster than I have the patience to shell them.

And if we want to make them junk food, all we have to do is up the sodium content to about 25% of that of a bag of chips, and kids will be gobbling them up just as if they were any other snack food. Of course, they won't be such a great thing anymore.
''Recently, Eric Schmidt, of Google, remarked that “There was 5 exabytes of information created between the dawn of civilization through 2003.” He continued, “Now that much information is created every 2 days.” We are creating more than ever across this ever expanding medium that we love.''

I feel like a visionary! I wrote recently that ''we have more written-word saved in Google's servers than all previous written-words combined since the invention of the written-word.''

http://makebelieve1.wordpress.com/2010/08/24/a-pc-appears-on...

I wonder,though, how did Eric Schmidt calculate the ''5 exabytes of information created between the dawn of civilization through 2003.'' Because I thought about the same thing and I decided that given the incredible variery of mediums from clay tablets to books to computer discs it would be impossible to know. Do you know how he arrived at that number?

And I realize that some HN readers will downvote me for referring to my own blog but so be it, this is a very interesting question for me. I wonder how he arrived at that figure he quoted.
If "help" came to mean applying tenets from Positive Psychology, then I'm all for it. If "help" means drugs as so often is the case, then I hope not.

You can spend a lifetime "fixing" all your problems, or you can get on with your life and focus on your positive strengths and learn to manage the negative.
http://www.ppc.sas.upenn.edu/
That money doesn't go to the business, it's pocketed by that one person.
It's part of the picture. It's not only the taste, but the availability of the junk food as well. The marketing doesn't hurt though (i.e. you weren't thirsty until you saw that Coke ad and now your mouth is watering).
Its not as simple as you might think: Children have been shown to prefer the taste of carrots wrapped in McDonald packaging.

Science!

http://archpedi.ama-assn.org/cgi/content/full/161/8/792
Nice ripoff of the Firefox 4.0 beta feedback:

http://stefan.arentz.ca/stuff/grabs/1283385827.png
It'd also be nice if when you do find carrots, they were packaged with something other than ranch dressing as a dip (e.g. carrots + hummus).
Would the difficulty be ameliorated by right-justifying the form field labels and moving them closer to the inputs?
I'm fairly certain they are talking about a CA system, since locks must be acquired for the tuples involved in a transaction (even if only long enough to determine an ordering id for the transaction). In the presence of a partition, it wouldn't be safe to acquire these locks.
Cyropaedia of Xenophon: The Life of Cyrus The Great
Back in college, a buddy of mine worked as a doorman at what had become a reasonably popular bar (with >30k undergrads, they're all pretty popular) with a line down the block every Friday and Saturday. As a friend of the doorman, I would rarely have to wait in said line, but on one peculiar condition.

On such days when he was going to be working, he'd give me a $10 bill some time during the day. Later that night, I would wait until the line was good and long, and walk confidently up to the door. Upon arrival, I would hand him his $10 bill back and cruise on through, making sure the gesture was noticed by passersby.

Without fail, every time we pulled this little stunt, he would manage to make a decent haul off of people that were inspired by my brazen (though contrived) bribery. As far as I know, there was no real policy on the matter of bribing the doorman - the only real problem is having to fudge the occupancy for a few minutes - and for every incidental person over the limit, there was at least one outside smoking, so this was never a very worrisome problem.
It fails on file I have thrown at it with some complexity other than jquery.
So theoretically we could all be banned and just not know it: each one of us trapped in his own little solipsistic universe.
Which works if you view writing purely as a way to sell your time or your other work. But if you want to make a living by writing, not by starting side businesses, then I don't think it's clear that your content should be free. Some people want to find a way to make a living as content creators, not as content creators + t-shirt salesmen + consultants.

How possible is this in general? I don't know. It's the same problem that exists with all other digital media. But I think it's likely that some people will probably find a way to make a living with paywalls or email newsletters, and be happier that way--even if they could make more by selling t-shirts. And I suspect they will do so with a very high price point, because exclusivity always sells.
I also like to have as few visual elements on a page as I can get away with. Keep it as simple as possible. Minimizes distraction, minimizes response latency, minimizes page rendering time in client's browser, minimizes the chance that something can "go wrong" with any given page, and minimizes work on my side.

I am not a professional designer, so take with grain of salt.
Not if you filtered it. Filtering is a cheap and easy process.
Facebook is worthless in the long-run.
> They would probably have much better opportunities as employees.

Nope. Nobody ever made a billion dollars working for someone else, but more to the point very few employees actually get to decide their own destiny. Imagine what Steve Wozniak's life would look like if he had never met Steve Jobs. I'll bet dollars to doughnuts he'd still be designing test equipment for some asshole boss. Arguably he ended up designing microcomputers for some asshole boss, but there were a few perks.

Plenty of people don't have the constitution or the inclination for entrepreneurship and that's fine, but they're never going to see a tenth of the opportunities as an employee than they would as an entrepreneur.

The obvious counterexample would be the likes of Xerox PARC and Bell Labs, but I think they're weak examples. PARC may have invented the WIMP interface, but it was Apple that changed the world with it. Alan Kay is a hell of a thinker and has been hugely influential, but he doesn't get to organise rock festivals or go Dancing With The Stars.
Great production implementations can start from coders reading papers on a rigorously explored idea.
Ah, Bjorn Lomborg gained global fame for a book published in 2001 disputing claims of climate change's long-term significance.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Skeptical_Environmentalist
Paying for benefits and costs are both wrong.

You pay the minimum to get good-enough folks but you never pay more than the benefits.

Note that there are things other than money. For example, many good-enough people prefer teaching 1st grade to driving a garbage truck.
> What's the difference between this and say slipping the building inspector a hundred dollars to "not have any problems"?

What's the difference between this and paying Southwest $10 to get early boarding?

For that matter, what's the difference between this and patronizing a top-notch doctor whose high prices result in a short surgery waitlist in order getting some surgery done more quickly?

We can bandy around analogies all day long, but when it comes down to it, the actions of private individuals prioritizing private resources for a fee is a fundamentally different thing than the actions of public workers prioritizing public resources for a fee. In the private sector, it's price discrimination. In the public sector, it's bribery. The difference is in who owns the resources that are being prioritized.
Damn it, now I'm thirsty.
This came up a few years ago.

It resulted in an interesting debate about whether NYC water was kosher to drink. When I heard about it, the question was still being debated, and I don't know how it turned out. (Not being Jewish or religious, it wasn't particularly material to my life.)

Oddly enough it turns out that the water was unquestionably kosher to drink before the local Jews were told about the arthropods. But once they had been told, there was a real question about whether they could continue to drink it. The reason for this is that there is a dispensation for breaking the dietary rules out of sheer ignorance. But once you know the rules, you are responsible for following them. The classic example being, if I recall correctly, the case of a blind man who didn't know that he had been eating pork.
The irony, it burns! Aaaaaargh!
No, no it wouldn't. It would be more effective to stop subsidizing unhealthy food. The long-term effects of such legislation are almost guaranteed to be a net-negative because of edge cases. There are already way too many laws. You should always look first at what can be removed, rather than what can be added.
"I really wish I could find something for Emacs which automatically detects the style of the code I'm editing and switches the coding style to that."

Shameless plug for my dtrt-indent - it doesn't switch coding style but it does adapt transparently to foreign indentation offsets.

http://git.savannah.gnu.org/gitweb/?p=dtrt-indent.git;a=blob...
Ready for Zero (YC S10) wants to help Americans get out of debt.
I'm guesstimating that he guesstimated.
I the observation about the blog itself not using top-down alignment is not pointless I think. It really makes you wonder whether the post was written to increase a counter in a database or out of conviction that this is the way to go. And if there is a good reason for not making the change, the author could have been more respectful to the reader by offerring an explanation.
Tabs versus Spaces: An Eternal Holy War
... what the heck? makes you wonder if its a backup because they know one of the other engines is dodgy.

not that they need all four to run but still, makes me kind of nervous