skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I was just reading about extrinsic motivators today in the book, What the Best College Teachers Do. The research cited there dates back to the 1970s and the work of Edward L. Deci. Apparently what he and his colleagues found is that most extrinsic motivators (money, prizes, grades) actually do work as long as they continue to be applied, but their effect on motivation or engagement is lost once the extrinsic motivator is removed; and, in fact, application of an extrinsic motivator appears to weaken any intrinsic motivation that existed before the extrinsic motivator was applied.

This theory has ramifications not only for paying students to go to school, or for good performance, but also whether grades are ultimately harmful to long-term student learning and comprehension. The research suggests that students who perceive getting good grades as a reward for studying tend to view learning as a performance or competition, not as a quest for mastery or self-fulfillment. When they graduate into the real world and are no longer rewarded with grades, they tend to stop learning, because the extrinsic motivator (grades) is removed. They also tend to "study for the test" and forget the lessons soon after, as the goal is always to perform well on the next exam, not to retain knowledge.

Not all extrinsic motivators appear to be damaging to intrinsic motivation. For example, the researchers (and those who have continued Deci's work) found that encouragement and praise were extrinsic motivators that often reinforce, or at least sustain, intrinsic motivation. The theory is that people (especially children) lose intrinsic motivation if they think they're being manipulated by the external reward: verbal encouragement and social acceptance are supposedly less transparent means of motivation than, say, money or grades.

Before reading this part of the book, I had thought that perhaps paying students for good academic performance was a good idea. Now I wonder if perhaps paying parents for their child's good performance is the right way to go, accompanied by a short course on developmental psychology for the parents.
Even before the Linode memory upgrade, Linode was more competitive for many uses because they offered 32 bit systems, whereas Slicehost only has memory-hungry 64 bit systems:

http://journal.dedasys.com/2008/11/24/slicehost-vs-linode

After the ram upgrade, Linode is a clear winner. I just hope they don't screw up the good service as they gain customers.
I agree with you, but he could have been more polite than "terrible terrible", especially considering that site is 48 hours old.
Go ahead and use text files, but make sure you specify exactly what encoding is used. Saying it's "just plain text" is not enough. UTF-8 is fine and convenient, just make sure your code actually encodes/decodes it when it should.
Standalone Commodore 64 BASIC on the iPhone/iPad
I was confused by the button "workplaces". Maybe something more explicit like "completely workplace listing" or "all workplaces"?
Dude, you don't have to move to SF. LA has a good startup scene and high-end engineering talent pool from Caltech/USC/UCLA, plus design/marketing/UX/etc people from the entertainment industry. There are no serious hurdles to founding a consumer internet startup here.

At startupschool, I met a bunch of people from the bay area, but none of them were interested in founding a new company. They were either already founders (looking for employees/funding/revenue), or, pretty happily working for a large company like GOOG/NVDA/AAPL/etc and not quite ready to leave. The people I found most interesting as future potential cofounders, were from other cities with "weaker" tech/startup scenes.
I'm actually using Basecamp right now, via a client, and I have to say I'm a bit underwhelmed. I mean, it works, there are no obvious bugs or anything, but I don't care much for the interface - it seems kind of jumbled and not entirely clear.
OpenID is easier than having to register for each site.

And you have Gmail right? Then you have an openid account.
Kieran Duffey
So many people spend their health gaining wealth, and then have to spend their wealth to regain their health.
As a programmer the saying "A picture says more then a thousand words" often feels like a fallacy but Ricky Ho has a history of illustrating his points beautifully. His nosql patterns post is another very good read: http://horicky.blogspot.com/2009/11/nosql-patterns.html
How Polyfills “fill in the gaps” to make HTML5 and CSS3 Usable Today
Rails will not become mainstream untill hosting services will be as cheap and popular as php.
The new Acrobat X
For me, self submissions are a large part of the reason why Hacker News is interesting. A lot of smart people come here to share their thoughts. Without that we would only have the Times blogs which aren't hard to find in the first place.

I am by no means representative of the Hacker News community, but I would guess that other people would say something similar.
Anonymity vs. Real Identity is a very influential variable in online communities. While I used to be a big fan of anonymity I've come to review that opinion in the last year or so. Maybe it's time for HN to start rewarding people who put their real identity on the line?
Spesifikasi dan Harga Android-phone Google Nexus One
Yes, you're probably right. I'm just always stumped by the part where you can't try a dry-run in educational theory- you actually have to try it out, and you run the risk of screwing up a kid's education.
Craigslist Shuts Down Aggregator Craiglook
Desk Space - East London
>But people lacking the same incentives will probably unknowingly slide into some form of bad behavior even if they've been active on the site for years - it will just happen naturally, because their economic equation is "amuse myself" with no mitigating factors. But most of the time it probably doesn't cause overt vandalism, just poor commenting hygiene.

I am not so sure about that - I come here and post comments in the hope that people will like them (doesn't work that well) because I derive my sense of worth from how much karma I have

Can't be the only one.
http://pgalih.blogspot.com/2010/10/spesifikasi-dan-harga-and...
Harga Android,Harga,Android,Android Phone
Spesifikasi dan Harga Android Phone
harga $529 USD for unlocked Nexus One atau $179 USD for 2 year contract with T-mobile USA
Q: Why is PageRank so complicated?
A potentially silly question that might hurt our pending YCombinator application, I've got to ask it anyway:

I really have no idea how PageRank works, and I'm interested in where the magic lies. Is it in the way they create an index that can quickly be searched even though it's got billions of entries? I read lots about how it's based on the number of links pointing to pages, but isn't that just a matter of creating a big graph of all web pages and counting the links between them?

I'd appreciate any info on specifically what technical problems have been so ingeniously solved to create PageRank.
Programmable blobs [video]
I agree that might be the case but actually the Twitter and OpenID authentication is much safer.

1) When you authenticate with Twitter or OpenID its all done on Twitter or your OpenID providers site. We cant snoop your credentials at all, you dont enter it on our site.
2) Sure authentication is an easy feature but this way we dont need to ask you for your details again, you let us talk to your service and use your existing information.
3) You can kick us off from your Twitter account from Twitter itself and at any time, see Connections section under settings.

Some people might be conscious about us being able to access your Twitter or OpenID information but its mostly available to the world on these services anyway. OAuth (which is the underlying technology behind this authentication) is being used more and more. It's much better and safer for end users, its just that initial hurdle to get mass adoption. Its the end users decision if they trust the site or not. Most people have trusted us today :)

We cant make any changes to the app whilst its being judged, not one line of code. I do agree that we should look at implementing a base user signup sans-OAuth provider but we cant do anything until Rails Rumble has been judged and voted. It was a 48 hour coding competition with many other developers around the world, see www.railsrumble.com
Why "rather than"? Do this if it works. If there are other methods that also pan out well, do them too.
I would recommend using NameBench (http://code.google.com/p/namebench/ ) to find the fastest free one for you.
Youth is wasted on the young - my new favourite saying.

Somehow a young person has to work out a way to hack the process, by gaining wisdom and maturity before their youth has run out, and apply it successfully. (and, to be fair, 35 is still young). To be more correct, someone in their 20's need to work out how to think like someone in their 30's or 40's, before they turn 30. Young people who do that are going to be successful, no doubt. The big problem is that a 20 year old has to listen to, and accept advice from, a 40 year, something many have problems with.
And yet, the results in this article show extrinsic motivators to be beneficial to performance on some cognitive activities. Seems like it's an area that merits more research.

On a slightly more meta level, it seems like TED and Gladwell are making more topics bikesheddable.
PageRank isn't complicated. It's just an eigenvector.
Chrome here, was an html5 video tag for me as well.
Cool project! I was working on something similar recently, and found http://greatsummary.com/ to be far superior to OTS. It won't scale very well, since you have to do an RPC every time, but maybe you can convince them to give you their code.
How defensible is Groupon?
Kids begin with a boundless inquisitiveness and enthusiasm for learning, yet the drudgery of the school system burns that out of most kids quite rapidly.
I usually think of logic as rigorously defined language, rather than built-up math. (Math being based in the physical world, and language being purely ephemeral)

From that point of view, 'or' 'and' 'not' and 'xor' make perfect sense.
Sorry to throw a tiny little wrench, but the list reads like a well-crafted parody of modern startup culture. There's nothing truly interesting in there. Just bland reshuffling of pseudo-innovative social networking stuff.

Sure, some of them look really polished. Sure, some of them might be somewhat useful. But man, the cognitive power wasted on yet another "SHARE YOUR TOP FIVE LIST", "SHARE YOUR TODOS", "SHARE" [+ something you didn't use to share]? Astounding. Now, the downvoting shall commence.
First off, I think it's worth noting that the current system of motivation, based on grades, is hardly better than straight up bribery, it's just that the theoretical rewards of the "bribe" (good college, great career, etc.) are so far in the future that they're pretty much invisible to most of the people in the system, except for the truly pathetic worry-wart-weiner-dogs that actually change their actions based on potential ten-year-hence consequences as high school students (which, I realize, is a category that many of us fall into, and there's probably something wrong with that, but now's not the time or the place...I was one of them, so I'm not going to cast stones).

I think rather than trying to bribe children to go to school because they hate it they should instead concentrate on making school actually interesting.

And I think rather than trying to bribe adults into doing work because they hate it it would be fantastic if we could try to make it interesting instead, so they would want to do it without compensation.

Of course, failing that, we have to pay them, because it's more useful to have a person do a dollar's worth of work for a "cheap" reason such as money than it is to keep the dollar in our pocket. Doesn't matter how nice it would be if the person really desired to do that work of their own accord, it's worth more to us to pay them than it is not to, so we do it.

Where's that analysis here?

From my interactions tutoring the hideously under-interested youth of America, at least the rich parents that care about such things would almost certainly be far better off (dollars and cents-wise) paying their kids a nominal wage to do their f-ing homework than they are paying me $80/hr to sit with them and force them to do it - even if I am there to answer the occasional question and review the material in a (hopefully?) more comprehensible way than the teachers might at school, in my experience the real gains are simply achieved by forcing kids to think about the topic for a certain amount of extra time every week, which they typically would never do on their own.

Basic reading, writing and arithmetic should be compulsory but let kids choose whatever they want to learn after that.

I'm all in favor of that idea. But you may underestimate the extent to which we're not even covering reading, writing, and arithmetic the way things stand. As educated people we tend to assume that everyone else is at least in the same ballpark as us, but look...those comments that you see all the time on YouTube, and chuckle at, assuming they're written by non-native English speakers? They are, in fact, pretty close to the average quality of the prose you'll get if you ask an average classroom of American students to write an essay.
Nah, you could. ASCII art covers most of your non-text bases.

And, if you're stuck for 3D video or textures or audio, you can cheat a little and define a 'container' and then use that 'container' within the text file. For example, imagine an XML file containing the rules on how to parse it- that is just another text file. You could do the same with any form of data. Binary data can be represented in ASCII too, they would just be 7x as large as a binary file.
This same idea is the last one i added a week ago in my project ideas document, time to delete it :). Jeremy, i guess you've already noticed this, tldr.com could expire in november if it's not renewed.

What about accepting complete urls as parameter? So that you just need to put tldr.it/ in front of an [URL] to obtain a summary?

Did you show this to reddit yet?

One thing i was thinking about was how to monetize something like this, sadly the only option seems to be ads or amazon/etc related to the content...
Are there any alternatives that actually let humans do this? Perhaps a site that employs some game mechanics? First to summarize, +10 points. Correction, +5 points. Request to summarize (bounties), +n points.
> I think bytes are next. Then bits. Then the glory of square waves.

It's hard to really quite grasp just how crazy computers are without mucking about in some square waves for a few hours :)
Re lionhearted's comments:

Sometimes it's hard to discuss topics like this without being judged as PC at best or a Milquetoast at worst. But ultimately this is a business forum and businesses need to market.

Copywriter Joseph Sugarman wrote a book called Advertising Secrets of the Written Word. It's the kind of title you'd expect from a long-copy copywriter, but it's worth reading for his list of 57 points to consider in advertising. Part of marketing is about breaking down walls to acceptance, which is what I really got out of the 57 points. So the last thing you want to do is build a wall to conversion right out of the gate.

In other words, this is my long-winded way of saying that I agree with lionhearted.
Some of this was covered by Dan Ariely in his TED talk on the "Predictably Irrational."

http://www.ted.com/talks/dan_ariely_asks_are_we_in_control_o...
Seems like T-Mobile should upgrade their network.
California cities are lowering standards to raise revenue
oh i see! That's rather unfortunate. Some websites steal the keyboard focus or have iframe buster that swallow the whole page.

I didn't find an elegant solution in order to avoid this yet. In the meantime, please consider the site as a proof of concept and try with an other letter ;-)
You forget though that you've studied all this stuff. Casual users of your thing won't have.

So when you say "Give me your Twitter username and password", they'll say no. It doesn't matter that it's actually safe. It certainly doesn't sound safe, and that's all that matters.

Argue against it at your own peril. People are comfortable with user/pass.
I don't make the rules, but my feeling is that content should be judged based on value, not who posted it.

The last thing I would want to see is a Digg-like divide between content super-sharers and content creators, trying to get their content seen.

I think it's awesome that we have smart people on HN creating good content, and we should embrace that, not mute it by frowning on self-posting.
Yes many of my friends feed their twitter straight to Facebook aswell. It's quite annoying to me. There is a Facebook app to do it. There's another facebook app that will only update your facebook if your tweet contains "#fb", which is a much better way
This is great - we've been looking for a scheduling app to replace an Excel sheet that we've been using, and this is close to what I had in my head.

One thing we'd happily pay for would be the ability to have finer grained resourcing. So instead of just saying who is working on what project, say precisely when they are working on it.

The goal would be for every person in my team to look at this in the morning to see what they need to work on that day or week.

Is this something you had planned?

Great start for 2 days work though!
Amazing, for something built in 48 hours. Very slick!
Plus when you submit something, you get the feedback of the hivemind, which is usually quite thoughtful.
I buy on the growth story in an industry I understand.
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The "parallel" in moreutils is an unfortunate naming collision, it is a trivial (< 200 LOC) program that is in no way comparable to GNU parallel.
My team built a lightweight news aggregator aggregator(http://agragr.com) which pops things up as they hit the front page in various places. So far I'm finding it's replaced a couple of tabs I would normally have open.

The stand out project I've seen so far is probably http://desksnear.me for finding nearby desks that are available.
If you really need to lease resources by the hour then by all means, go with virtualized servers. But for one of the web apps I'm building I know that there's a high chance that I'll need to keep the servers around for at least a year. The prices on e.g. hetzner.de (I'm not a customer, I just read about it on HN) totally blows EC2 Reserved Instances out of the water.

I don't know why you consider dedicated servers capital assets. Maybe if you're colocating your own servers, but I plan on renting dedicated servers that a hosting company provides. They'll be responsible for replacing the hardware if it fails.

Turns out that renting a dedicated server and colocating your own costs approximately the same, assuming that the hardware never fails. If the hardware does fail then renting a dedicated is cheaper.
Perhaps a minor issue, but a bit of a turn off for me: you have to include "http:// in your url. Otherwise you get some snarky comment like "You'll need to provide me with a valid url, matey" which is even more aggrevating given that the address was a correct one. I suggest you allow people to miss this - it's more to type and I'm guessing most people are used to just bunging an address into their browser without protocol qualification.

if (!url.startsWith("http://) {
url = "http:// + url;
}

(Edit: for some reason the closing quotes are being stripped)
Even Under New Captain, Yahoo Seems Adrift
The Facebook Money Machine
I assume I missed something obvious: how can I add a task and an estimate duration ?

Or isn't it possible ?
A classic work.
Spoiler alert for the first point.
Google Refine aka Freebase Gridworks (tool for working with messy data)
Of the ~$200 I've spent on apps, only about $10 of that is on apps I still use. I'd be happy to switch to a new ecosystem but I don't find anything compelling on Android yet.
That's the ticket, kowtow to brutal dictatorships to win their favor. That always works.
I was there, and liked the talk.

One of the questioners asked pg if the trend of Google/Facebook (and to a lesser degree, Apple/Microsoft) buying out companies for $20-30 mil to get engineering talent is sustainable. pg's answer was more or less "Who knows?" but I wonder if others have additional thoughts.

To me, it seems like a terribly inefficient system. The actual promising startup idea/engineering gets thrown out. The cost per new hire is absurdly high. And it doesn't seem all that likely that a successful entrepreneur will be as successful inside a larger company (especially with a few million in his/her back pocket).

At the same time, Zuckerberg said that Facebook has been happy buying talent and is likely to accelerate the pace of acquisitions in the future... so who knows.
SEO Tricks : Basic But Most Important | Tricks Window
Ask HN: Cost-based pricing for hosted web-apps?
Given that..

- building software is getting easier and cheaper [1],

- one can reach a larger segment of small businesses and easily win them over with affordable pricing [2],

- mapping your cost model (based on cpu, bandwidth and storage) to a different pricing model (users, records) is a difficult problem to get right [3].

As software developers, why should we frown-upon or try to avoid cost-based pricing for hosted web apps ?

[1] Enabled by services like Google App Engine..

http://code.google.com/appengine/docs/billing.html

[2] Being low-cost is one of the best options available for start-ups..

Start by writing software for smaller companies, because it's easier to sell to them. ...if you want to win through better technology, aim at smaller customers.

They're the more strategically valuable part of the market anyway. In technology, the low end always eats the high end. It's easier to make an inexpensive product more powerful than to make a powerful product cheaper. So the products that start as cheap, simple options tend to gradually grow more powerful till, like water rising in a room, they squash the "high-end" products against the ceiling.

From : http://www.paulgraham.com/start.html

[3] My thoughts about this mismatch, blogged in "Why freemium pricing model for CRM / Online databases needs to change"..

http://rrajkumar.wordpress.com/2010/10/13/why-freemium-pricing-model-for-crm-online-databases-needs-to-change/
I really dig the simplicity of it. It's the first time I managed to fully understand a presumably minimalistic project management service in under a minute. I feel comfortable sharing this with friends and fellow students without fearing that I have to explain everything.

I would love to be able to embed images and code, though. A service like present.ly stands out better in this regard. At the moment, I don't know how well I would use it in a CS study group without at least a <code> tag.