skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
so true. I liked digg, honestly, and far past the "early adopter phase". Then it seemed like every front page story was either about what Microsoft was doing wrong (HOLY SHIT MSFT DID THIS!!!!), what new liberties Bush was taking away, etc. Or, of course, a recursively titled "Digg gains ground on slashdot", etc.
I from the 'burbs. Are there any informal bar-camp type things coming up?
I beg to differ. If you compare the average member of a hunting-gathering society to the average farmer, then sure, the hunter-gatherer has more time. That's because the farmer farms very intensively, and feeds everybody else in the society. If you take the average member of a farming society, on the other hand, probably about 1.5% of his waking time is spent farming. (3% of the population farms, and each farmer maybe spends half or maybe a little more of his waking time farming). Thus, farming does, in fact, lead to time freed up from acquiring food, but it does so unequally, letting those who choose to farm farm, and letting everybody else do something else.
I think this is my favorite response ever to anything I've ever written.

I look forward to your rebuttal - if you could post a link to it in the Blogger comments, that would be ideal...
Related posts:

http://weblog.fortnow.com/2006/07/science-and-art-of-computa...

http://www.paulgraham.com/hp.html
"You should go home if you are thinking suicidal thoughts. You should take a break or go home if you think homicidal thoughts for more than a few seconds. You should send someone home if they show serious mental malfunctioning or signs of mental illness beyond mild depression. If you are tempted to be dishonest or deceptive in a way that you normally are not due to fatigue, you should take a break. Don't use cocaine or amphetamines to combat fatigue. Don't abuse caffeine."

Godda love those big companies.
Social Networks as a Mobile Device Enabler
This article certainly is well documented... still I don't see why agriculture is a mistake. Yes, our ancestors were intelligent enough to understand that progress usually involves a temporary loss of comfort to achieve long-term benefits. Why is it a mistake?
It's hard to manipulate markets when someone else knows what you're up to -- especially if you intend to make any money at it.

http://hanson.gmu.edu/biastest.pdf
I'm certainly no fan of Haskell. But I do like Scala very much and it did come out of academia.
It still does not make sense. Humans were in a hunter-gathering mode for quite some time. If they were so much healthier, AND had more free time, why did the society start rapidly progressing only with the advent of agriculture? Did they just magically become smart? I'm sorry, but no. While this article is certainly interesting, and thought provoking, the thesis doesn't hold.
Not to pick a fight here or anything but in your original message, you implied something completely different. You implied that the hunter/gatherers would have no time to make any discoveries since they'd be off looking for food all the time.

Second, one of Diamond's premises in this essay seems to be that farming and its consequences are, directly or indirectly, the cause of the malaise in the world (over-crowding, wealth inequality, class structure, war etc).

So I think the point is that with farming you get free time, but also all the bad things mentioned above. What Diamond is arguing is that hunter/gatherers didn't have to deal with most (all?) of the negatives but still had plenty of free time to pursue their leisure. That is, civilization might not have been set back just because we didn't adopt farming. In the end, it was sheer numbers that decided the outcome, not the best method.
Why thank you. =)
You might want to be careful about anachronism when stating facts.

It is true that very few today farm, but take into account that, within the past century alone, the yield of farmers has increased by an order of magnitude, not to mention the millennia of domestication and invention before it. For most of agricultural history, the percentage of farmers was much higher than 3%.

For example, from Wikipedia's article on Roman Agriculture:

>In the Roman Empire, a typical family of 3.25 persons would need between 7-8 iugera of land to meet minimum food requirements (without animals). If a family owned animals to help cultivate land, then 20 iugera is needed. There would not be a surplus production on this farm.
This is a good read, although what was most interesting about it for me was the inescapable feeling I was reading a weblog.

I actually didn't get that feeling with Joel or Paul's essay compilations. But in this book he has footnotes which are URLs, name-checks blog favorites like Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi, and has chapters of long-blog-post length. Not a bad thing, just something I found unusual.
Mephisto: Elegant and Powerful Weblog-Engine
I'm going to the whiteboard!
> Second, one of Diamond's premises in this essay seems to be that farming and its consequences are, directly or indirectly, the cause of the malaise in the world (over-crowding, wealth inequality, class structure, war etc).

And he's not wrong; because farming is progress, and progress brings good things as well as bad things. But, as we're an intelligent species, we recognize bad things (yes, it takes generations) and work around them.
They didn't suddenly become smart and you certainly cannot attribute all the developments to the adoption of agriculture. Progress has been very... erratic (can't find the right word) throughout history.

To blindly attribute progress to a singular cause such as farming is short sighted. I'm sure there are many different variables (farming included) that influence progress and discovery.
1. I didn't write the original message.

2. Yeah, we have overcrowding, inequality, classes, and war. There are bugs in agriculture. Overcrowding just means that most people aren't dying off quickly like they did when there wasn't farming. Inequality just means that some people are now wealthy, where before nobody was wealthy. I'd bet war happened before, too; it just happens on a larger scale now because everything happens on a larger scale now.

3. You can't do most kinds of technology, education, or pretty much any other kind of endeavor if you have to spend all your time near enough naturally growing sources of food to not spend all your time in transport. Most kinds of art and technology come from concentrating appropriate quantities of appropriate kinds of people in one place. That's the point of universities, conservatories, and, for that matter, companies. Most interesting things in the world come from concentrating people.
Well, all right, so agriculture sucked for a long time. It's still the case that the precursors to many of the good things we have today (e.g. computers) come from concentrating people in cities, which comes from farming.
Again you're equating farming with progress. Can you say that if we hadn't adopted farming that wouldn't have made progress?
Sorry, you're right... you didn't write the message. My mistake :)
Ok, time for a bit of hand wringing. I said I'd wait a week, but this needs to be pointed out. In the space of one day, we've gone from startup news to rehashed reddit news.

http://reddit.com/info/3895/comments

Not only that, but the article itself is 20 years old, and is not an attitude I have read in Diamond's later works like 'Collapse', where he certainly underlines the dangers and problems that face the human race, but does manage to strike a good balance between gloomy and cautiously optimistic about the possibility for improvement.

Harumph.
I think it is moreso the ability to settle in one place that caused the growth of technology. The hunter-gatherers, no matter how numerous, certainly did not spend their free time building forges and experimenting with metal.

Also note that the time spent gathering food likely does not include preparing to gather food (e.g.: making weapons). Although they could spend plenty of time playing games, note that games originated to prepare children to spend time gathering food (and practice other necessary survival skills).
If we had stick with hunting/gathering, obviously it would not have been progress.
I don't read reddit, anyway, I guess it takes time to find out what is considered appropiate for the new hacker news. I went by the definition of "is not shown on TV". It's 20 years old, but old articles have been posted before, and I only found it today... If nobody is interested, nobody will mod it up?

Besides, I thought this article also relates to startupping, because of the average work hours aspect. But granted, Jared Diamond is not exactly unknown.
It's not that bad a link... it just seems so drastic a change:-/ It seems also to illustrate that the intersection of interesting startup links is very well defined, whereas the intersection of interesting 'hacker news' is rather less well defined, and will probably be more prone to disagreement, even if the people posting are the same ones as with the old yc.news, because our interests and beliefs are likely to be quite varied.

Add to that people who didn't see or take part in the original, and while I hope the change will go ok, it will be a lot of work.
That would just wreck your eyes.
Question of the Day: Tortoise or Hare?
i'm from the burbs too. i don't know what's coming up. opencoffeeclub was yesterday.
That is true, but my point was merely countering the assertion that ancient farming cultures had more average free time than ancient hunter-gatherer cultures. I don't dispute that agriculture allowed technology to eventually flourish in the slightest; hundreds of millenia of slow-progress pre-agricultural prehistory are strong evidence of that.
How to Stay Motivated
Repeatedly on Reddit, e.g. http://science.reddit.com/info/1rssu/comments

Agriculture simply multiplied everything. Hunter-gatherers still had and have tribal wars, murder, rape, rapine, torture, high infant mortality, much lower male life expectancy (due to fighting), plus the usual disease, famine, and social inequality of women.

The average college student in a dorm room enjoys greater luxury and comfort than kings of yesteryear; they have climate control, hot and cold running water, antibiotics, corrective eyewear, and of course a far greater selection of food year-round, not to mention a better selection of healthy mates.

Whether people are happier in modern technological society or hunter-gatherer society is almost beside the point; evolution seems to have selected for worried, discontented people -- they outcompete the easily satiated. Even as we precipitate the extinction of traditional hunter-gatherer lifestyles, we can imagine them at some point in the past wiping out even less technologically-savvy people who perhaps were even more happy and contented, leading an existence akin to our bonobo relatives. A similar article written then by gatherers might blame the widespread adoption of hunting for increasing societal violence and leading to a new class division: warrior, due to the ensuing upswing in human-human "hunting".

Increased population can be thought of as a tool; it has been exploited for ill much of the time, but it can also be used for the betterment of all. When we start to live in "The Matrix" (a pleasurable one), we may well rely on aquaculture to produce high-yield algae we farm for biofuel and for nutrients for our IV drips. At that point we may instead regard agriculture, regardless of temporary blips, as the best thing to happen to humanity.
I live in the city north side - Lincoln Square. What are you guys working on? Web apps I presume?
Number 3 Startup Hub? 
So it's pretty obvious that the Bay Area is startup hub #1, and Boston is #2, but what is #3?

New York? Boulder? Chicago? Seattle?

Follow-up question - what cities that are not the top three seem to have the most potential to become #3?
The filtering by the wise guardians probably hasn't yet kicked in, either ;-) Time will tell if the filter mechanism will help to move hacker news into a specific (desired) direction.
Seattle, I'm told.
If you don't allow downvoting of stories then you get this, so you have to ignore some stories. But that's much better than the alternative, which is people banding together to bury certain stories that reach the front page (or before they do, if the karma threshold is above 2).
5 tools every PHP programmer should know about
Bad News And New CEOs at Technorati And Podtech
Wow. In my original post I edited out the last line, which was "I just hope the libertarians don't show up and fill up the site with Ayn Rand conversations, like every other social news site." Amazing!
AT&T cripples BlackBerry to make iPhone more appealing
I think he was really asking about the 5-day chart, which has a large stairstep upwards at 4:00 AM GMT on each day. The date range parameter apparently doesn't hotlink very well on Y!Finance.
I'm hoping for Atlanta to your second question. Quite sure it's not #3 now but there's a few of us working on it.
OTOH, people did vote it up, and I don't think it was bad... just... oh who knows, I can't figure it out. Back to hacking on Hecl.
Why is it depressing? It would be nice if SV was a give-guys-millions-to-make-cool-free-stuff industry, but that's not much of an industry. Revenue has to come from somewhere. Apparently, people are more willing to see ads than pay to use the product. If that's what's depressing, then your problem is not with SV but with what people want.
Too US Centric no?

Canada has got some pretty interesting startup scenes, Vancouver, Waterloo area and Ottawa come to mind.

And Europe is certainly not to be forgotten about, let alone India as well.

I'd be interested to see how things compare globally, although I think you've got 1 and 2 pegged.
There is a paradox present with being authentic (if we equate authenticity with "coolness" in this context). Malcolm Gladwell addresses this paradox in his piece, "The Coolhunt".

"In this sense, the third rule of cool fits perfectly into the second: the second rule says that cool cannot be manufactured, only observed, and the third says that it can only be observed by those who are themselves cool. And, of course, the first rule says that it cannot accurately be observed at all, because the act of discovering cool causes cool to take flight, so if you add all three together they describe a closed loop, the hermeneutic circle of coolhunting, a phenomenon whereby not only can the uncool not see cool but cool cannot even be adequately described to them."

Authenticity is important, but equally important is finding those customers who can recognize it's "coolness" for its given domain, and will tell others about its greatness (hopefully before the product's "coolness" takes flight).
This is really brilliant. Imagine what people would say if you traveled 50 years in the past and told them you could launch a new business in less than 11 hours.
Actually, in traditional agricultural societies, almost everyone is a farmer. There's a reason that the vast majority of people in the middle ages were serfs -- it took that many people to feed themselves plus everyone else.

You can actually gauge how advanced a post-agricultural civilization is based on the percentage of the population that works in the agricultural sector. Most thresholds of technological advance (most notably, the industrial revolution) have allowed a smaller farmer class to feed an entire society.
South Florida has far more. Retired New Jersey businessmen and south american drug dealers are more into the Bentley motif.
I think I just found my new favorite site for when I'm bored and out of ideas.

BTW...one of the top games listed there is 'Desktop TD 1.5'. If you liked WarIII TD's, give it a shot. Very addictive.

I wonder if they can get (or already have?) the guy who makes all the orisinal.com games. Those are some of the nicest Flash games around. Simple, beautiful, and fun.
This business would be analogous to a lemonade stand. The people in the past would understand it just fine.
Secret AdSense Online Advisory Council Revealed
it's not chicago, but it should be.
After working 8 hours, I end up avoiding working on my website. Instead I end up playing wow or watching TV. I long for school to start so I have more free time.
Not to discount this remarkable achievement, but a lemonade stand would have a business model ;)
The iPhone Is Internet Explorer 4 All Over Again
Sometimes folks forget that AdSense is a widget. :)
This is the kind of tangible analysis that I was looking for. I must giveaway that I'm my last degree was in systems engineering, so I completely understand this. Thanks!
"We have broken the speed of light"
Well, okay, but the point of the normal free time argument is that agricultural people have more time, and are therefore able to do more stuff. My point is, it may not be the case that agricultural people have more time on average, but it is the case that agricultural societies give enough people free time to do many more interesting things, and especially, enough free time to concentrate in cities and do things they couldn't do while not in cities. Which more or less negates the whole agriculture-is-a-mistake argument; once you show that agriculture lets you do lots of amazing things in cities, you can argue that those things are worth the various bugs in agriculture (most of which eventually get fixed anyway).
http://stupac2.blogspot.com/2007/08/we-have-not-broken-speed...

http://www.eurekalert.org/pub_releases/2007-08/ns-lst081607....
Agriculture is not exactly the reason for technological advances; rather, progress became possible (but not guaranteed!) thanks to agriculture.

While a few hunter-gatherer societies lived in a place so abundant that they can settle in a single location and gather everything they needed, the vast majority of such societies were migratory, moving to wherever the food was.

In a migratory society, most technological advances are simply not useful. When you only keep the things you can carry on your back, anything that doesn't have a direct use is an active hindrance with a quantifiable opportunity cost. Civilization is only possible when people can settle in one place.

Further, even hunter-gatherer societies that are fortunate enough to settle in a single place have to remain small to survive, or they exceed their food supply. This means that the chance of a given society developing a new technology is much smaller (given a smaller supply of creative individuals). It also means that even if a society does develop a new technology, that technology spreads very slowly, leading to less cross-pollination with other individuals and ideas.

By contrast, agriculture concentrates people together. There are a variety of technologies that increased the productivity of an agricultural society as a whole, and it's very natural for those technologies to spread throughout a society. Furthermore, agricultural societies that are more productive than their neighbors can produce more soldiers (when a smaller percentage of the population can feed the whole society, there is excess labor for armies, as well as other pursuits), allowing them to conquer their neighbors and spread their advances to their newly conquered territories. Basically, in an agricultural society, technology spreads like a virus.
Classmates.com goes public. What about Facebook?
Is this possible? I think classmates.com is the prototype for a horrible social networking. Paid content, extensive privacy, horrible layout and design characterize this site that was good idea executed badly. Now, you can invest in it:)
I would hope that it would be DC, but it's probably not. If we're talking about web startups. Could it be NYC?
Re: Boulder: Why not Fort Collins? Close to Denver, beautiful area, nice weather, college town, and - more than anything else - the place is just loaded with young people, and local businesses seem geared towards a younger market more so than most any place I can think of.
Yes, the so on means go to 0.5 for the next 2 hours.
Of course you have to tweak the parameters to get the desired results for your site. It how all depends on how much you value recent posts and votes, versus overall votes. I also subtract a value depending on how old the post is. The site I use this for doesn't have any users, but it seems to work well in my limited testing.
The Pareto Rule for Social Networks
How many agree with this assertion? Twenty percent of Facebookers drive eighty percent of the content - i.e. posted items, profile changes, notes, interesting wall posts. I guess that the same could go for MySpace or LinkedIn. There's always a small collection of people offering content, and many more just stalking and reading it. It could even go for this: Hacker News.
What metric do you think one should use to do the ranking? Absolute # of startups? Size of VC investment? Biggest nerd community?
If this counts as launching a startup then I've "launched" about 27 startups over the past 8 years. Others might call this a feature or clever hack. (not to denigrate at all what Mark did here - it's cool stuff, just not a startup in the traditional sense)
Agreed. I don't know about the particular %, but sure, you are always going to have some users more active than others. It is certainly true for Hacker News. I'm sure a significant % of people using this site haven't even bothered to register. Perhaps pg could enlighten us as to an estimate of the actual %?
Obnoxious. This article manifests the worst mistake in the contemporary world -- the triumph of modern cynicism over progressive idealism.
David Sifry Out as Technorati CEO, 8 Staff Too
I can't believe this article was up-voted. What does this have to do with hacking or startups???

I'm a little worried this site will go the way of reddit...
What's in Ottawa? (I grew up there)...
Has Facebook abandoned privacy?
What percentage of moviegoers are filmmakers? From that perspective, Facebook is unimaginably creator-driven.
Whatever metric you want. By whatever metric that everyone agrees that the bay area and boston are 1 and 2.
Norvig: Teach Yourself Programming in Ten Years
Not sure if this has been posted here or not, but I just came across it browsing Norvig's site. Thought I would share it.
Yahoo's data appears to be messed up. Maybe screwed up the trade date when dealing with different timezone... or something. Here's another couple free charts you can verify against:

http://chartsrdc.cme.com:443/cs/charts.jsp?_quickEntry=6E1%2...
http://www.dailyfx.com/charts/ChartStation.html

I realize the first is futures, but they match the spot market extremely well.
But isn't this because the tools of production for film are expensive and complicated?

Sure, in 5 years 20% of people won't be making hollywood films, but in 5 years it could be that 20% of moviegoers make their own movies on occasion.
No, AdSense is a business model in which there is a simple javascript widget interface. The model is money in exchange for advertising across billions(?) of websites. A startup is created and launched when there is a business model that uses the widget. Otherwise its a programming exercise. Any reasonable programmer can create a program in <10 hours, but unless there is a business model it is not a startup.
You have more free time in school than you do at your job?

School was way more time consuming for me.
Smarty Pants vs. Dumbass. The theory of lifehacking, and keeping your closet clean
The Boss is Back! - TvByDemand | Forums | WWE
Anyone who thinks hunter gatherers had pleasant lives should stop to think what happened to people who were too old to follow the tribe when it moved, or what happened when a mother who was already nursing had another baby.
Yes, probably Seattle, or maybe Austin.
word-recognition
What works for me is, while I'm at work I think of one little feature I want to accomplish. Then when I come home I immediately work on that feature, telling myself "When it's done I can take a break". Then I never take a break because I get so involved.

It's so satisfying watching a project come together and become polished and pretty that once I start polishing, I don't want to stop.
acrd-rovcgviticn