skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Not actually a Wiki, but similar in concept:
'Earth2100.tv is a project by ABC to solicit ideas from the public and experts about the dangers facing world in the next 100 years. "The world’s brightest minds agree that the “perfect storm” of population growth, resource depletion and climate change could converge with catastrophic results. We need you to bring this story to life."'
Two nucleobases found in a meteor fragment are of extraterrestrial origin
A couple more then I have to clean the kitchen ...

1. Use that valuable h1 tag (and h2) on every page to tell me something (and Google) about that page - something good and rich. Don't waste it on my name - or if you do, I should be allowed to say something about myself. Or there should be something else there. Just an important tag that I'd hate to waste.

2. Your image alt tag for your log needs improvement. Also a text tag line would be a good thing.

3. Set up a custom route and a field in your db where you make a friendly url for all the courses. "/course/2" should be "/course/how-to-use-brainbank". This should also be your page's title "How to Use BrainBank by _your_name_"

Out of curiosity, will the courses be reviewed? What's stopping me from having you send out something bad for me to anyone who signs up?

Ok, the kitchen won't clean itself.
You would not have liked to see me when the death of Jerry Falwell was announced. Although it wasn't selfishness that prompted my glee on that occasion, rather that many other people would be spared pain from his blustering hatred and undue influence. A few graves in this world deserve to be danced on.

Granted, Russert doesn't strike me as one that deserves it.
Google Docs Now Supports PDFs
I agree, and applaud your independent thought.

My condolences to his family as well. I don't begrudge anyone their mourning. I'm sure a lot of people loved him on a different level than the people he worked for. But do it privately, please.

The people inundating us with a celebration of Russert's work are the people who bought and paid for him. His bias in favor of the malevolent powerful, whether left or right wing, was appalling.
The tools available for .Net development are better, in my opinion. Visual Studio and IE Developer Toolbar (not the IE8 version) make debugging javascript lovely whilst the Resharper extension enhances VS' features nicely. Also give VisualSVN a try for Subversion integration.
Top 42 Games for Linux
That links to the top 42 commercial games for Linux.

Top 42 Free Games: http://www.linuxlinks.com/article/20080510052539217/Games.ht...
And another 42 Free: http://www.linuxlinks.com/article/20080522164112313/Games-Pa...
TwitterCounter: How popular are you?
Several bugs and issues, some things don't work, issues with tables...

Not to mention the fact it just looks ugly and horrible IMHO.

Setting innerHTML to a string, in order to deserialize a partial HTML fragment is just not nice.

The DOM methods are actually pretty well thought out, and provide a far better interface to manipulate the document.
Castro st will be your hangout.

Work out of RedRock cafe.
Russert and Falwell are two heads of the same hydra. Falwell's job was to enflame the masses into voting against their economic interests, and Russert's was to pretend to be legitimate to give the most powerful and corrupt people cover. The same guy was on the phone giving both of them their orders.

Take another look at those pictures. Then google "Cathie Martin Meet The Press". Then, google "Meet the Press, Dick Cheney interview"
The Accessibility Checklist I Vowed I'd Never Write
Scientists confirm that parts of earliest genetic material may have come from the stars
Good example of a harmless comment that got downmodded hard.
Erlang at Work - Using Erlang to write IM network gateways
Is it just me or is scribd.com the worst thing to happen to the Internet since MIME-based email?

Insofar as I can tell all it does is strip me of basic functionality (e.g., save the thing so I can read it offline), introduce confusing functionality (TWO scrollbars on the left!? WTF?) and all for what? So some engineers could do some flash-based masturbation & feel web 2.0?

Scribd.com developers: you are not Web 2.0. You are not 1.0. You are web -0.5. You are what we people did when they had bullshit internal doc apps, before HTML.

Now please stop pissing off the Internet & go under already.
Google Will Provide It’s Ad Technology To Yahoo!
Exact same for me, high five!
All Technology News
I wonder what story they spun to get that money!?!
The Slashdot entry on this story is skeptical.

http://science.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=08/06/14/1737231
I'm not so certain that comment's harmless. I'd honestly say that comment is not too far from comments such as "Me too" and "I agree," a type of comment that contains no substance and spreads the message that it is acceptable to write comments with no substance.

I would really like to see some insights or examples of what makes Tim especially fair or a great interviewer. :)
As agotterer says, the problem is with people who only "have ideas". Having an idea and communicating it takes 10 minutes. If that 10 minutes is all you spend on the startup, while the technical guy spends months... it kind of sucks for the technical guy.
Has anyone used SCORE services for a web startup?
Has anyone who has started up a web startup used the SCORE business services (the ones from the public library)? I'm working on a prototype for my website in my spare time and everyone keeps telling me I need a business plan. I don't want to waste a lot of time and energy on a very polished and overly formal business plan. But I do want to contact investors and apply for grants for my company. Has anyone used SCORE for help in building a business plan? I'm probably going to go and get help from them no matter what feedback I get, I just wanted an idea of how other startup founders view some old and stodgy service like SCORE as being relevant to a Web 2.0 startup.
insulting the scribd product is somewhat unfair, imho. it's not that the product is inherently bad or something. maybe someone finds it useful (ycombinator owners apparently think so). i certainly don't, so i use my greasemonkey script to route around it.

all that said, i'm somewhat puzzled with the decision to enforce the scribdification here on HN. isn't it a bad PR for scribd? does it really generate enough positive effects to justify the obvious negative effects? not trying to troll or something, just really curious.
I was thinking the exact same thing when I read:

> "One day, after crawling out of bed at 10:30, I decided enough was enough."

I'm currently going to sleep around 9am and waking up at 4:30pm, so I may be a bit biased, but her 'problem' doesn't sound that bad. Even when I had a job, anything before noon felt like it shouldn't exist.
I've noticed a few hiccups over the past day
I've seen it but haven't used it. Where are you located?

For Business plans, I'd go for the 20-pager if you want investors and prep a great demo/pitch presentation. Many folks (including myself) have recommended the "Business Plans That Win Money" MIT series book as well. Cheesy title but pound for pound is best I've read. http://tinyurl.com/4x9od2
This probably doesn't explain every case that the guy is talking about, but I used to adopt this attitude in various jobs -- usually a few months before I ended up leaving the job for something else.

I've found that I have a specific lifecycle in regular jobs. It goes like this:

1. Enthusiasm. No matter how many times I've gotten burned in other jobs, this one is going to be different! Management seems to be really open to improving things, or doing things as best as practically possible. Hurrah!

2. Passive-Aggressive apathy. Well, I was wrong. Again. Hells, this place moves slowly. No, management's plan or idea won't work, and I'll say so, but I don't feel like explaining it anymore because clearly they aren't interested in my opinion. I will slouch in my chair and grudgingly do what I'm told.

3. Complete apathy. I won't even bother to say that I disagree with their bad ideas anymore. Discussion is pointless; they simply want to do it their way, and that's that. I'll browse through the classified ads on my lunch break.

(Get new job, go back to 1.)

I don't think that particular lifecycle is unique to me. So, the author may be dealing with some folks that are completely disenchanted by their work environment, but for whatever reason they can't or won't find another job.
Re: Domain name: That's bias as in "cognitive bias" not "racial bias".

OK, so you're a physicist, and you know that, when the dust settles and the true theory whatever-it-may-be is found, it's going to have multiple worlds in it, rather than violating relativity.

At what point, in your opinion, should physicists go ahead and announce this fact to the public as the official verdict of Science?

Make no mistake, quantum gibberish has trickle-down negative effects on the rest of the planet - people watching "What the Bleep Do We Know?" and losing hope in Reason. It may not hurt them any less than disbelief in natural selection, on average.

At what point should physicists get together and say: "Oops! Werner Heisenberg was wrong about the special role of consciousness. We now know this for sure. Everyone stop reading 'The Secret'."?

It's easy to say "Don't be too emphatic about that truth there" when you're a physicist and you can see the arguments clear as sunlight. If we were all evolutionary biologists we wouldn't need emphatic defenses of evolution, either.
That was a well thought out post. In addition to my previous comment posted here, http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=217636 I forgot to mention that Yahoo is quite big in the non US, BRIC (Brazil Russia India China) market. I am not sure finance types really understand what drives techies, creation and creativity as the root of one's personality and validation. While I'm as much for making a buck as the next person I'd rather do it while creating something.

MSFT stock has been flat for half a decade now while Yahoo's been going up slowly in the same time. If their Panama system does well, maybe they can get a piece of the Adwords pie.

I think Ballmer's been a disaster for Microsoft, no CEO has had such flat ratings on stock for about a decade and still kept his job. Though stockholders might think Jerry's doing a lousy job only 16% of their stocks would've seen the MSFT valuation of $35. Which translates to about 12% gains overall or a $2.4 increase in share value from when MSFT's interest in Yahoo went public. Even if they dump their stock now, they're coming out on tops. So I give props to Yahoo for aligning with Google in the meanwhile and safeguarding their research and development teams and work.
I don't have a problem with this one. It's mainstream news, but it's mainstream news that's actually relevant to people, as opposed to, say, celebrity gossip. It has no special relevance to hackers, but it's still just as relevant to us as to anyone else. Stories of this magnitude come up in the media maybe once a month. Having a single post about them show up on news.yc isn't going to drown out the signal.
I think everyone should be skeptical. It's standard woo-woo bunk. I'm not sure how this bubbled to the top compared to similar scams...
Ah, I was wondering why this was happening. At least I'm not the only one.

I honestly wonder if Twitter would be the same if it didn't have all of these problems. There would be nothing to lovingly make fun of.
Well, it's just an obit entry. "In lapidary inscriptions a man is not upon oath." - SJ
I love the night. I also love the winter and cloudy days. Has anyone ever thought about running their company at night? Has anyone thought about making the normal hours for your programmers start sometime after 8 pm? It might produce interesting results. The only thing you would need is your public facing group awake during the "normal" hours, or as I like to call them: the "sleeping" hours.
I had to vote this back up because it looks like the trend of downvoting someone who disagrees is still going on.
Ask YC: Voting and Karma (Call to action)
I'm going to ask this as simply as can simply be asked:

In your opinion what is the purpose for the upvote and downvote? The general consensus is the upvote is for when we agree, but there is a dichotomy, or perhaps an even larger disagreement on what the downvote should be used for.

I think it's time to come to a community understanding of one another, and in my opinion this indiscriminate downvoting of comments without offering some sort of foundation on our disagreement or general apprehension to the topic is inherently threatening to the positive vibe of this community.

Discuss.
Interesting examples of the "PAP". A good follow-up might examine why a programmer is passive-aggressive.

thaumaturgy hits on one common reason: the programmer is a product of his environment.

Another very common reason is that the programmer is in over his head and uses "fog" to protect himself. Why? It's easier. And it works. Problem is that the programmer has done nothing to get out from being in over his head. And probably never will. They're everywhere.

My first mentor once told me why he thought there were so many mediocre programmers: all they have to do is stay one step ahead of the user. In a commercial environment, not so hard to do.
Nah, the article (and the claim of the inventors) were very misleading. Soon after this publication, more detailed interview to the inventors were reported, and the inventors admitted that they use metal oxidation process to produce H2 from the given water. So it consumes that metal in order to produce electricity (and it also produces metal hydroxide as waste). Calling the system as "generates electricity with only water and air" is almost a fraud, imho.

I couldn't find English article of the interview. Here's a link to the Japanese one.
http://techon.nikkeibp.co.jp/article/NEWS/20080613/153278/
Is this SCORE as in, Service Corps of Retired Executives?
In your opinion what is the purpose for the upvote and downvote?

Upvote = "I'd like to see more comments like this".

Downvote = "I'd like to see fewer comments like this".

I don't think that people having different reasons for wanting more or less of a particular type of comment is a problem.
I used a SCORE counselor for help with a technology product (not website) business plan. He was an old-school business executive, with entrepreneurship experience only at the store franchise level.

Extremely helpful. The basic principles of business and research have not changed much. You still identify a market, solve a pain, get paid, etc. Trying to sell your business (concept, not equity) to an experienced but not hip executive will go a long way toward validating your concept.

Unless your appeal is strictly to the hip early adopter. SCORE can't help you there.
I don't know, there was pretty massive agreement that "Clinton Conceeds" shouldn't have ever made it to the front page here.
Hmmm, except you're wrong on the most basic facts of Russert's role:

http://www.mtholyoke.edu/acad/intrel/bush/meet.htm

Transcript of Interview with Vice-President Dick Cheney on Meet the Press, 8 September 2002

Find one other interview with Dick that matches that level of questioning.
I dunno. Performance is comprised of many factors, I'm not so sure that table normalization is one of them.

Table normalization is meant to improve data integrity, not performance.

In many cases where reads outnumber writes, backing off 4th normal form and even 3rd normal form by replicating data can significantly improve performance. Author does mention this as "semi-normalization".
To me Scribd was always useful for sharing documents online.

For documents that are already online it sort of defeats the purpose.

I suppose for some OS/browser combinations the experience is better, but on Mac/Safari I can display the PDF right in the browser where I can scroll and search without any trouble at all.
The results from the 2007 contest aren't online yet, as far as I can tell (I found the 2006 page). Why would I want to put all that work into a clever entry if it will never see the light of day?
Making any lasting change requires three things: Motivation, Mechanism, and Monitoring.

I've implemented these three things to fix my sleep schedule: Motivation comes from my own desire and encouragement from those around me. The Mechanism is to shift my eating schedule earlier by eating a snack in my bed right when the alarm goes off and eating dinner earlier. Monitoring is the log book of times that I eat, wake up, and go to sleep.

Applying this technique for 2 weeks has yielded a 2-hour forward shift in my sleep schedule! :)

The article mentions another mechanism: going outside right after waking up. I'm going to think about adding this mechanism to my sleep-schedule-shift personal development project.
it sounds like this guy is a consultant, who management brings in, and everyone there automatically hates him.
You know, I thought about this for a while before down-voting it. I very rarely downvote -- maybe I have downvoted ten times in the last year.

Let's review:

"Not hacker news" <- great comment

"One less fevered ego tainting our collective unconscious. Good." <- personal attack on someone you didn't know and who can't defend themselves in this forum.

That kind of brazen disregard for humanity is anathema to any organized conversation, in my opinion. I'd down-vote you again if I could.

As a political junkie, I like watching the Sunday-morning talkers. Yes, Russert was a democrat and had worked on several campaigns before joining NBC, but he was good at what he did and brought a joy to his work that was infectious. I'm sure he did a lot of good and bad things, but most of all he was a human, a human I spent several dozen hours watching over the course of my life. He deserves better than that comment.If it's not for the board, fair enough.

You know, it's quite possible to disagree with people, even hate their behavior, without demonizing the person themselves. "Powerful elites [using] his show to control the way they distributed propaganda"?? I feel like I need a shower after reading it.

This, friends, is why politics shouldn't be on HN. If you feel you need to launch into some tirade about multi-national corporations using mind control to enslave the population, take it somewhere else.

I don't think this story had to be political at all. Famous talking-head dies. What sorts of neat startup attributes did he have?
I almost never downvote.

The only time I downvote is if something is extremely inappropriate, negative, trolling, or is degrading (IMO) to the quality of this community.

I never downvote when I disagree. If I disagree, I reply with my disagreement. I wish others would too. Not much to learn from downvotes. Lots to learn from discussion and healthy debate.

I upvote often, to anything that I think adds value.
Na, look at 'em. They look like total pricks.
Ooh, another reason to be a PAP:

"I had a chance to meet this young man and boy does he have Straight to Upper Management written all over him."
The reflection of comment scores in user karma makes this problem worse; it means we're keeping score, and creates artificial reasons to vote comments. Granted, if post submissions were all that HN tracked, I'd have a karma of 0. But I still think Reddit's system is better.
I suspect that Scribd may be good for precisely the kinds of proprietary format documents you don't see as YC news items very often (Word, Excel, PowerPoint etc).

However for PDF, Scribd really isn't a good fit since there are already so many good PDF viewers out there. In particular the PDF support my OSX Laptop comes with blows Scribd out of the water so a Scribd link to a PDF is effectively a downgrade for me.

Too bad there isn't some info in the HTTP protocol Scribd could use to decide to deliver me the PDF instead. Oh wait...
Downvotes without an explanation have no meaning. You should be required to explain why you downvoted.

If a downvote means "I'd like to see fewer comments like this" -- then, why? What is wrong? Is it off-topic, rude, you disgaree, it used words you don't like, it ran on too long. What, what, what is the problem?!?! A downvote gives you nothing but some vague feeling that you broke some kind of social rule or norm somewhere _without actually explaining what it was you did_

Downvotes are mostly non-useful and promote "safe" comments, which have a tendency to be boring.
i think there should be no down-vote - because i very rarely notice that someone comments that doesn't make no sense at all - also if people who get up-voted will automatically gain more value anyway...

so for example if i make a comment that doesn't make sense then nobody will up-vote me (and nobody can down-vote me either as there is no option to do that either) and i will end-up having lowest score (which is 1) compare to others. also down-vote de-motivates more than no-vote... so why de-motivate someone.

i hope i explained in simplistic way...
Yahoo CEO’s Big Messup May Set Microsoft Right
http://underhanded.xcott.com/?page_id=9
At the very basis, an upvote means "I want other people to see this" and a downvote means "I think this is a waste of other people's time."

Your voting habits don't influence what you see at all, so it really has no personal effect; you're voting things for other people.
The quality of SCORE, the organization, depends on your location. Some chapters put on extremey helpful workshops. I went to a few of them in Austin, and found them very helpful. As you note, it's stodgy stuff--not high tech at all. But, accounting, business and contract law, copyright and trademarks, and patents, apply to all businesses, and those are all topics where SCORE can be helpful.

I don't know anything about the materials at the public library you mentioned.
That was a question. Specifically in the interests of pondering why the commenter was down-modded even with the reasonable comment...
programming is more than syntax

There is a huge amount to programming .net that has nothing to do with the {}'s of C# and all to do with the .net framework (which won't translate to Ruby at all).

That said, a good/sharp programmer is more than a monkey slinging code so they should be able to work well in any language.
Is anyone else bothered by the use of "confirm" and "may" in the same sentence? If it's confirmed, it is, not may be, right?
Making fun of them because they also "look like pricks" doesn't make it less juvenile, you know.
It depends on the person. I went through the series in highschool, but many (most?) people do it in college and some never get through it at all.
This: "It has no special relevance to hackers" is the key. We have general news sites for general news. I'm sure we all know how to get there. Nobody is going to be informed for the first time that Tim Russert has died by coming here. So now you have to ask yourself, what does it add to the conversation?

This is not a general news aggregator, we have those in spades, and the chances are that we all know where to find them. It's disheartening that this has gotten so many upvotes.
"What sorts of neat startup attributes did he have?"

That, I think, is a great question. To me, Russert exemplified the best of his profession without sacrificing himself or his work. By all accounts, he was a great guy who did a great job (qualifications aside about the state of the American media, esp with regard to politics). If folks say the same of me when I'm gone, it will have been a life well-lived, indeed.
As someone who isn't ever going to give you a permanent email until I'm certain your service is something I would actually use, I recommend you dispense with the upfront registration all together and do what jottit.com does - only make the person register at the very end.
Trash like this is why we shouldn't put politics or general news in a hacker news site.