skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
From 35 days ago: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1564285

And 28 days ago: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1584017
Please note the distinction between high availability writes and lock-free writes. CouchDB offers the former.
This seems a bit petulant to me.

There is real, substantive criticism of how CL handles adult ads independent of grandstanding politicians, hand-wringing moralists, and sensationalist media. These groups are always going to be flinging shit around; why dignify them by pretending to be their victim?

And why refuse to acknowledge the legitimate issues that are raised? CL has said nothing in response to critics who have pointed out that independent research groups have been able to place ads that contradict CL's stated policies, or that relevant authorities have said they've received few to no reports of suspicious activity from CL. Refusing to acknowledge these problems, and instead focusing on the misdeeds or weakest arguments of their most sensational critics, undermines CL's credibility quite a bit.

And if you are going to shut the section down on your own, just do it. You don't get any pity for claiming you've been censored when there's been no actual legal pressure applied. You haven't been censored, you just caved.
To me, this is an extremely sad story about the way we treat knowledge and learning. How absurd is it to cheer for someone that memorizes questions and answers without having contextual knowledge about the actual meaning behind those questions? It's not dedication, it's thick-headed stubbornness.

The lady has been at it for about five years now. If she did it the right way, she could have learned to learn, then learned to read and write, and then passed the exam, plus come out with other valuable skills. Doesn't this remind you of those college graduates that go through the motions, but when they sit down and are asked to do something on their own simply fail to even understand what they're asked? I remember back in college I would sometimes participate in study groups, and so often encounter students that relied simply on memorizing problem types and the ways to solve them without actually having any clue about what they were doing. It seemed more common with students hailing from asia, and surely had something to do with the way school and knowledge is treated there.
> How many users are there in that "community" right now and how much time do you exactly, roughly, spend on the "community"?

roughly 12,000, with ~5,000 active in the last 30 days (this only counts users whose accounts are more than 30 days old). still very young but seeing very healthy growth.

> How does the time you spend now compare to the time you spent right at the beginning?

I'd say I actually spend more time on it now (~6 days a week) than I did at the beginning; the site is almost profitable now and is my full time job, vs. the first few months where it was only a side project.

> The third optional question is, how did you actually build the community? Did you use those techniques, like, posting through different accounts and starting discussions with your own self and other techniques?

I got friends and colleagues to join up and pestered the heck out of most of them until the site became sticky enough that they came back (to my delight) on their own volition. I only have ever had one account :)
I assure you that more than one is made daily.
I love how the music player in the bottom right corner of like.fm stays open as you navigate between different pages.

Does anyone know how they did this?

Edit: To clarify my question, this is probably done with AJAX, but like.fm also updates the browser URL bar, without using a hash anchor fragment like gmail. Any idea how that's done?
To me, this is less about the fact a single woman had to memorise a written driving test by failing it 949 times, and more about the mismatch between the test itself and the populace.

Surely she is fairly indicative of a rural inhabitant? Why is the test so inaccessible, and how many others are there like her?
I despise the people who created that ad. Their attitude is to me one of the worst that humans can display. It reminds me a little bit of the anit-jewish movies the nazis created (sorry for evoking Godwin's law, but it is like that).

Nothing good can come from scapegoating like that. And Smith is hardly to blame if teenagers spill their guts on facebook. Seems to me he rather tried to warn those kids.
This is making Seattle a better second to the valley for startups. Coz Google and Facebook are reasonable backups for when the startup fails and you need a day job to build savings before the next attempt.
> It is horribly unjust for Americans, many of whom have no or poor health insurance

They do, however, have free health care. You do understand the difference, right?

No, it isn't as good as most paid care. So what?

> Pharma, which spends disproportionate amounts of money on direct marketing to consumers,

What's "disproportionate"? You do know that marketing includes free drugs for poor people, MD education, and the ads that tell people that there are treatments for their illnesses/conditions, right? Which of those do you find objectionable?

> can't produce the medications we need cheaply and efficiently, that represents a market failure,

Does it? I'd like a pony, but the fact there isn't one in my front yard isn't actually a market failure.

If you think that you can develop anti-biotics for less, go for it. You'll get rich, you'll save people's lives, and you'll drive those evil drug companies out of biz.

You were planning to go through the FDA right? (Of course, if you can fix the FDA, then all new drugs become cheaper.)

> and the government should step in and take the lead role in drug development.

What rational govt that has pension/retirement obligations would spend money on a drug that significantly increased lifespan?

> the NIH doesn't need to make a profit

The NIH has no skin in the game. If it screws up, no big deal. In the rare cases where someone finds out, NIH defenders will swing into action. If Merck screws up, folks lose their jobs, stock value goes down, etc.

The NIH is driven by interest groups. Pharma is driven by what folks will actually spend money on. I know which one I think accurately represents what people value....
Using Coral CDN:

wget -rl 0 -np -A .mp3 http://thenine.ca.nyud.net/essential/
Your comment on a wife is made in jest, but it's the same advice I've heard from respected lawyers and others experienced in immigration here. It really is the easiest way, even though there's a wait and plenty of paperwork still involved. :/
Not to mention its uses for those who physically can't use a mouse or 'scary buttons'.

One of my cousins is severely disabled and can only really use one hand with limited movement. They are completely unable to use a normal computer without assistance, but can manage an iPad in all capacities apart from the off switch.
Haha, I was thinking exactly the same thing :)
Professional handicap I guess.
Ha, like there are zillions of Fortran 77 programmers now. They still make compilers that support it though. Go figure.
Google lets you do that. You can opt out of advertising cookies [1] and Google Analytics [2].

[1] http://www.google.com/privacy_ads.html

[2] http://tools.google.com/dlpage/gaoptout?hl=en
Oakenfold's 'The Goa Mix' is probably the best mix I've ever heard.

Should be these two:
http://thenine.ca.nyud.net/essential/1994/1994.12.18%20-%20E...

http://thenine.ca.nyud.net/essential/1994/1994.12.18%20-%20E...
We're reaching out to a number of open source font developers so I bet they have been contacted. I'll inquire. I think the current priorities are international language fonts actually, but other beautiful fonts are still welcome.
Sadly, all she got was a drivers license. It's not like she hit success with her startup after 960 tries and became a happy member of the fym club.
I got friends and colleagues to join up and pestered the heck out of most of them until the site became sticky enough that they came back (to my delight) on their own volition. I only have ever had one account :)

This sounds like the bowling pin technique (or whatever it's called) that was described on HN a few weeks ago. Where you start with a very small community that will talk to each other anyway and then grow at a trickle to keep the overall velocity up. In this way, your invite only tactic seems to have paid dividends vs having 10,000 people hit on day one and finding nothing going on.

Update: Thanks for find it where that "bowling pin" thing was, a clicky link: http://cdixon.org/2010/08/21/the-bowling-pin-strategy/
קורס אנגלית מכיל רבים של קבצי אודיו לפיתוח מיומנויות הקשבה קבצי PDF
That article's totally backwards. The rendering is nothing to do with Google (unless you're viewing on Chrome :P). Microsoft has a fairly good font group internally and has made some great progress.

Google is just getting started (I'm part of the fonts effort there) and there are fairly respected designers involved in the whole effort. Without buying in licenses it will take some time to reach a certain quality level but a lot of the fonts provided are high quality and have received praise as such - the quote implies they're all Wingdings :/
It doesn't cost anywhere near that much in the U.K., more like $20-30k debt after 3 years on average. I think the title is misleading but the rest is true.
Haven't heard of that one, I'll check it out though. Catchy name, too. And yes -- I think you're spot on here. It's gotten a lot of flak for being invite only but I really believe in the model (as long as you can stay on the right side of the elitism line).

[edit] Just checked it out; was a post from Chris Dixon. totally spot on. Thank you sir.
How do people hang horseshoes above their doorway? Not because of superstition?
couldn't they have done this with flash a long time ago ?
A wise man once said, it takes money to make money.

Rather than viewing a modest annual expense of $20 million on lobbyists and branding, look at it as protection money that enables the revenue stream to continue and to grow. If the choice comes down to either shutting down all of Craigslist because they can't possibly moderate every post after hookers are using their freedom of speech to posti ads in every category, or paying lobbyists to keep a lid on things from DC and thereby continue the operations, then the arithmetic shows CL loses more if they don't pay the lobbyists.

I loathe the entire DC lobbyist racket as much as the next guy, and it truly is the scourge of our democracy, but it works! Otherwise why else would all of corporate America spend such lavish amounts on lobbying?
She's 60+ years old and has been selling vegetables and working on farms most of her life. She doesn't remind me of college students or graduates at all.

For her, learning how to learn is probably much more difficult than you think it is.
There are several claims made in the article, and I'm skeptical that all of those things are completely true for all of those.
Perhaps I misunderstand the industry, but isn't this how many photographers tend to operate? Sure, they're trained in technique, have a particular aesthetic, etc, but if you take 1000 pictures at an event and boil it down to the 20 "best" ones, you're going to be doing better than finding 20 out of 50?
Something almost Sims-esque? I'd ignore the haters for now and try to figure out what your vision is.

It's not clear if you have a game in mind or just know you want to make a game - but assuming you have the difficult but rewarding task of creativity ahead:

Figure out who would use it, what you want them to learn, and how you want to convey it. Imagine how you would play the game. Play other simulation games and see what works and what doesn't. Take what works and draw on paper to figure out how things are going to fit together.

Your initial game prototypes can be on paper with your sons, using dice instead of a computer, just to get the concepts straight. Then the technical part of implementation and platforms comes once you have a greater understanding of what you actually need to build, so you can pick the right platforms and toolkits with that context.

Good luck, it sounds like a very worthwhile project.
Flash isn't open or a cross-platform standard. They have yet to implement anything like this in the mobile space yet because of all the hardware variations.

Putting it at the browser level in HTML5 solves all those problems for the most part.
Yes, my next project is most likely going to be a game. Most of my industry experience is on the writing, reviewing and community side, so I want to get my feet wet on the technical :)
If Craigslist actually stood by their community-centric, "everybody share" principles, rather than wear a fake mask of anti-corporatism over their money-grubbing true face, then Craigslist themselves would put a single checkbox on every Craigslist post form letting the user make that choice. And the default state of that checkbox would be "yes."

Then CL could just offer a bare-bones, REST, read-only firehose API to access those posts. Just like how Twitter does it. This entire project would probably take the developers at CL a month to roll out into prod. Hell, knowing how software shops work, they probably already have 3 private internal versions of it that were shelved by the ignorant, risk-averse management who only fear change and don't know how to tread water in the meandering river of technology and Internet society.

Wild idea for the Techcrunch rumor mill in 2011: it's too bad Twitter doesn't buy or merge with CL, and in absorbing CL, make them be more open and community-centric.

Perhaps CL will see the light and open up an API, as the newspapers get more desperate and turn up the dial on the hate. CL is going to need to show off something, anything to take the spot light off themselves before the wolves rush in now that they're injured & bleeding.
without reading the article I will say:
a) this is too obvious to need voicing
b) it ain't hacker news
The beauty of data visualisation (David McCandless at TED)
That's an extremely cheap agreement. Probably because statements like this:

>Remember back when Google's Buzz social networking app shared user's private information without their consent?

Are based on complete FUD. They had no privacy violations, just UI snafus. Getting rid of the persistent annoyances surrounding things like that is probably worth at least 8.5 million.
The Romance of Garbage
"Be ready to follow the community; that is, the community might end up in a slightly/vastly different place than you intended. That’s okay; embrace it."

Spot on with this one. If you fail to embrace where the community is pulling you, you might miss out on a bigger business opportunity than the one you originally envisioned.
Some people, such as the author, choose to write every day. Others, like PG for example, post much less frequently (thus keeping the SNR much higher). For most people, I think the sweet spot lies somewhere in between.

Whenever I strive to do something every day, it ends up feeling forced or contrived, and inevitably the quality drops. (I might be atypical in that regard?)

Furthermore, I think there is such a thing as wearing down your audience. It’s like you’re lowering your own value. Sure, you might still produce really good piece on a weekly basis, but they live in the same house as all your other, potentially mediocre posts.

That said, I strongly agree that we should all try to write every day. I started blogging earlier this year, and only at that point did I realize how difficult it is. So, taking my first point into account – my suggestion is that you do write every day, but not necessarily share everything you write. A journal is good for this, or even write it on your computer without publishing it. Whatever works. By doing so, I think you still develop your voice and style, without obligating yourself to add to your blog every day. This approach has helped me avoid burnout. Plus, there's something I really enjoy about writing things just for myself.
surely had something to do with the way school and knowledge is treated there.

You mean like the fact she only started school at 15 and never finished it? We take things like literacy for granted, but they're actually quite difficult to acquire if you don't start young.

Which is not to say that I think her method was a good idea, just that there may not really have been other options.
I mean no offense by this but.. is English your mother tongue?

I used to play Scrabble a ton and adopted a more verbal, etymological style that, I'd assumed, would be more common amongst native English speakers (but maybe not!)
You're looking for a preferably non-technical co-founder?
I suppose one doesn't actually need first-hand experience to have such an opinion, but it is somehow a little bit surreal to read a call for "A Return to Traditional American Virtues" written by a Swiss professor who works in Germany. It'd be like reading an American professor who'd never lived in Switzerland pontificating on how the Swiss need to return to their core values.

It's a particularly nice juxtaposition in this case, because one traditional American value is not listening to what European intellectuals say. ;-)
Not to mention how poorly cited the whole thing is (like the dubious assessment that unemployment is twice the stated rate).
Thanks so much. If I had to pick one "top" point, it'd probably be this one.
I am not an immigration lawyer, but one thing I've heard is you could setup a corporation in Canada, and then sell consulting services to a US startup. That way they don't have to deal with the fact that you're not a US Citizen for payroll purposes, as they just pay you like any other vendor.

You can work remotely / travel to the US for periods of a few weeks at a time, working out of their offices - sublet apartments from craigslist for a month or two at a time, then return back to Canada. I believe there is a US visa you need to get to do this, under the guise you are working for a foreign business conducting biz in the US.

If the startup takes off, you will be integral enough to the process that they will (hopefully) hire an immigration lawyer to figure out how to get you into the country for longer periods of time and pay you directly. If it doesn't take off, probably best that they didn't issue your VISA after all...

I know of a few people who got in from eastern europe to the US that way... again, I am not a lawyer though, and therefore don't know if what these guys did was legal or not, just repeating what I heard...
"I have many good projects, most in idea stage" -> So you have a lot of ideas, basically?
The funny thing about buying a TV roughly every two decades (currently a twelve year old Sony Trinitron is doing its duty) is that I just don’t know that there are TVs which can do that.

It seems that TVs have turned into twins of the bloated laptops Sony likes to sell. I’m not sure whether I like that. Is that software at least user friendly?
Interesting. Sadly it does not mentions any practical tools for doing social network analysis:

Here are few that I know:

For small networks (up to a million or two million nodes such as Wikipedia Link graph from 2009)

Following libraries provide code to handle and manipulate Network datasets:

1: SNAP by Prof. Jure Leskovec [ http://snap.stanford.edu ] written in C++

2: Networkx by Lanl [ http://networkx.lanl.gov/ ] written in Python, esp. good for fast prototyping

There are few Databases for storing networks, e.g. Neo4J http://neo4j.org/ .

Additionally there is a Graph Processing Language called as Gremlin

http://wiki.github.com/tinkerpop/gremlin/ .

For Large networks with millions and billions of nodes, one can use Hadoop / Map-Reduce or Apache Hama [still in nascent stage]. Google has a special system known as Pregel which it uses to perform scalable computations over large networks.
A good read, but it seems to idealize how America rose to such strength and gloss over how many serious problems came with it and the subsequent need for government to step in and protect (Labor laws, EPA, FDA, SEC, the list goes on...)
Well its not so much that learning to learn is more difficult, but learning to learn in a given domain. If you don't have someone to teach you, figuring out the ideal way to learn something can be tricky.

For example, the Rubiks Cube. I'm sure there are great ways to learn to solve this puzzle, but I learned using a very time consuming technique with a lot of failure. While I have a really good schema for book learning, I have a relatively poor schema for learning the optimal way to manipulate items in 3space, despite the fact that I live that space.
Interesting -- the fact that the US is physically large may thus have contributed to religiosity: people could more easily choose to raise their children "free" from the nefarious influences of people who were different. (c.f. "group polarization" http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Group_polarization )
For people who like to read the original, here's the german version:

"Amerikas europäische Krankheit" - http://www.spiegel.de/wirtschaft/soziales/0,1518,714521,00.h...
I can't really evaluate the article on economic terms, but it fails miserably in its knowledge of history. If we are to believe prof. Straubhaar, in the 20th century "[t]he United States rose rapidly from virtually nothing to become the most politically powerful and economically strongest country in the world", by following the economics of some fuzzily defined American Way where "every man was responsible for himself -- in good times and bad. No one could count on government assistance".

Then the good professor argues for a return to these good old times. The historical reality begs to differ. Far from being "virtually nothing", the US manufacturing output was the first in the world as early as 1890:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Economic_history_of_the_United_...

This economic growth was, by the way, happening behind some pretty heavy protectionist measures (initiated by none other than Lincoln):

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tariff_in_American_history#Civi...

But maybe this economics professor wasn't referring to economic output? Let's look at the principles that guided Franklin Delano Roosevelt, under whose leadership the US became acknowledged as a military superpower as well:

"Throughout the nation men and women, forgotten in the political philosophy of the Government, look to us here for guidance and for more equitable opportunity to share in the distribution of national wealth"

A complete opposite from the article's description of an ideology where "no one could count on government assistance"!

In conclusion, the article's premises are based on a very shaky foundation and expose a shocking ignorance (for an economics professor, at least) of US history. And if the foundation is bad, I don't think the rest of the edifice hold up very well either.
Ah ok, I thought a repost from her own stuff with a follow up link. I get it now. Sorry... (I should get more sleep).
Judging an article without reading it is also not Hacker News.
Is the idea supposed to be that a web client (html+js) reads and writes directly to a CouchDB server? Where do you put business logic?
To be fair, a clean retail Windows install is just as clean as OSX. The clutter comes from shitty bundleware.

This is, IMHO, one of MS's greatest struggles - it is not enough for Microsoft to develop a culture of top notch user experiences, but also all third party OEMs. This is a problem that Apple does not contend with.

We see this with Windows phone also - no amount of software and UI can save a device designed and manufactured with rock bottom quality.
Multithreading Magic
It's not ridiculous at all. You really think there's not a hierarchy of strip clubs, that the top clubs don't compete for the best strippers, and that every girl who wanted could just buy a bus ticket and end up making six figures stripping in NYC?

The simple point is that the vast majority of strippers don't and can't work in the top clubs in NY, Vegas, and Miami, and don't make anything like the kind of money that's made in those places.