skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I am a extreme advocate for science and a complete atheist, but completely disagree that any of the points he brings up in his TED talk actually support his thesis. I think he is confounding being able to discover logical fallacies in existent (moral) arguments with the possibility for innate derivation or at least making a very large leap of faith. I remain unmoved from the notion pure science is strictly observational and every single decision for prescriptive action is, at its core, a value judgement.

The core question for most prescriptive action is often simply determining the limits of the self, that is, how do we delimit the boundary between the self vs. the other, and what are the bounds that we choose to extend empathy to?

Is the near-self or that which empathy extends to everything that biologists have classified as homo sapien? Is it confined to ourselves and a handful of close friends? Is the boundary defined at humans sharing similar values, goals, and culture? Is it extended to all animals with a central nervous system? How can we determine what this value ought to be scientifically?

"The seperation between science and human values is an illusion, and actually quite a dangerous one at this point"

This seems to ignore historically that, more often than not, science is used as ex post facto justification. Darwinism and natural selection is a true scientific observation with mountains of supporting evidence. It was also later adopted as a central logical doctrine for the most abhorrent policies of Nazism. A logical argument for eugenics could be made, but remains abhorrent because in Nazism, the near-self vs other distinction drops off in a freefall across subsets of humanity. This contrasts strongly with today's average definition of near-self considered to be the set of all that is homo-sapien.

The set, degree, and unit by which we extend empathy in the self vs. other distinction IS the core of human values and he does not offer a derivation.

I suppose I should reserve final judgement until I investigate his book you mentioned more thoroughly.
Oh, that sounds easy enough to do, we'll implement it right away (it should be live in a few minutes. Thanks for the tip, we didn't know about this duplicate content situation...

EDIT: Added!
This is exactly what should happen when your low-traffic site suddenly gets 50k visits in a day: Absolutely Nothing. Kudos to the historio.us guys for building something that can actually handle a little spike in traffic without falling over.

We see so many sites come through here that are showing 500 errors by the time they get halfway up the front page that you'd think nobody knew how to do this stuff anymore.

Great job of ticking off the basics, guys. Building on top of that foundation, you shouldn't have any trouble scaling out when this sort of traffic starts becoming a daily occurrence.
I have considered using delicious or something. But I'm very much an email person and usually have my email open anyway. I went with posterous because it fits this personal quirk, so, for me, it's a very easy solution. Perhaps at some point I will need to be more organized and such. For now, I don't really need something better bad enough to put in the effort to find another alternative and make it part of my routine.

Thanks!
Coming in for a one day event is cool and possibly helpful.

I run the Hackers and Founders meetups, and we get a ton of people coming to the meetups that are visiting town for a week or two. The vibe that I get from most of them is that it's the trip is valuable.

If you are going to make a trip of it, I'd suggest coming in for a week or two. There's tons of startup/technology events and you can probably schedule one every night for the entire time you're in the area.

Bring business cards,introduce yourself to people at events, and you can be having coffee with people twice a day the entire time you're here. That's what being in Silicon Valley is about, and that's what's amazing about this place.

If you're not having a coffee with someone, spend the extra time in Palo Alto along University Ave, Mountain View along Castro Street or hanging out in bars and coffee shops in SF. I'd also suggest hitting Noise Bridge and the Hacker Dojo while you're here.
this article sucks.

can someone please give me the reason why people feel that facebook is "violating privacy" in a way that has nothing to do with the acceleration of technology?
Malcolm Gladwell: Twitter Doesn't Work
This is awesome, but it would be great if they also told me what places are sausage-fests so I'd know where to avoid!
In democracy only 20% people will vote as per their conscience.
Enabling instant search in Chrome did this for me. Pretty sad really.
Can you please explain how/why did it save you money?
"Under capitalism, man exploits man. Under communism, it's just the opposite." --John Kenneth Galbraith
Learning simplified
I struggle with proving big oh, thus I wonder if (Kahn) or anyone else can help me prove that:
t(n) <= cg(n) for all n >= 0
and here is the example I do not grok, where I'm gonna prove this assertion: 100n + 5 ∈ O(n^2).
This proof goes like this:
100n + 5 <= 100n + n = 101n <= 101n^2
I struggle basically with wrapping my brain around the proof there. What is going on?
1) Numbers should not be moved to the right on the titles (ie follow 87)

2) He changed the background color lighter to show more contrast on the blur, even though bg colors are customizable in twitter, thus creating an unfair comparison.

3) Top black bar items not aligning with the grid may have been intentional. It's not part of the layout but intended to be a separate object that is part of the view port. I'm sure it was intended to seem like the bar was an extension of the browser, not part of the web site. In this way, it does not distract from reading.

4) His contrast with background colors on the "tweet box" area, the feed, and the right side was done poorly, completely breaking the concept of main vs sub content on left and right. The original background colors are much better in clearly segregating left from right, and devaluing content on the right.

Designers forget (esp those with print backgrounds), UX is not simply about making things look pretty, but also being able to trigger an emotional response and create a connection with the end user.

Ironically, Doug Bowman's latest post on StopDesign talks about the Uncanny Valley. This theory applies here too. Rodrigo's design looks way too much like a static blog, and makes me feel uncomfortable.

Although aesthetically pleasing at first sight, this guy still has a lot to learn from Doug Bowman.

His design honestly looks like a Wordpress Blog theme, not Twitter.
The specialist vs. the generalist
Thank you, added!
holla holla holla
And I'm sure you're not even joking. And you'll make $$$ doing exactly that. Damn you Zack!
Thank you! To give credit where it's due, buro9 from HN urged us to implement the Varnish caching feature for cached pages, so we had it written but disabled because we didn't think it was going to get that much traffic. We hadn't turned it on for the first 30k visitors and the server was still doing great, but when we saw it we just switched it on and load dropped to nothing.

Serious amounts of love for Varnish here.
Browse the web, earn prizes and points
Spengler asserts that democracy is simply the political weapon of money, and the media is the means through which money operates a democratic political system. The thorough penetration of money's power throughout a society is yet another marker of the shift from Culture to Civilization.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Decline_of_the_West#Democracy.2...
Then we could sue Google for copyright infringement for caching our pages, I guess... Why would we not allow Google to cache it? Each cached page has a great big box on top saying that this is the historious version of the cache and linking to the original site...

Example:
http://cache.historious.net/cached/515865/
We didn't know one of our users publicised it, though, and we didn't know Google would even see it...
How long until this gets gamed by bogus foursquare accounts and everyone gets pointed to the nearest strip club?
Thanks for submitting this. These are the kinds of non-startup stories I like to find on HN (I'm a fan of David Byrne's blog but I somehow missed this one).
Ask HN: How do you decide which idea to start on?
How do you evaluate your ideas, and decide which one to work on?

Do you use criteria like time required, cost, etc?

What have you tried, what would you like to?
How To See Which Posts Are Popular For Any Website or Blog
There's a huge difference between what Google is doing and what you're doing.

1) Google is caching pages for a specific purpose and ensuring that they aren't cached/scraped by others:

http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/robots.txt

By not excluding robots, you're opening yourself to all kinds of situations where you are responsible for draining revenue from the owner of the content, which leaves you liable to lawsuits. By contrast, the way that Google caches content and their rules surrounding it do not generally harm the copyright owner.

2) Google honors all robots.txt, no-archive meta-tags, and other indications that the author doesn't want the page to be cached. Is historious doing the same?
Im just looking at flights now and should be able to have 8 days in town: 13th - 21st. Do you know any events off the top of your head that are on? Something I might start concentrating on once flights are booked.

I am definitely starting to think that it would be worthwhile, mainly for the networking. There are so many talented people in the area and the thought of meeting some of them really excites me.

Now I just hope they'll give me time off work. Somewhat short notice but I think (hope) it'll be okay!

Thanks for the advice.
At work, there are some bits of information I fairly frequently need but which aren't readily available in any of the manuals and such we have. We get email updates saying "This procedure has changed. Henceforth, the new procedure is..." and you can't find it anywhere in the manual or anything. I have a folder to put those types of emails in. For some things I need to access fairly frequently which are also fairly lengthy, I save a copy to my desktop, even if I have to create a different document in a different format to do so. For shorter things, I use the "notes" function available in the microsoft suite of applications I use at work.

When making myself outlines of things at work, I focus on stuff I need to know but for some reason am having difficulty with it. If I get certain types of requests to correct a particular type of error repeatedly, I focus on trying to figure out why I am doing it wrong and how I can stop doing it wrong. Then I note the stuff that I feel I personally won't feel is intuitive or obvious and expect to have trouble remembering to do. If I think the instructions we have suck, I rewrite it in a format that makes more sense to me and run it past my superior to see if my re-interpretation is still an accurate depiction of things.

Am I happy with all this? Nope. But they don't really give us a better method and I am making this stuff up as I go and it is getting to the point where team-members email me and say "do you have a copy of...?", so I have the general impression that my slap-dash, thrown together approach is more effective than whatever other people are generally doing. For at home -- working on my websites and such -- I am not really at a point of "production". I am still surfing HN and talking with my adult sons a lot and trying to nail down a more concrete idea of where to go next. My big focus for a long time was getting well. That still takes a lot of my time, so hopes of figuring out how to support myself as an entrepreneur are still almost a "hobby". That is changing and I may soon need to get a lot more organized and focused. So far, just collecting links to articles and information and emailing stuff to my sons is working okay.
One I consistently recommend is "Risk: The Science and Politics of Fear" by Dan Gardner, it's a fantastic insight into how we approach risk both individually and as a society.

It can be pretty revelatory.

http://www.amazon.com/RISK-SCIENCE-POLITICS-DAN-GARDNER/dp/0...
Say hello to mechanically separated chicken
Most of them would have moved onto Perl web frameworks. Rough timeline would be:

Perl --> cgi
\--> mod_perl
\--> Mason
\--> CGI::Application
\--> Maypole --> Catalyst
\--> Jifty
\--> Mojolicious
\--> Dancer
\--> Squatting
\--> Continuity
\--> PSGI / Plack [works with all the above]
IIRC Reddit's "in" with Conde Nast (who eventually purchased them) was a social networking site targeted at women, owned and branded by CN, with Reddit's tech.
Ishmael by Daniel Quinn.

Explains an ethical viewpoint in a very clear style. Changed the way I think about human progress.
And also C, Bourne Shell & Perl because git depends on them.
I think it's pretty safe to say that paying cash for every child falls squarely in the category of "rewarding behaviour you wish to encourage", let alone subsidised housing, tax breaks and paid maternity leave. There are obviously degrees of encouragement or discouragement, but that's beside the point. Which, in case it wasn't clear, was that these measures only have a hope of working with low-income households as the advantage of fixed-size benefits (cash child benefits, paid maternity leave) diminishes proportionately, and the rest (tax breaks, housing) are inversely dependent on income.
Yes, I notice those people. I believe you can sometimes tell by the quality of a programmer's code that they have a background in dealing with text on a theoretical level.

Disclosure: I work in tech now but have an English Lit. education.
So if a group of people have voluntarily agreed to incorporate, could that be called force, ever? I don't see how a "small number of people" can "force everyone to act in concert" when they have voluntarily incorporated i.e. allocated some of their capital or labor to some other party.
Non-fiction: "Influence: The Psychology of Persuasion" by Robert Cialdini

Fiction: "Cloud Atlas" by David Mitchell

I'm going to assume that you've read Crytonomicon and Snowcrash by Neal Stephenson, but if not... they are #1 on any list.
The rest of us manage ok, why do you think you won't as well?

I lived in Germany where gas is lots more expensive. The cars are smaller and more fuel efficient (we brought a truck to Germany and had enormous difficulty finding parking for it). There is better public transit. And communities are more walkable. In most of the US, it is extremely to get around without a car and commutes to work are typically pretty long. I currently live without a car and kind of informally hitch-hike to work because it is 2.25 miles away and there is no bus service from here to there. So I accept offers of rides when people stop and offer (which is more often than not).

A lot of the things that would make a neighborhood more walkable have been made essentially illegal to do. Most urban planning rules and conventions are car-oriented and actively encourage the creation of sprawl, which is not conducive to creating new walkable neighborhoods. Older neighborhoods that are more walkable are often extremely expensive because it is a highly prized quality and no longer something we can create. "New Urbanist" architects and builders who have tried to build more walkable neighborhoods have found that have to jump through a lot of hoops to get such plans approved.

I've seen some photos of people on the street in an Australian city and most American cities just aren't that pedestrian-friendly. So, yeah, Americans have good reason to be freaking out.
>For example, if I want to play a computer game nowadays, I'd better have Windows.

Try this site: http://www.kongregate.com/
Why do you think it's doomed to fail?
I didn't read that at all. It sounded to me like someone who loves what she's doing, is pretty grateful for her good fortune, and doesn't have much of the persistent malaise about women in technology. It read more like "I'm so glad I got into this stuff, and there are some benefits to being a woman."

A "puppy on crack"? Pretty harsh and cynical. It was harldly unbridled enthusiasm, but she's got an optimistic outlook, which is refreshing on this topic. If she's not bemoaning the issue, not generally dissatisfied with life, is that too much?
How to be successful: steal ideas and copy people
I have recently gotten into long-form magazine articles, and I encourage you to check out Kevin Kelly's list:

http://www.kk.org/cooltools/the-best-magazi.php

Plus http://longform.org/ and http://givemesomethingtoread.com/ are both excellent.

Neal Stephenson's "Mother Earth, Mother Board: Wiring the Planet" in particular was formative for me as a teenager.

http://www.wired.com/wired/archive/4.12/ffglass.html
Old GCC easter egg (aka implementation-defined behavior)
They actually tried to buy Foursquare.
While not exactly like HN, http://reddit.com/r/women/ is about as close as you are going to get I think.
Premji treats his employees like wage slaves http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vivek_Paul
And he refuses to share ownership of Wipro and owns 85% of it.
Madison Avenue loves these "inefficient" ads because they get to play the part of "cop" in the classic prisoner's dilemma.

Let's say you release "Brand New Purple Foobars!" and hire my ad firm to advertise them. Sales are up, so what's your conclusion? Well, maybe my ads really helped push your product. OR maybe your product was just so awesome on its own that it didn't need any advertising. The question is, if you don't know for certain which it was, do you take the risk of not hiring my ad firm next time? What if you don't, but your competitor that just came out with "Brand New Yellow Doohickeys!" does?

The problem with Google's ads is that it removes the mystery. If I know how many people saw the ad, and how many people followed through and clicked the link, then I can evaluate how effective my ad campaign is directly. It's like giving the prisoners cell phones so they can text each other… "Hey, they said you confessed…that true?" "Nah man, you?" "Nope!" "Cool…so drinks later?"
TMS is barely comparable to any other radio sports broadcasting. It's an event in of itself.
Anime Ace is a particular favorite of mine for speech bubbles and narrative blocks. Badaboom works well for in-panel sound effects. There are many others, but those two remind me most of my Marvel childhood. (I has Spidey #1 and Hulk #1. They cost a dime at the time, and who the hell knew they'd be worth anything? Same with my Bobby Orr rookie cards -- I traded a bunch of them away for proper Leaf players, and wound up putting the last one in the spokes of my bike the next season.)
I highly doubt they just gave up. I am more inclined to believe that they were facing declining revenue with no money in the bank.
Yeah, and perhaps one that tells me where all the creepy guys who use this app "are at" so I can avoid them. :P
Somebody from http://geotool.flagfox.net/?search=82.128.1.251 hacked into my Gmail a/c
most events in San Francisco can easily go from a bonestorm to a bronado to a category five hisicane in a span of 30 minutes

Translation?
Thanks for posting this, as much as I hate MS at times, I was starting to get frustrated with picasa and have been migrating my family to use live photo gallery lately.

UPDATE: I'm not liking how Live Photo Gallery won't let you create "albums" (like picasa) instead of requiring you to create folders/copy photos instead. Is iPhoto this way too?
I think FB will face many lawsuits in future.
I loved G,G&S, but found Collapse disappointing in comparison. There was a lot of unnecessary personal gushing about his home state which had no contribution to the work and undermined the credibility of the argument. It picks up after that though. It's a much more political and argumentative book than G,G&S, and seems to force a view on the reader (a view I happen to agree with, but still felt uncomfortable with the amount of persuasion in there).
Rand claims that the characters were intentionally portrayed that way:

"My characters are persons in whom certain human attributes are focused more sharply and consistently than in average human beings"

I agree with you on the Rearden vs Galt issue though...that doesn't make sense.
"Fooled By Randomness" by Taleb is one of my favourite books of all time! I found it really eye-opening.

I'm currently reading "Outliers" by Gladwell, and it's a great read! I'll probably try and pick up a copy of his "Tipping point" next.

Another good psychology/behaviour/economics book is "Freakonomics", and it's sequel "SuperFreakonomics". Both interesting reads. If you haven't read "Fooled by randomness" yet though I'd definitely recommend that first!
Love you, Ubuntu.
> a Facebook app running on a Webkit core that opens all external links in Firefox.

This sounds really nice, but doesn't facebook also do the sa=D-style redirects like google? (I've no way to check.) If so, it effectively becomes a nice cross-browser way of tracking you.

(For example: http://www.google.com/url?sa=D&q=http://haskell.org/hask... )
I have done what you suggest and having been living the "ideal life" for over 10 years. The biggest challenge was to our cost of living to about 30% of what it was on F/T work. First time I attempted the change, I got broke fast and had to get some contract work to pay off the bills and credit cards.

Once we established the required habits, we ended up with a small nest egg which has come into handy.

Although I do have to take on short consulting gigs to top up the fund, they are becoming less frequent as I we get better at managing.

The only difference is that P/T work for employers hasn't worked out as expected. Instead, I take on project oriented work which lets me bill for completed work and have deliverables and milestones that fit with the other activities. Sometimes it is tough to say No to work that has deadlines that would require working F/T or more to deliver on time.
Have you read the Taleb's previous book, "Fooled by Randomness"? I was completely blown away by it. I didn't find "Black Swan" to be anywhere near as interesting, but that could just be because I read it second.
The one that keeps you up at night.
I tend to go with magnitude of possibilities. Specifically, if I'm still thinking of new applications/markets for the idea days later, it's probably worth pursuing.
Sounds good, but actually imo flawed advice. Almost every new idea I've had that has "kept me up at night" has started to seem much more mundane after a few weeks of work.
The one that smart, hardworking cofounders believe in, too.
Stopping using the "like" button so as not to give them usable data would be the first step...

-

Facebook's bigger problem is that their "platform" strategy makes it pretty easy to monitor these metrics and target fans without paying Facebook a penny. Essentially they traded potential revenue streams for ubiquity. Getting a "x and y like this" published in friends of fans' streams is a free action, as is collecting demographic information on the "likers" and sending them all coupons they have to "like" to activate. Established brands can generate better ROI from well-run fan page promotions they don't pay Facebook for than paid display ads with low CTR.
> I'm a Linux guy at heart

If you are going to use GTK+, take a look at Vala [1]. It's a C#-like language which is compiled into C. Much saner than coding in C. You can easily port your app to Windows/OSX, but, as others noted, non-native UI will be far from perfect.

I'm using this approach in an open-source project of mine [2], feel free to borrow the ideas.

[1] http://live.gnome.org/Vala

[2] http://www.spek-project.org/
I read a lot of biographies. It's interesting how you start seeing the common denominators between great men when you do. Especially 'Alexander of Macedon' by Peter Green is a riveting read.
I am more than my genome, I am my connectome