skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Independence: People's opinions aren't determined by the opinions of those around them.

Haven't you ever noticed on Reddit: foo makes a comment, and then foo's comment karma drops to 0. All of a sudden, it goes way down to -3. Then bar makes a positive reply and gets a large karma score, and all of a sudden foo's comment shoots back up to 10 karma or more.

Well, people really are influenced by the opinions of others. If someone's downvoting someone, the majority of people are going to agree that downvoting that someone is a good idea. If a group of people are beating up someone, more people join in and beat up that someone.

Did you hear about the Juneteenth mob that pulled someone out of their car and beat them? Someone thought that was a good idea, and all of a sudden hundreds of people thought that was a good idea.
thanks - i fixed it.
The problem with f# is that its basically one guy working on it. If he were to get hit by a car, the language would die. I stopped using it until it is no longer a MS research project.
The world Godin presents is definitely scary for me. I value my feeling of privacy, but as he points out it is only an illusion. The need for this illusion of anonymity is strong in our society because people don't want to take responsibility for their actions, or are ashamed.
The kind of openness described by Godin requires a new paradigm and therefore can only be currently adopted by few.
I'll put some ads for now. At this moment, I have no business model. I guess time will show what's best to do
"But there are open source projects that are tackling important Web 2.0 problems "up the stack." Brad Fitzpatrick's LiveJournal scaling tools memcached, perlbal, and mogileFS come to mind, as well as OpenID."

memcached et al date from well before the annoying, useless, vague term "Web 2.0". as does Lucene, Nutch, and other interesting work Cutting has done.

collaborating on software that's only useful if you have servers that are getting tens of thousands of hits a day is hard. it automatically reduces the pool of potential participants to be very small.

fuck Bill O'Reilly for wanting to turn everything into something that relates to his dumb conferences/speeches/whatever. and fuck "software as a service". jesus.
Apparently the subreddit idea is gonna be taken to the next level when they release the new reddit.
Buxfer Adds Payments; Now Perfect For Settling Your Bar Tab
reddit and digg, et al have often been called democratizing sites -- it seems like the tragedy of democracy in general also applies to these sites. Initially, the smartest people understand how different and better the system is than what's out there. As more people catch on, the quality decreases since new users aren't quite as interested in new, big ideas (and appear to be content with pictures of cats).

Once the quality of content slips a little, the early adopters leave and find a better place for content and a downward spiral begins. (see also: wikipedia circa 2004, US politics, etc)

I know for myself that Startup News has helped fill the void of interesting content I used to consistently get from reddit. Anyone know of new sites out there that might be more like old-fashioned reddit?
If your server isn't in the States, it is easier for the USA to spy on you. They don't need the PATRIOT act; they don't need to ask at all.
I know you just pasted the title in caps the way you found it, but it would be nice to re-type the title so it is easier to read.
Om Malik wants people to Email Him Instead
"fuck Bill O'Reilly for wanting to turn everything into something that relates to his dumb conferences/speeches/whatever. and fuck "software as a service". jesus."

I think you actually are referring to Tim O'Reilly. (but fuck Bill O'Reilly too)

What's wrong with software as a service, aside from the fact that it's a buzzword?
First TechStars Company Launches
Somewhat self-serving, but I've launched a new social news site focused on business topics:

http://www.DailyHub.com

The content is good and the traffic is steadily growing.
What are the News.YC rules of startups?
With all the lists floating around I'm interested to see what everyone thinks are the golden rules of starting up.
Haha, you're awesome Budu3.

We're social networking with customizable webpages. So think facebook but instead of profile pages, you get let's say, a Wiki-based profile page.
Twitter, Indeed Backer Involved In Name Game
Facebook Reunites Man With Birth Mother
As someone learning both Perl and Lisp right now, I'm going to disagree on mere cosmetics as the main thing that scares people away. I'd also disagree that the reasons people get scared away are the same for each language. Perl is scary because there's loads of arbitrary syntax and shortcuts that you have to memorize. Lisp is scary because there are some unusual concepts that need to be learned before you can accomplish anything useful.

When learning Perl, I often find myself thinking "how do I do X?" Then I go look up the trick to doing X. When learning Lisp, I find myself thinking "I know I'll be able to do X, once I understand these rudiments well."

Consider the accumulator generator: http://www.paulgraham.com/accgen.html.

How would you assign the generated accumulator function to a variable and call it?

In Perl, you look up the syntax for assigning the returned function to a variable(or just guess and you'll probably be right). Then, you look up the syntax for calling the stored function (if you guess you'll probably be wrong).

$s = foo(5);

&$s(1);
&$s(1);
$s->(1);

In common lisp (I used CLISP), you can copy the Perl way of just using a value assignment, then using the apply or funcall function to call the stored function. This is all in Chapter 2 of On Lisp

(setq s (foo 5))

(apply s '(1))
(apply s '(1))
(funcall s 1)

Or, you can learn how to assign using symbol-function, and then you'll be able to call stored function like any other:

(setf (symbol-function 's) (foo 5))

(s 1)
(s 1)

In Python, just guess and you'll be right:

s = foo(5)

s(1)
s(1)

In my opinion, the Python version is by far the most intuitive. Call the function, assign the result to a variable, which is then callable like any other function. Lisp is more flexible and fun but takes more time to understand some aspects of the underlying interpreter. Perl is almost just like Python except I have to remember to put the right ASCII characters around my variables to get the right behavior. There doesn't seem to be a way to call a stored function just like you'd call any other function in the language. You'll always need that ampersand or the arrow. That's really annoying, just like it was really annoying in BASIC to have to use "CALL" to call a subroutine, and how you need wrapper objects in Java to call any Method. Maybe there is a way to do it, but it's probably completely random and buried in the documentation somewhere.
It's weird. Adblock seemed to be blocking them. No idea what filter I wrote that would have done that.
Dear staunch
Thanks for telling me about ServerBeach! They look absolutely amazing ( as long as they really do have 99.9% uptime ;) ). They've set up my account within an hour. The 10mbit line is great!

I'm posting here since I can't find your email address. But thanks!

Shawn
Would this be called news ycomb spam. 42 points. yea right this is a hot story.
Everyone has their own beliefs, but in general I would say: Build something users want, release early and release often, and spend as little money as possible in the process.
Daniel: We really need to revisit the legalese, We already got rid of a couple minor clauses in there. But, it's just that lawyers are very conservative naturally, and development effort foreshadowed going over the terms very carefully. We will take care of that by the end of the day.

In terms of alternatives, Amazon is the alternative to Paypal. We hope though that our app will be an important use-case for driving the payments functionality, especially for the younger crowd.
I'd like a reference page for the markup syntax used in comments.
Wouldn't netvibes be better off in making a facebook app, not the other way around.
I wonder how many page views facebook will lose if everyone uses e-mail [again] instead of facebook messages.
Facebook Losing Advertisers
A number of high-profile advertisers have apparently pulled their ads from Facebook after their ads were displayed next to a profile of the BNP.
Wow, nice idea and executed excellently. One week? I gather you are a webdev in your day job then? XHTML Strict, jquery etc...

A couple of suggestions: For about 20 secs I couldn't figure out what this site was. Maybe a helpful tagline close to the logo? The vertical list of arenas next to the videos jerks a bit as I hover. A little unsettling. Some extra margin or padding for those boxes should fix it.

Try some viral angle - "Tell a Friend" or something. Maybe a Gabbly box to chat with anyone else who is on at the same time.

Best of luck. I hope you don't get porned.
not many, i would think... a lot of facebook's usage is driven by the need to have "public" communication - like the Wall, for example.
I looked and all the votes are from legit accounts.
I often see stuff getting upvotes from sockpuppets,
but there is no sign of that here. I think it's simply
that a lot of readers of this site know the Xobnis.
Most news aggregation is a waste of time for readers. But I used to enjoy reddit much more than I do now. Another commenter's point about subreddits is totally right. I have so much fatigue when it comes to politics, that I just can't read reddit anymore.

Pictures of cats are ok though. My googleReader LOL folder is pretty big :)
The paperwork that YC uses is for a Delaware C Corp.
Let's not turn this into digg, shall we?
Yes, I made a similar point here: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33903

Unfortunately I don't know of any sites that compare well.
There needs to be dynamic subreddit creation with distinct moderation systems for each. This would allow the creation of sub-communities, much as you see w/ the programming reddit.

I think this needs to be thought about more as community creation, not just news aggregation.
perhaps clearer if I wrote 'profitability and the quality of the content'
Nice concept, nice design. Great job vuknje.

But there is a bug in there. If you click multiple times fast enough(or if the same arena is opened in multiple tabs before i start voting ), it accepts each click as a valid vote.

Do not depend on UI components/client side script for validation.

And in UI, it says "New Arenas (1 - 10) " although it shows only 1-3 (/new.php)

Hope this helps. All the best vuknje.
Build something you would use too. That way, you would also have that vested interest to improve upon it.
First 3rd party native iPhone application released
How long do you think it will be until Apple patches the iPhone to stop this application?
William Golding: Thinking As A Hobby
You've talked about the consequence (programmers make less money), but you haven't defended your status quo. Another way to phrase your statement is "Barring market manipulation, Super Expensive Program 9000 isn't worth writing." Which should explain everything.
Anyone interested in Scala technical discussions?  Do you know of a good forum for that purpose?
The papers here look quite interesting:

http://www.scala-lang.org/docu/papers.html
http://blog.reddit.com/2007/07/new-reddit-on-horizon.html
I've been thinking about a cheap, scalable, multi-gigabit server, complete with about 40 gigs of ram, tcp offload engines and session logging. Prices on all of these parts have gone down and it might be something to pursue. Who needs a netscalar?!?
very cool. let's keep our fingers crossed.
I think to get wisdom out of really large crowds you need something like pagerank.
Yah, the after-the-fact layer of beauty doesn't work so much. I had to push pretty hard recently for a redesign of an interface _before_ work began on a port to a new architecture.

Somehow folks thought they would build everything, then make it better/usable/pretty. But the process needs to be the other way around at such a critical time.
Man.. The title is the most important part of a post. What kind of information do you get from "Ka-Ching!"? Nada.

Oh, yeah.. Yay, flexible credit card service. That's awesome!
Two papers that look particularly good:

http://lamp.epfl.ch/~phaller/doc/haller07coord.pdf

http://lamp.epfl.ch/~emir/written/MatchingObjectsWithPattern...
Bear Stearns: Yahoo Must Form A Social Networking Strategy
build...sell...retire (just kidding)

Building a Product People Want (seems like PG's single golden rule)
How humiliating. A stock broker telling Yahoo what their strategy should be. The concept is so weird the title's hard even to parse.

They'd never dare offer Google such advice, though it's entertaining to imagine what G's reaction would be if they tried.
OK, it's not adblock. There are now no voting buttons I can find anywhere on the site, either on the home page, or on arena pages. I tried in Firefox (2) and in IE (7).
Never, if they're smart. Just let hobbyists do their thing.
Piracy HAS become one-click easy because information is not scarce anymore. The fifteen your old of today that you think should be able to pirate software has no choice but to download it in a ridiculously easy manner.

There's no turning back now, unless there's an international movement to start policing the internet which involves cutting off countries that have been declared piracy havens from the rest of the internet. This, of course, contradicts the principles of the internet.

I'm too much of a moral relativist to think the Pirate Bay is evil. Stalin was evil. George W. Bush is evil. Making something people want (one click access to free information) is not evil. Laws are not inherently good and violating laws is not inherently evil.

I'll admit that it's not practical for all information to suddenly be free, but in the long run, information will be free. In the meanwhile, people like you and me get to argue about how free our information should be. This debate is part of the process of freeing our information.
I think the Facebook valuation is a bit much at $4.5 to $7 billion.

My reasons:

+Web startups should not be valued over 10 yrs, this is demonstrably much longer than most significant startups last Also consumers in the web world have short attention spans.

+Esitmated Prime page views aren't validated

+Prime CPM growth rate increases 400+% over 10 years, which even after adjusting for inflation seems to be a strech.

I think facebook will lose value over the coming year. If they wish to sell, they must do it soon. This is because the industries understanding of the valuations for acquisitions such as DoubleClick will correct. The multiples are too high.
The younger you are, the less Godin's world will bother you.
Paul Buchheit: The first thing that you need to understand about humans
Er.. What? The developer can price it at whatever he wants. If no competition exists, that price can be very high. That's not manipulation, that's capitalism.
Social bookmarks in Google search
Okay. So for someone like me, in a position where I have very little money and I want to get out of that situation, to hear "Whatever people make should be free" is just silly. Yes, open source is wonderful, and I really want to contribute to it. But needing to feed myself everyday and to pay for my car and a place to live takes precedence.

Would you tell PG that Viaweb should've been free? Why? Because it's a service? There's no fundamental difference between a service and a piece of desktop software, except you can't steal it.
Amazon Flexible Payment Service
When this was posted, ~50,000 songs were uploaded. Now it is at 75,800. Nice

I've has some trouble uploading though.
Twitter Is Now An Extension Of My Blogging
80K
Facebook Is Not For Business
Lock-in becomes a Web 2.0 issue
Markus Frind: Time to sell?
This is great! Great writing Paul, thank you for examining this.
You summed it up yourself. The fundamental difference between a service and a piece of desktop software is that you can't steal it.

In a society where everyone has access to free software and an internal moral compass is the only thing that deters us from piracy, it doesn't make a whole lot of sense to release desktop software with no service component.
I find it interesting that the degeneration of these sites into 'mob rule' is the exact thing the founders of the constitution anticipated and put safeguards in place against. Who said,'The best argument against democracy is a conversation with the average person'? Maybe we can find some answers in the philosophy of government...
"... The evening arrived; the boys took their places. The master, in
his cook's uniform, stationed himself at the copper; his pauper
assistants ranged themselves behind him; the gruel was served
out; and a long grace was said over the short commons. The gruel
disappeared; the boys whispered each other, and winked at Oliver;
while his next neighbors nudged him. Child as he was, he was
desperate with hunger, and reckless with misery. He rose from
the table; and advancing to the master, basin and spoon in hand,
said: somewhat alarmed at his own temerity:

'Please, sir, I want some more.' ..." ~ http://www.gutenberg.org/dirs/etext96/olivr11.txt

In other words attack Tims poor stand on "software as a service" doing everyone a disservice as software might again slip into hands of Dickensian like masters where users are reduced to begging for permission to access to fix a piece of buggy software critical to their business and communication. See 'Eben Moglen' challenge for Tim ~ http://www.linux.com/feature/118201

"... Let's not turn this into digg, shall we? ..."

ie: Meaning no 'argumentum ad hominem' attacks on every Tim, Dick or Jane. Go for the ideas, not the man ~ http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ad_hominem
A new outlet for self-expression: home-made video games.
I think this is applicable to both male and females.
There's a difference: I own the code that's on my server, but the artist does not own the music that's on my desktop; I do (logically, if not legally). If I sell software to someone, and then they want to sell copies, that's their right. I use licenses which explicitly recognize that right, but even if I didn't it should still be up to them, except where contractually barred.

If the artist wants to keep people from selling music they've produced, they're free to do so, by not selling it or giving it away. When they've sold something, however, it's not up to them to control another's actions indefinitely.

Obviously this is heavily at odds with current law where I live, but fortunately it's easy to get around said law by using licenses which give legal weight to rights a person should have with respect to easily copied materials.
The Pirate Bay is competition, once he's given away or sold the first copy.
It's not that "whatever people make should be free". It's that buying something should not automatically restrict your rights to what you already own. If you can figure out how to make a non-easily-copied copy, then you won't need to forcefully (with law) restrict people from using their own computers after purchasing your copy. But the ease of copying (and thus competition) doesn't justify using force.

Web applications are one way to solve the problem of "how do I sell use of software without making the copy they're using easily copied". Other ways include, for example, DRM, but web applications are a far more robust solution than DRM, for the class of applications they can provide solutions for.
Amazon's New API Competes With Paypal, Google Checkout
When I'd first caught wind of an "Amazon FPS" I was hoping for some awesome DOOM 3/online commerce mashup. It turns out that I was way off on that one.
Taking someone's work and repackaging it as free without paying the owner is stealing, not competition.
You summed it up yourself. Stealing desktop software is just that: stealing. Continue to steal other people's work (obviously nothing will change your mind), but don't lie to yourself by thinking it's not stealing. It is.
How would you write a web application to deliver some music without being able to steal it? You can't. It's not a panacea. People have to be moral. If you're 15, fine, steal it, because you can't buy it anyway, and it's not hurting anyone. If you're 25 and you have money, don't be selfish. It is stealing. And if it's stealing, then laws apply. They protect ownership rights.
Copying music or a movie or software in violation of its license terms is not really stealing. When you steal something, the other person doesn't have it anymore. E.g. if someone steals my watch, I don't have a watch. But the owner of IP doesn't have an actual loss when you copy it without permission. At most they forego some revenue they feel they're entitled to.

People in the music industry have been doing their best to stretch the despised word "stealing" over onto this new behavior they want to discourage, but that doesn't make it so.

At best it's a metaphor to call illicit copying "stealing," but really more of a lie.
The artist (or record company) /does/ own the copyrights to the music on your desktop.

When you purchased their music, you most likely entered an agreement not to reproduce/distribute it.
Very thought provoking. And I agree with your conclusions but I get there via a different route that is contradictory to your route at least on a semantic basis.

I like to assume that a person tends to act rationally within his internal mental framework. Even a "crazy" person.

I might have got these ideas from Pirsig's _Lila_ but I'm not sure since I read it a long time ago. Regardless he would break down the framework into categories such as chemical, biological, social and intellectual.

If you want to understand a befuddling person then you need to try to understand the framework within which he is operating.

Understanding the framework of "the mass consumer" is what makes Clotaire Rapaille wealthy. If people didn't operate rationally within such a framework it would not be possible for him to make accurate predictions about consumer preferences.

The more self-aware a person is the more that person consciously understands his own framework. Some people understand their frameworks very well, but many people are totally blind to them. If you talk to people who have these blinders and you take what they say at face value you will have bad data and you will draw bad conclusions.

Another important related factor is that of honesty. Someone who understands his framework well does not necessarily want to reveal it and thus might obfuscate. A person who does not understand his framework might be afraid to say "I don't know" and will spew rationalizations rather than the truth.

How does this relate to your examples?

I don't want to speculate about what is going on in the split-brain case.

Physical attractiveness is recognized by pre-rational parts of the brain (Pirsig's "biological" category). Evolution gave us that ability to help select fertile mates and healthy friends and leaders. Within this evolutionary/biological framework the favors given to an attractive person are completely "rational". The problem with the attractive criminals comes from the court making decisions at the biological level that should be made at the social and intellectual levels.

"The people at Chrysler" must have been dealing with self-unaware people and did not realize that fact. Rapaille knew who he was dealing with and approached the problem by trying to understand the frameworks rather than relying on the people to directly tell him what they want.

The woman with the umbrella likely is not honest. She could not admit, "I don't know what I'm doing with this umbrella." And so she chose to rationalize. Whether or not this was a conscious decision depends on how well she consciously understands her own framework.

(This is the second time in as many days that I've mentioned Pirsig on this site. I don't know why as I've not read or thought about the books in a long time, but it's making me want to reread them!)