skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I'd like to point out that these reasons also apply to things other than products. In particular, going through that list it struck me that those points covered pretty most of the reasons I had for leaving online communities of one sort or the other. I'm not referring to just Web 2.0 environments like Digg or Reddit but rather to just about any online group of 3 or more people. From forums to mailing lists, these reasons all play a role.
That's nice, but are you really having to add a browser plugin to search a site isn't a really an ideal solution is it?
You're welcome... not entirely all your replies, just replies starting from yesterday and not more than 3 days old (can be adjusted).
Well, as an example of how you might go about doing that, I remember reading an article about a study that found that bad teachers don't get better with time, but they tend to cling on anyway because they get significantly more money each year.

One of the suggestions from that article was that to improve teaching quality, it might be worth offering a flat (higher than the current 1st-year and lower than the current 10th-year) salary to encourage people to try teaching for a couple of years after uni (since the salary would then be decent right away). This would also discourage people from clinging on to the job unless they really like it.

This is certainly not a solution that teachers' unions would advocate, but I suspect it could produce some positive effects, assuming the study I mentioned was correct, and assuming part of the problem is indeed the fact that many people who could be great teachers don't bother because they pay is very bad at the beginning and they can go and be bankers instead.

Of course I'm not an expert on this, so my theories may be wide off the mark, but I don't accept the idea that the pool of existing teachers can't be improved. I suspect that one of the reasons why private schools are indeed better than public schools is precisely that they can afford better teachers.

As for teachers' unions... I have little respect for a professional organisation that works against its own professional aim. I'm sure they can be taken care of in some way or another.
You'd have to provide some great incentives to balance the 25% lower salary. Free time is nice, but it's also free. If I value free time over a large paycheck to the extent that I'd be willing to give up that much salary, I'm basically just looking for a part time job. It sounds like the only difference is that you're allowed to use company resources for a side project. Is that enough?

I'm uncomfortable with the idea that not paying employees what they're worth will have a net benefit. You should pay your employees well in whatever ways you can reasonably do it (money, benefits, stake in the company, perks, even softer things like respect, trust, etc.) Compensating them with free time doesn't make any sense. They have just as much time as you do, and it's theirs to spend.
Even having a very beautiful girlfriend can't make you happy all the time. You can still cry while you are at the Disney Land.

All those studies failed to recognize that the state of happiness is not something infinite. And how can you understand and appreciate the happiness if you have never taste the wrath of sadness?

Yes, the studies show us the correlation between having kids and less happiness in people. But remember, correlation does not imply causation.
Nice subtle racism. "I'm not sure what the going rate on a Guatemalan hospital is, but I'm sure it's less than [1 million dollars]". A million dollars barely buys you an MRI machine - which would cost the same no matter where you are since it is an international market. A million dollars doesn't build a building, even if you think Mexico is cheaper, it is not 1/500th of the price.

Preceded by "try having .. a blog". Yes, the father/son connection and the blog/reader connection are definitely comparable. I see your point, and will now sever family ties in favor of blogging.

And then you site Bill Gates - as if that is a typical startup founder. Not even sure what that has to do with anything.
Tea Company had an IT Dept...in 1951
Is there any happy people who live without any sense of purpose and meaning?
I find bug trackers satisfying

I didn't, at least not until I started using Atlassian Jira to track bugs in our open source projects. What a difference a nice, organized system can make!

If anyone is dissatisfied with their current bug tracking systems I highly recommend Jira - Atlassian gives out free licenses to non-profit and open source organizations; and it's a really great product.
It's a lot better than nothing.

Also, this is the official plugin:
http://plugin.searchyc.com/
It is popularly interpreted literally, as inspirational and individualist, but critics universally interpret it as ironic

I prefer the popular interpretation.

I also prefer the opinions of civilians over "critics".
Could you clarify this?

(Perhaps with a poem.) :)
Thanks for this! You learn something new every day.

I'm curious how you found that out initially. I'm more focused on quantitative fields and would love to learn more about the liberal arts.
U.S. ad market a "slow leaking balloon," worst growth forecast in 6 months
The deep and strong custom of boys over girls is fascinating. In eastern Europe and a lot of other places, girls are the ones who are valuable, for obvious reasons. And by obvious I am talking in Darwinian terms.

So the only way I can think that a custom like that can survive is if people have no way to control the sex of children. But now suddenly they do.

It is hard to explain to people from the new world just how powerful culture can be. Old world tribal customs culture, not Mozart and Voltaire culture. You can fight and break laws, but do not ever break customs!

I've heard people say that a Chinese proverb about raising girls is something about watering someone else's garden. I worry things like that will go away only if the ancient customs' back is truly broken.

Let the ratio of girls to boys go completely out of hand. Then sit back and watch an old stupid custom die a painful death.
I think this is a bit harsh. There has been a lot of research on these issues, and the proposal of a 6-hour workday is pretty common among socialist parties in the Scandinavian countries, at least. It's not an unknown (or particularly novel) proposition.

I'm not the original poster, but I commented above my assent-- at my last start-up, we went with the traditional 8-hour day, but at my new one (where I am just beginning to hire people) I'll be using a 6-hour day (at the same salaries I used to pay people for 8.) Based on my practical experience in hiring and managing dozens of people at my last company, I'm making this decision-- I'll let you know how it turns out, once the data is in.
Having children is easy, and obviously billions of unremarkable people do it. But raising children well is extremely difficult. It requires hard work, deep thinking, and dedication.

"...some of the best kids in every generation come from the worst homes so 'doing it right' is hardly a value added activity."

And many of the worst people in every generation come from the worst homes. Doing it right is most definitely a value-added activity.
if mainland Chinese society made a shift to be more gender equal (politically and economically), this wouldn't be (or stay) a problem...

This is a ticking time bomb, both there and in India
I am a libertarian, and I am all for legalizing Marijuana, but god help me I am so tired of talking about legalizing Marijuana.

Or reading yet another article with yet another perfectly good reason to legalize it. I know, I agree! But reasoned out arguments is not why it is illegal.

The only kind of Marijuana article I'd ever want to see is a Machiavellian political strategy.
How many children do the 10 most powerful political leaders in China have? I'd be curious, if anyone knows.
For some jobs (e.g., assembly-line work, or being a receptionist), every hour that the employee is on the clock adds value to the company. For all other jobs, I don't think any rule of "you are expected to work X hours per day", whether X is 8 or 6, is really useful.

At the end of the day, er, performance-review period, either you've created value for your employer that justifies the salary they paid you, or you haven't. If you did, why should the employer care whether you did the job in 6, 8, or 10 hours per day? If you didn't, then some kind of remedial action needs to be taken, and the action is not necessarily "do what you were doing before, but for more hours". And if the employer can't gauge the value of an employee's contribution without referring to how many hours per week the employee showed up, then the employer has bigger problems.
I've always been fascinated how Hollywood can produce movies that are globally palpable.
Bet everybody else gets their untranslatable peanut butter (cultural quirks that don't cross borders) into the movie jelly.

Sure I can make a crack here about America having no culture, but that's not it. Hollywood is good at this. They have their business tight.
Rands interviewed via Twitter.
You Are What You Do
I'm not really criticising the idea itself here, more its presentation and backing. I'm a big fan of ROWE (Result Oriented Work Environment). In my start-up we don't have any such thing as working hours, and we don't intend to, ever, if we can help it. Ultimately, when we hire someone, we're not hiring them to sit on a chair for a certain time, I'm hiring them so they can do amazing stuff. If they can do the amazing stuff in half an hour before breakfast and spend the rest of the day playing computer games, all the better. Our start-up is still very small, but this is working for us at the moment.

This kind of system, in our case, is not the result of idle day-dreaming, however, but of about 15 years' worth of combined experiences working for other companies and seeing what works and what doesn't, and reading masses of literature on the subject. That makes it very different from simply saying "Oh, I think I'd work just as well with fewer working hours, and hey, it might even give some benefits" - which is just idle chatter and not worthy of an article, imho.
OpenTable Seats 3M diners per month, generates serious revenue
I think the article gets it wrong at the end. Family Guy got resurrected because Cartoon Network's Adult Swim played the old episodes almost every night. This got a lot more of Family Guy's would-be target audience interested in the show. It was that interest that woke Fox up to bring back Family Guy.

The same thing is happening now to Futurama. The formula appears to be to put shows on networks during time slots where their target audience already is and where it doesn't have to compete with unrelated content. Who knew?
And very often people will bash free markets with examples of corporations like that, but few will point out that there is a big difference between the corporatism we live in and truly free markets.
If you thought vista was late... oh the joys of The Big Rewrite...
Erlang isn't exactly new. Development started over 20 years ago and it has been open source for 10 years.

http://www.erlang.org/course/history.html
Google Map directions from Australia to California
Database Performance: The Web Layer
The future is bleak, but it's not what you think.

Birth control and education are like a virus that impacts fertility. Over time we will adapt. It used to the sex drive was enough to reproduce, in the future the specific desire to HAVE kids will replace that.

So the population will drop, then slowly turn around, but it will not end up in a balance. What you'll have is wealthy educated citizens of liberal democracies who absolutely have got have lots of kids.

We better have colonized space then.
And in fact what we all need is a good, commercial grade open-source Lisp compiler + tools.
"Although their research is quite interesting there are a few things which limit its practicality. They can only detect tunnels going through ssh servers which they control."

and only I control my server, so I'm good to go.
I can't find the exact quote or attribution, but someone once said, as a scientist, if you can't cure cancer in mice, you may as well hang up your hat.
Book Review: Ready for Anything
Bang & Olufsen design team avoids meetings/process and "sculpts" products little by little
This Day in History - June 2
This may not be the proper place to express this, but does anyone else find excessive linking in an article obnoxious? Can't they just quote and then cite at the end? Why do I need 9 tabs open to fully enjoy a short article?
I was a nerd in high school, and I was an athlete. Granted it was swimming in the Midwest which means practically nobody cared, but it was a sport. I would count my days on the swim team as an invaluable learning experience.

I found that I could think more clearly, could sleep better at night, and was more awake during the day during the swim season. In other words, while I was in shape and health my mental abilities and general well-being improved. I would not have really internalized this lesson unless I experienced it first hand.

Sports have a place in school. It helped me learn some social skills, the value of physical activity, and that there can be a life outside of a computer. I was a pretty good swimmer (won more than I lost), but I was by far the worst on the team. I didn't gain any popularity by swimming. This falls in line with what PG said; you have to be a good athlete to gain popularity from sports.

This isn't to say that I like how important sports are in school, but they have a place. So yeah, reduce the importance of sports but I wouldn't be in favor of eliminating them.
"Unprecedented" demand for 3G iPhone
MySpace group owners forced to use DIY scripts and tools to fight trolls
Zappos. They focus on making both employees and customers extremely happy, at all costs.

Apple. They focus on making a majority of their customers happy. They don't seem to do anything remarkable for their employees, however.

Microsoft. They don't understand how to make their customers happy, nor do they know how to make their employees happy.

All three of these companies are successful. There's a continuum of success, and how far you get down that continuum depends on many variables. In the end, it's a matter of business philosophy and focusing on what the business does best.

When business people say that corporations exist to maximize shareholder value, I always cringe. Businesses exist to make something people want, and then to receive money in exchange for making or doing it. The point of a corporation is to make the most awesome "something," such that lots of people pay you for it. Simple.

To make the most awesome "something," you have to focus on what that something is. Whole Foods is a retailer, so their employees interact directly with their customers. In Whole Foods case, the "something" they provide is a point of distribution of goods. Making their employees happy will have a direct, positive impact on the quality of the customer experience in the store. But this is not really quantifiable because you can't have a before/after controlled study. The happiness that Whole Foods tries to instill in its employees permeates the culture of the company; it's how they do business. They can't simply turn off their company happiness meter and see if profits drop.

You can, however, compare Whole Foods to the other health food stores that don't focus on employee happiness... and the results are obvious.
Pipe Dream: Static Analysis for Ruby - Code Commit
words weave a winding way

through thickets through traveled thought,

without wisdom wearily won

we trip, we tumble, we flop
Sure, but that's around 20 years after the 70's, and the usefulness of the ideas wasn't well known until some time after that.
So, I should have kept my thoughts to myself for another 15 years, until I do intensive research on the idea and see what works and what doesn't? Nobody forced you to read the article.
I read it in 8th. I hated it, since I had no idea what it was talking about, and seemed like just more of the usual crap they fed to us and tried to make it look as if it was very 'deep'. You just don't get poetry if you're forced to read it, and if you don't have a feel for what it's talking about beforehand.
"Charter schools (privately run, publicly funded) seem to be even worse than normal public schools."

Really? Anecdotally, the one's I know of seem to be better. There are some like Kipp or Amistad Academy that have worked miracles in the inner city. From articles I've read that look at test scores at all charter schools, they do about the same as their public counterparts.
What's so scary about this is that the quickest and surest way to eliminate a surplus of young men is war.
I'm not sure that altering salaries alone will do much of anything. Now there is an incentive for young people to teach, and it might save money, but there is no incentive for good teachers to teach.

My main objection to the idea of "hire better teachers" is that I don't think the people who would "go and be bankers" would necessarily be good teachers. It's a completely different skill set. I'm a good programmer and researcher, but I'm an adequate teacher at best. There isn't much benefit in attracting me to teaching.

Also, teacher pay is actually quite good when include benefits, tenure, multiply by (12 months per year/9 months of work) and add in the value of 3 months vacation.
interesting, although a list of "25 reasons users start paying for your product" would have been more useful. not sure about the % of hackers here who have recurring revenues from customers
Why don't parents home-school their kids all the way through college?

Two main reasons, from what I can tell: 1) most (if not all) quality employers require a degree; 2) parents feel (and often are) incapable of teaching advanced material.

If you're a true student of PG, you're now dying to say 'but what about being around other smart kids'? Answer (limiting our scope to high school for the moment): home schoolers are frequently around other smart kids. Home schooling doesn't mean that children are locked in their houses all day every day. Home schooling doesn't mean learning on an island. It's more like learning in a chain of islands, with frequent trips to the others. And since the parents of home schooled children are (by self-selection) those that tend to care more about their child's intellectual development (and can afford the means), the average home schooler is at least better-read (if not better 'educated') than the average high schooler.

Also, when you home school, you can accomplish things about twice as fast, which frees up the rest of your day to get your kids out into the real world (something kids locked up on a high school campus all day every day see much less often). If Johnny prefers, he could read more too (which is often the case).

So could high school if it were done right.

I'm not going to hold my breath waiting for public schools in South Florida to get it right. They're among the worst in the nation, and given our means, I feel it would be an irresponsible choice to off-load my daughter to those places. (We cannot afford private school to the tune of $12,000 / year ... although I could argue that home schooling is better than even those places [I went to one]).
"They also require the ssh server _and_ client to disable compression."

That's pretty far from actually allowing ISPs to identify encrypted P2P traffic.
I sincerely hope you're joking.
I find myself disagreeing as well, for much the same reasons.

However, I do think that America is unique in that the rest of the world values brains, but the US seems to instinctively distrust it.

My own totally unscientific pop psychology theory is as follows:

I lived in Germany for a few years. It is easy to sense a lot of national guilt. Dark history, I'll try to avoid Godwin. So modern day Germans are not as care free flag happy as other nations.

Now consider how patriotic Americans are. Now think about American history, there have been some great high points. But what about all the low points, just of the top of my head:

- Pox blankets. Read up on the story of Ishi the last Yahi.

- Slavery.

- Vietnam.

- Etc.

So can you be both deep and happy go lucky patriotic in America?
I am not saying no American should be proud of their country. In fact, I think America has done a lot good.
But American pride can be complicated if you know too much.
So maybe that's why there's this almost reflexive anti-intellectualism?
Every single study on couples that choose not to have children confirms that they tend to be well-educated and well-off. If you pick a group that's better off than most in every important category (money, social rank, health, etc), you would expect them to be happier, duh. Correlating one of their many choices with happiness is a classic example of selection bias.
Great insight. It is not being popular what matters, it is to have character.
maybe it's a slippery slope toward greater productivity, worker well being and company profitability? The 8 hour day was negotiated from unregulated work hours based on workers rights (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/8_hour_day)

I'd be surprised if any knowledge worker averages MORE than 6 hours work a day so why should they be bound to the office for eight?
Is there really a large enough pool of people out there who would be good teachers

Keep in mind that the labor pool is controlled by a cartel. Remove the certificate (and other) requirements and you have a very large pool. Allow people with specialties to teach part time, and you could get some very good people.
I was a textbook definition of a nerd: skinny, all A's, glasses, bad clothes, took college classes at night, asian in a very white blue-collar town, did all the nerd stuff (even math camp!). I went to a mediocre high school with few smart kids. Nevertheless, I was popular in high school. In fact, even as a freshmen I was hanging out with the cool senior crowd. There were many factors: I was never intimidated by anyone, I had a sharp wit, I never made others feel dumb, I didn't take any jokes personally. The big thing is body language. If you walk around like Clint Eastwood, people assume you're cool. Even when I moved to a big city, thuggish guys assumed I was one of them.

My advice: just pretend that you're cool. First impressions and body language matter a lot. It works for my friend, too. She's a small girl, but big, loud, obnoxious Wall St. traders are intimidated by her when she walks into a meeting. She exudes a self-confidence that makes them shut up and listen. If it works for a skinny nerd and a 5ft girl, it's gotta work for you dweebs, too.
"In a round-up last year, Beijing cops seized 3,400 guns and knives used in war games"

WTF! Knives?! These guys are hardcore.
I think Paul is missing something here, and that's soft skills. I, like him, was at the D table, and it was only much later that I realized why. I was much more interested in left-brain activities at the expense of right-brain ones. Yet left-brain skills are not necessarily smarter than right-brain skills, just as being a physicist isn't better than being a film director. The film director was probably popular in high school. The physicist probably not (and probably still isn't). And that's too bad for both. Nerds are unpopular because they're hiding in what they're good at; the same reason a cheerleader might put on makeup.

To be truly smart, you need to develop both sides, both skill sets. You should be able to dress well and yet know the Earth's distance from the Sun. The true smart is a round thing.