skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
"forgetting all the lives destroyed"

Lets say it's the year 2100. 100 million children have a chance at life because they were vaccinated with Gates Foundation money. 1 billion are wealthier because of a better education provided by Gates Foundation programs. The environment is cleaner because populations used that health and education to lift themselves out of poverty.

Are 20 years of frustrated tech entrepreneurs an unreasonable price to pay for that?
No they don't. Think harder. You may have turned 12 knowing how to make a pipe bomb. Me and my friends weren't.
How come no one talks about the loss of innovation Microsoft have incurred on the world? What if Windows were NeXT or Unix? What if Bill Gates had tried really hard to create the best tools possible, rather than the most profitable software? What if the world had run on Unix in the two decades since Tim Berners-Lee used a NeXT machine to create the web? Might we have had a 1% increase in annual productivity (mainly from better innovation, not only direct efficiency improvements)? We'll never know of course; but you don't have to be crazy to think so.
Thanks for the link. I was never thought to use bottle rockets when I was younger.
The problem is they have to fight it and compete with it. Doing one without the other will lead to disaster.
It may be against the terms of the merchant's agreement, but locally in eastern Canada it's quite common (for both debit and credit transactions), and (although I don't follow the issue closely) I've never heard of a lawsuit brought forth over it. I'm sure the CC companies would be up in arms if it were a national chain of some kind, but the little Mom'n'Pop restaurants and convenience stores seem to fly under the radar, even if that category may be large in aggregate.
I won't want to - I'll carry bills, but I won't carry coins.
Also, decry made up statistics in the post, but then claim to define new trends by using a sample size of 1.
...but Bill Gates, Jr., and most especially Bill Gates, Sr., are not at all against this. Bill Sr. has written a book calling for higher taxes, in fact.
According to Malcolm Gladwell, which I agree with, it's practice and persistence. How many hours are you coding a day? How many hours are you spending learning to code smarter?
I'm a female dev who has mostly worked in male-dominated teams. I'm currently working in a female-dominated team. The differences are extreme, with the largest being that the mostly-female team has a really difficult time taking criticism and giving criticism (saying 'no' to bad ideas). They're too optimistic and not realistic enough IMO. But what do I know, I'm just the dev! :\
> Creationists doubt the evidence for evolution, but what do they want to do?

Teach Christian mythology in science classes.
I'd agree that community is part of it, but Open Source software already has a definition: the Open Source Definition. Windows, Pine, QMail and many other apps with source code available under various licenses and communities attached are not OSS because their licenses don't meet the OSD.
Forgot to answer the question.

Feels like we have two options for making money.

1. Focus on the viral aspect and charge for upgrades like backup, long version control history, more templates, more pages, PDF conversion, larger file uploads, etc.

2. Focus on the enterprise and make it like an Enterprise wiki. Make features more suited for Intranets. Make it a pure pay product. We feel we have a big win in this field for the typical user because of our obsession with ease of use.

Sunny
Both genders bring different experiences and perspectives to problem solving.

Also having a mix of genders in an office in my experience leads the natural cliques that form in any office to be more interdependent. I'm not a sociologist or claim I can explain it but that has been my experience in working in almost purely female or male environments and working in mixed environments.

Having someone in the extreme minority will always make them feel like an outsider.
A certainly worthwhile read for anyone thinking through what to do after college
We have a quick video (30 seconds or so?) but didn't stick it up yet. Maybe we'll try and stick that in today though.
Neither major US political party seems to do better than 50/50 overall

According to Larry Bartel's research, in some major areas of economic policy, this is not true. See http://rodrik.typepad.com/dani_rodriks_weblog/2008/03/americ... and
http://www.washingtonmonthly.com/archives/individual/2005_05... for more details.

Of course, insofar as you're talking about public perceptions of news media "debates", that only confirms your point.
Yeah this is all good but I'm not sure how it's relevant to 13 year olds.

Also: small bomb, dirt field, nobody around, "doesn't really do anything dangerous", thanks, I'll take 4 of your fingers for that assumption. Don't thank me, thank static electricity! =)
Information Organization: A case study in music recommendations
"i didn't follow role models, i just got drawn to these machines, almost instinctively, and not just computers, cars, electronics, any kind of machines."

You may not have had any role models, but as your interest grew, you would have heard the names of people that are doing things (making things you used, big in the industry, etc). If the situation was reversed and you were a girl, I wonder if you'd subconsciously notice that there weren't hearing about any other women, and I wonder if this would subconsciously make it seem like women "weren't allowed."
WOT Reputation Scorecard: "This site has a poor reputation"
You've judged him as a sociopath by his actions, not his intentions.

In other words, you assume he's actually a sociopath, instead of assuming that perhaps the narrow view we see from 72-point headlines doesn't paint an accurate picture of the whole man.

from http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Actor-observer_bias

actors tend to attribute the causes of their behavior to stimuli inherent in the situation, while observers tend to attribute behavior to stable dispositions of the actor

i'm hardly a zuckerberg apologist (see previous comments during the whole facebook privacy hoo-hah). but wanted to point out, really, that calling someone a "sociopath with zero ethics" based on a few articles without actually knowing the guy is likely unreliable way to judge someone.
1) A bubble burst weeds out apps that don't have enough intrinsic value to the customer in the first place (E.g. T-pain, fart apps, and so on)

You might not like the T-Pain app, but the code behind it is likely a hell of a lot better than that of a fart app. Other then that, agreed.
Not sure about YCombinator, but TechStars is very open with their results.

You can read up on them here: http://www.techstars.org/results/

I suspect YCombinator's are similar to those.
I actually prefer the "one click to start using"
Offline events are key, especially conferences. Get Satisfaction did this. We're doing it with work2conference for Cloudomatic. Bring your customers together in person, educate them, and connect.
Thanks for the feedback.

Would you mind giving us some examples of sites where you like how they collect feedback?

Sunny
Not just that, but a mix of genders, ethnic backgrounds, etc.

Diversity is good. It also prevents the office from becoming a chauvinistic sausagefest, where people all of a sudden feel like it's ok to make inappropriate jokes because they're surrounded by guys.
I'm pretty sure it's that she pays a higher rate than he does. He pays more taxes every year than she'll earn in her lifetime.
why is redfin (a real estate company) blogging about bill gates? weird...
This is not the first Ars Technica article I've seen that erroneously compares the "controversy" surrounding evolution with the controversy surrounding global warming. Evolution is a binary fact. It's either true or not and, as rational, informed people know, it's true.

On the other hand, anthropogenic global warming is a matter of degree. Scientists largely agree that there has been some AGW (although it's not settled to nearly the confidence of evolution). What people object to is the constant bombardment with doomsday scenarios. The magnitude and implications of AGW are NOT settled and yet it's often claimed that hugely invasive and costly public policy initiatives must be enacted to combat worst case outcomes. Scientists and activists who carry the science further than its legs undermine their credibility and make it tough to discuss the issues fairly. It's pretty sneaky to suggest that if you don't toe the popular line on AGW, you're probably a Creationist.
Nothing happens in a vacuum:

"But the most infamous event was when the captured men of Otranto were given the choice to convert to Islam or die; 800 of them held to their Christian faith and were beheaded en masse at a place now known as the Hill of the Martyrs. The Turkish fleet then went on to attack the cities of Vieste, Lecce, Taranto, and Brindisi, and destroyed the great library at the Monastero di San Nicholas di Casole, before returning to Ottoman territory in November."

"...it will surely surprise those who believe that millions of people died in the Spanish Inquisition to learn that throughout the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, less than three people per year were sentenced to death by the Inquisition throughout the Spanish Empire, which ranged from Spain to Sicily and Peru. Secular historians given access to the Vatican’s archives in 1998 discovered that of the 44,674 individuals tried between 1540 and 1700, only 804 were recorded as being relictus culiae saeculari. The 763-page report indicates that only 1 percent of the 125,000 trials recorded over the entire inquisition ultimately resulted in execution by the secular authority, which means that throughout its infamous 345-year history, the dread Spanish Inquisition was less than one-fourteenth as deadly on an annual basis as children’s bicycles."

The Irrational Atheist, Vox Day
Exactly. In every other country where coins have replaced notes, they've just said "OK, on such-and-such a date we're replacing the note with the coin, everybody come in and swap your notes for coins!" and a few months later you don't see the notes any more. I don't know why the US Mint has got the idea that they need to keep printing 'em both.

Of course there are two other factors that don't help:

a) Previous dollar coin designs have been ugly and filled with misguided feminism (I still don't know and don't care who Susan B Anthony was, and I only know Sacagawea from The Simpsons), and

b) Previous dollar coin designs have been damn near indistinguishable from quarters by feel. Make 'em bigger or thicker or give 'em flattened edges or a hole in the middle or something! Preferably all of the above so you can look at it and say "Wow, that sure looks like a dollar's worth!"
I'm attacking the concept that books can be good or bad, while illustrating that religions aren't going to change that, only the people who act.
The average age on HN isn't helping you much there.
Thin uses mongrel / eventmachine / rack, all non-blocking concurrent libraries. Backed up by a good ORM (I use DataMapper, but AR may have got its concurrency patches), you may roll out quite a fast application with quite a low-end server machine.

So it all basically comes down to ease of deploy against more controlled environment.
I think every new rails application should use 1.9.2 and rails 3 by now. Concurrency should not be an issue.
Have your restaurant members allow you to install a cam at a strategic location and stream that video on your site. Apart from menus, the user can get a look and feel of the place before heading for it. Even if I have been going to it often, I'd check if I will get place. At times, you can do some webinars where the chef maybe showing off his best creations....

To make your site create a pull, you could have users register and identify themselves at the restaurant for a free give-away or a discount. Then the restaurant could upload the details of what you had and paid, to a password protected area. It will be a history of my personal spending, what I liked and where. Reward the heavy users etc etc.

Build a social network of foodies, would be foodies and the folks who feed these foodies.
Office romance 101: Relationship advice for managers
Notion's Adam Tablet- Android -Nice configs
Looks great! I'd like to see some demo orbs to see what's possible with the editor.
Don't worry too much about Steve Jobs. Take a look at how much Disney stock he owns and the dividends that stock has been paying out.

I'll take that actual wealth over valuation on paper any day.
Excuse me, but why is raising taxes on the rich a good thing? If the rich feel that they have too much then there's always charity. Most of the people on this site should know that there isn't a limited pie of wealth, and you shouldn't punish those who enlarge the pie.
Is it better to be a bully in business and do great things with the wealth or to be graceful in business and squander a fortune? I really don't know but my initial reaction says the former.
There are two fundamental differences:

- Taxation and philanthropy do not represent (usually) a direct benefit to the payer. For better or for worse, we as a society look more highly upon selfless gestures than selfish ones. Philanthropy is the voluntary form of selfless giving, taxation is the involuntary one.

- Philanthropy and taxation have an intent to benefit others. Creating market-based value is often merely a side effect of generating direct gain to oneself. Beyond the selflessness argument, we as a society are conditioned to look more highly upon intentional acts of value creation.
Since it's all old testament stuff, they are teaching Muslim mythology as much as Christian - but really teaching Jewish mythology !

Has anyone told them?
very slick
Things are complicated when considering applying this to an online price list for example, but applying to individual brick and mortar retail locations, I don't see what the problem with the in store displayed price to be different in different tax jurisdictions.
The problem is that it is very, very easy to disable time-based lockouts, thus making piracy even easier.
Governments could control the internet to a greater degree (see: China), but given how entrenched the multinational, cross-border culture of the internet has become, the nature of the internet lends itself to corporate control much more than state governance. Corporations are not as restricted by such arbitrary boundaries, and large conglomerates' international reach can better control the flow of traffic and information than a government that is mostly relegated to controlling aspects within their geographical limits.

So while the goal of public interest advocacy to promote open networks is noble, it faces the same problems that governments see in other forms of internet regulation. The limit of one country's abilities may be outweighed by private interests. The only way the internet can stay an equal and open forum in this sense is if it is economically advantageous for corporations to provide this service, though I fear the potential undermining of their control and ultimately their bottom line may lead them to restrict according to their agenda.
Craigslist Took One for the Open Internet
3. Let users make money off ads on their page and take a cut?
Looks like you'd need the Linux 2.6.33 kernel:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/TRIM#Operating_system_support
http://forums.debian.net/viewtopic.php?f=7&t=51105
First of all, I think your comment would have been more effective and to-the-point if you had left off your first paragraph.

Second, I'm surprised to see a regular contributor to Hacker news saying something like this:
> there are religious contributors to the site who may not enjoy being caricatured.

That seems like a poor reason to avoid saying something that you believe is true and contributes to the discussion (especially in a public forum like this).

Third, the statement "violence...is not an effective way to achieve ends," is just a platitude. It most definitely has been effective, and is sometimes an effective way to achieve ends. Rome seemed to take care of it's Carthage problem pretty well. You can certainly argue whether or not this is a moral way to achieve ends, but that is not what you said.
Could he be an Android consultant instead of selling apps? Does anyone have experience with that?
Hacker NEWS
> I treated them as excuses to demonstrate how smart I was

you just did that again ;)
I've never understood Fantasy Football, either the rules or the appeal.

Perhaps it's a chance for non-geeks to geek out about something in a socially acceptable way? On the other hand, maybe it's just about having an excuse to socially interact with your workmates in a non-work context?
, personally, would like to hire more women. At least that way I wouldn't be tarred by the same brush as those who really do discriminate.

Unfortunately I also get a disproportionate amount of resumes skewed male, sheer statistics are going to say I'm going to hire more men. And I'm still going to feel like I'm the asshole when these "not enough women in tech" posts come around.
Thin doesn't use Mongrel and Mongrel isn't non-blocking and isn't a library. Rack is not a non-blocking concurrent library.

You can use non-blocking concurrent libraries and use Thin in async mode yes. However the quality of support for it varies. Not everything supports Fiber-yielding-to-EventMachine at this time and for applications without long-running I/O blocking operations there's little difference in throughput between async-Thin and multiprocessing servers like Phusion Passenger. If you have long-running I/O blocking operations, like Twitter API calls that can last several seconds, then yes Thin is better.

On the ease of use and stability department, we believe Phusion Passenger is easier to set up than Thin. We also monitor and restart our stuff automatically so that if anything crashes you don't have to manually restart things like is the case with Thin.

As for resource consumption: Phusion Passenger can start and stop processes dynamically. On a low-end server you can configure it to not start your application process (or only start very few of them) until it's needed. We also have plans to implement multithreading support in future versions, with the eventual goal of being hybrid multiprocessed/multithreaded/evented so that the user can choose the best of all worlds.
Unix and Linux Q&A site based on the Stack Overflow engine
The IE9 site asks me for my language, OS, and architecture.

* I don't know or care about this info

* My browser has already provided it to the site
Live stream over @ http://www.microsoft.com/Presspass/presskits/internetexplore...

Needs Silverlight to watch. Kinda blows they didn't do it in HTML5, or even YouTube's live stream hip stuff.
Yes

iTunes
Magazine publisher spends $1.5 million on Drupal
Very interesting look at what a $1.5 million CMS/Web-first initiative does and doesn't buy you. They do know it's free, right?
Spoken like someone who's never read Herbert Schildt.
I'm feeling better now too, knowing I'm not alone. This worshipping makes me crazy.
I nearly burned my patio down building the smoke bomb in high school. I learned in the process though that you could skip the entire cooking process. (It does smell awful, but that's just the sugar caramelizing.

Made for a great prank on the last day of school though.
Lost World's Fairs: Exploring typographic possibilities on the web
Startup Tips from Jack Dorsey: Don't Pull a Twitter
I remember that post, it was a good one.

I was asking myself what I would do in a Googler's situation. Would I game for a significant raise or not. I'm still not sure - I do feel like it's kind of a shady practice, almost like blackmailing your employer.

I wonder if there will be any backlash (unofficial or otherwise) for those employees in the future. Maybe they'll get passed up on future raises or promotions, get less interesting projects etc.

Does anyone have any predictions?
IE9 Beta Released
I like the frontpage, I wish everything was this easy.

Couple of suggestions:

In design:

Customized is the top item, but I don't have any customized layouts (nor is there a hint how to make one).

The layout editor is confusing. I don't see what is the difference between bars and banners, etc. Eventually I figure out these are the categories of the layout, and not particular parts of the page I am going to design.

The names are still not very clear to me, seems like the categories should be named after the banner image: something like nature, business, buildings, sport, etc.

It turns the customised design editor is actually very cool. I'd like to be able to resize the images though, and delete them - the theme I was editing had three banners images (the 'money' theme), and I wanted to get rid of the extra two.

The color set with the black background wasn't working for me (using Chrome).

In the editor:

Inserting a url, when I select the text and insert a link the text becomes the caption - but if I choose one of my own pages the caption text gets replaced with the name of the page. It doesn't look like I change it either (without using the html editor).

In settings:

Why does my username have to be six characters long? I'm quite attached to 'sjf'

Settings, privacy and invites look great, very simple.
As an un-privileged viewer I can still see the design and settings links even though they don't do anything. This is frustrating.

Hope it works out for you guys. I share your frustration with wikis, they are so ugly.
I would like to use it for http://www.squarechat.com I use flash right now and it just doesn't feel right. It would be great to have support for this across other browsers too.
Those weird domains are Commission Junction. That's how they hand out the links, nothing Jeff did on his own. They moved all their affiliate links to a set of gibberish domains many years ago... I can only speculate why, but software that removes tracking cookies, and malware that rewrites affiliate links to credit the sales to someone else, are the first things that come to mind.