skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Is it possible, though, to have a functional society where everyone follows his or her passion?

At the extreme, probably not. You'd have a population of people who spent most of their waking hours: playing basketball, rapping, shopping for shoes, having sex, watching movies, and doing drugs.

Who is going to be a cashier? Janitors? Work on assembly lines or make clothes? Lots of construction jobs go unfilled. Big swaths of the medical profession disappear. Prisons have 1/100th the correction officers. Dentists are gone.

On the bright side... there's no patent atttorneys.
So how do you combat that?
> They confuse pattern matching with knowledge

> Rather than saying, “Most companies who sell at this stage, regret doing so, and here’s why,” they’ll say, “Don’t sell now, that’s a stupid idea.”

i know why. if they start to explain, the founder will start seek for the reasons why his situation is different. if he really founds, the vc will either fail to explain, either they start an infinite conversation.

that means - pick smart vcs for this not to happen! :)
Inside the anti-kettling HQ
Gray Hacker News
Convert NIB Files to Objective-C Code
How To Promote Your Blog Without Commenting On Other Blogs
Nokia: Buzz About Potential Windows Phone 7 Deal Rises
Macworld wasn't invited to Verizon's iPhone event too.
And the risks of centralized power being wielded by a benevolent authority falling into the hands of a malicious authority is very real and should never be ignored

The government is a malicious authority, just as Egypt has proven. The only difference is in the current levels of totalitarianism.
Easy Payday Loan
You can get payday loans in Georgia with easy and convenient way by applying for a faxless easy payday loan is quick and easy process to avail cash advances within a short time for your urgent requirement.
After an Egyptian protest in internet petition form, I'm glad the Canadian government had some sense in them to hold on to a future in tech innovation in Canada.

I can only imagine what kind of immediate effect this would have had on tech startups.
Flickr Restores Mirco Wilhelm's 3,400 Lost Photos
Webs Acquires Facebook Page Builder Pagemodo
I didn't read the article but wanted to comment on spideroak:

Really love their "realistic" pricing model, even cheaper with a .edu email address.

Had a lot of problems with CPU usage, may have been the thousands of files in my .git directories...

This leads me to support, they have been overwhelmed and it has been difficult getting then to review my logs. they gave me multiple months free due to my non usage but I decided to cancel when I found arq for mac.

I asked then to cancel my account and give me a years credit so I can give it a try in the future and they credited my account for a year... pretty cool.

Wish them the best of luck!

Written from my mobi...
I wish that scaffolding would go. I've not used it in four years, apart from when inheriting code from Rails-newcomers.
Absolutely, and I'll freely admit that I don't know how to calculate that. I made a major assumption in my last post, that I'll explain here:

Most quotes I've heard recently put the cost of bandwidth at around 1-2c/GB. I assumed, quite possibly erroneously and I'll go hunting for the source in a moment to confirm/refute said assumption, that when TekSavvy's CEO said that a conservative estimate (read: "highest reasonable estimated price") of bandwidth could be 30c/GB, I was assuming that he was taking things like administrative costs and possibly infrastructure costs into consideration. I made this assumption because of the extreme disparity between the two cost points - 1c/GB from some versus 30c/GB from him.

I realize that I didn't make this clear in my original post - I didn't even hint at it, actually - so I apologize for that.

Also, when I just now checked my wording in my original post, I noticed that you edited your comment to include a back-of-the-napkin estimate of Bell's incremental cost of delivery to be around 13c/GB. In my opinion, this only strengthens my assumption, since I sincerely doubt Bell would provide additional bandwidth for less than cost.

Looking at Bell's website right now, I see that their "Performance" plan in Ontario lists 6mbps speed with a 25GB cap for $31.95 per month.

Using your calculation of cost of bandwidth being 13c/GB, this means that full utilization of the cap would cost them $3.25 per month, leaving $28.70 for administrative costs and upgrading.

In a completely unfair comparison, I'll mention that Rogers charges me $6.95 per month (last I checked, anyway) as a usage fee/basic fee/system access fee. Let's nearly double that up to $12.72 (to make the next calculation easier) and call that the cost of doing business (tech support, paper pushing, general administration). This brings the total up to $15.97 a month, which is HALF of what Bell charges for this plan.

Bell then gets to choose how much of their 100% profit they want to use to upgrade their network, and how much they want to use to give their CEO a raise.

As far as the overage is concerned, let's note that when I called bandwidth costs 13c, that was on the assumption that Bell made no profit from their "insurance" option. Anyone who doesn't pay insurance gets to pay $2/GB, of which at least $1.87 is pure profit. Their overage would be 1538% of cost - a nice markup.

Edit: I just noticed[1] that the true cost of this plan is actually $41.95, but they offer $5 off for the first twelve months and an additional $5/mo discount to be used towards their satellite service. I'm not going to bother doing more calculations, but I thought it was worth noting.

[1] http://www.bell.ca/shopping/jsp/pageblock_styles/Pricing/fle...

(I had to disable JavaScript to get that link. The JS-Enabled version requires you to drill down two links to get the full details to appear, so it was impossible to get a direct link to the JS-Enabled version of these details)
Good feedback! Never really thought of that :)
How to Refresh Energy in Farmville Frontier Game | InfoMov.Com
Yes. Haven't taken a proper vacation since I got hooked on these services and realized the whole lifestyle is insane. I wasn't in my right mind, couldn't focus, had horrible productivity.

After a few months the noise crept back, it was a way to take a break from work that took less effort than getting off my ass and going outside.

There's also a factor of having nowhere to go if you live in a shithole. I wonder if people from Europe waste as much time on Twitter/HN because typically their real world surroundings are better. Maybe the whole social networking craze is driven by the horrible residential planning in the US.
I wish they gave better campaign-like reporting for autoresponders.
My only concern is this - why buy an iPhone 4 on Verizon when the next model is due in a few months? Will be interesting to see if this pisses people off.

That’s one of the downsides of having such a simple product line. Who (except for a tiny minority) even knows when HTC or Samsung release a new phone? The announcement of a new iPhone makes headlines and it’s also introduced as a replacement, not just another different model. (Technology progresses. Blaming any tech company for introducing a newer, better and cheaper model is stupid. A phone you buy today will be just as good in three years.)

My guess would be that people will not be very pissed. There will be lame jokes but not much outrage. I think that Apple will go for a two-year rhythm when it comes to major iPhone updates and that the next iPhone will consequently mostly receive a speed and RAM bump, maybe some nice software features and some cool hardware thing (NFC?) and that the case and other specs will stay the same. (Except for changing the case I don’t even know what they could conceivably do to make this a major update.) Current iPhones would obviously equally benefit from software updates (well, mostly – hopefully).

Apple will definitely continue to sell the current iPhone even after the next model has been introduced – just like they are still selling the 3GS now.
Given the change Mozy just instituted, my backup costs are going to go from $4.99/month to $23.99/month. This is an intolerable jump, regardless of the reasons they have for it. I don't expect something for nothing, but bait-and-switch is BS.

Looks like I'm in the market for a new backup solution.
Be a nice consolation prize for Julian Assange, having lost out on TIMES Man of the Year.
Right now, we do look a bit like a mini-clone of these other photo-sharing apps but we hope to branch out and have our own identity. I used this analogy when talking to a reporter - it's like how Friendster, MySpace, Facebook, Bebo are all social networks with some very common operations but they all took on very distinct identities.
Node 0.4 announced
Agile Development Chuck Norris-style
You're right, I really didn't think that far into it, and probably should have A/B tested it... but I have never even setup an A/B test before and that certainly would've slowed things a bit. With things like this, time is of the essence, so I don't regret not running an A/B test.

Based on non-statistical analysis: the only comments I've heard about that particular line are that it was really funny, so mission accomplished I guess. I understand where you're coming from and how it could be offensive, but your comment is the first (from any network) to even mention it in that respect.
Right. But by allowing Bell to force UBB on 3rd party ISPs, it is effectively forcing UBB on everyone, not just Bell customers. Now it's just limited to Bell customers.
The article is misleading (although the HN headline is correct!) - the $20k is for compromising Chrome on OSX / Win7. The CR-48 is just an extra price for anyone who does so and is not a candidate target.
Microsoft reinfects Chrome with closed video codec
lacking experience, i'd think that to say 'yes' is much more scary than to say 'no'! :) that would be the courage.

i mean i am not offended when someone doesn't reply. the deal is not done until it's done, so it is always 'no' until you sign the papers. (endless meetings are worse, but we should just concider them as 'no', not 'maybe' and cancel them when there are too many)
Hey, I'm a CS student UT, in my third year. I recently started looking into iOS development for a couple of game ideas I had. If you're interested, send me an email (hassaanmarkhiani@gmail.com), and I'll send you some information about my work experience, languages I know, etc.
Derek's 'desk'
On reading more about this I was depressed to see very little in the way of proposals to avoid the phenomenon, except (surprise! it's Stigler) don't regulate.

But I did find some interesting ideas at the end of this paper: http://www.icgg.org/downloads/Boehm%20-%20Regulatory%20Captu... (pp. 23-24)
The 1099 reporting requirement seemed excessive, especially when some corporations deal with thousands of vendors. Having to ask vendors to fill out W-9's is already a hassle, following up on every vendor would be a huge burden.
Yes, I believe that you can have a functional society where everyone follows his or her passion, but to see it, you have to realize two things:

1. The current allocation of labour isn't set in stone. Just because we have a certain number of accountants now, doesn't necessarily mean we need all those accountants for society to function in a way that makes us all happiest.

2. Almost everyone is passionate about eating and having a warm place to sleep. An accountant who quits his job to pursue a career as a rock star will likely soon run low on money, and may find renewed passion in accounting, if only as a part-time gig to feed and shelter himself and his family, while he finds greater fulfillment playing music in his spare time.

I also believe that nothing truly great gets done without there being a huge amount of passion behind it. Look at any great project you know and you'll see it there in the core people. They wouldn't want to be doing anything else. The world would be much better if everyone followed their passion. I think most of us are just too scared to let go of the security of making the safe, easy, predictable choices.
This explains the FSF's position pretty well:
http://arstechnica.com/apple/news/2010/05/fsf-apples-itunes-...

More recently, this line of argumentation was used by a VLC contributor to pull a VLC port off the App Store by citing copyright infringement:
http://www.readwriteweb.com/archives/as_vlc_for_iphone_ipad_...
I doubt that ID Software GPL'd the version of Castle of Wolfenstein that they submitted to the AppStore. ID Software owns the copyright on Castle of Wolfenstein, so they can release it under whatever license they want. They can even release it under multiple licenses.

The GPL 'issue' is that, if I fork a popular project under the GPL, I don't own the copyright so I can only ever continue to release it under the GPL, I can't change the license because I don't have the legal right to. If I wanted to publish said GPL'd project to the AppStore, my only option would be to release it under the GPL, which is incompatible with App Store licensing requirements.
The Perfect Developer Setup
Amazon current streaming works great on Roku but I've been surprised with how few platforms they are on. Netflix totally owns them as far as availability on devices goes and it's something Amazon will have to fix if they are serious.
To be more precise, it would actually be paying more if you are on an indie ISP, by reducing competition.
Reminds me of the apocryphal story when Marx was asked during a lecture "In communism who will clean the streets?", to which he replied "You will."
The whole point of the DMCA takedown process (for better or for worse) is to remove the burden of investigating the validity of copyright claims from distribution services. It's one thing to judge app quality; it's another thing altogether when two people submit essentially the same app, and disagree over who actually created it.
How do I get people to sign up for our beta?
Twitter is noisy, but people stick with it because of the value we get. We have a new service that vastly improves the signal-to-noise ratio. With our service, users are required to tag posts, they can also follow topics - not sources, and we have a unique tagging engine that lets you do several things, like follow compound tags. With these features, our users can get more value than from Twitter, but with much less noise. There are many other benefits, such as getting interesting content from sources you've never heard of before.

We're launching our beta later this month and we need users to test our service, but I'm not sure how to drive traffic and get people to sign up for the beta

In addition to driving traffic, I'd like to get feedback about the concept.

The website is http://www.poundwire.com

To learn more about our product, you can check out my startupli.st interview here: http://bit.ly/h2Odh8

Any feedback you have is greatly appreciated: poneppo [at] poundwire.com
As long as by "follow your passion" you don't mean "follow your passion to the exclusion of everything else", then it seems very possible. It seems unlikely that someone will have a passion for emptying my bins, but that's not to say that the person emptying my bins can't be following their passion when they're not collecting garbage.

Many people in the western world could probably work far fewer hours, own fewer material things and therefore have much more time to pursue things that they love.
I think most people on HN like case studies because they help them learn things that they can apply to their own businesses. If you have no interest in improving your business, or learning new techniques, or getting "fresh eyes" - then I'm sorry you are here. Part of hacking culture is testing and trying out things, not just making assumptions and saying fuck it. Little things on landing pages can make a big difference in sales. Why not test some of them? The OP himself said that this promotion was an "experiment." My point was that I think the OP could get "hundred other to laugh" without using the lines that may creep out a few. I'm not saying I'm offended by what he wrote...I'm saying "try to make more money." Testing some stuff like that would offer spice to his case study when he posts it on his blog. Controversy is a great sales tool. Humor is a great sales tool. I didn't think the sentences in question were enough of either to outweigh the potential downsides, and they seemed like throwaway lines anyway and not something he was attached to emotionally.

------
Re: my 'aggressiveness.'

I called you a dickhead about half in jest (we were talking about being offended), and half because you replied to me with a cliche that I had already addressed and an instruction to "get over it." Dickhead is one of the least offensive-offensive words I could think of - it's my grandmother's term of endearment for my grandfather ;-) HN guidelines say, "Be civil. Don't say things you wouldn't say in a face to face conversation." I wasn't exactly civil, but I would totally say that to you in a face to face conversation.
Thanks for the ideas.
That link with the movie about startup iteration was really funny.

I'm familiar with ITIL. At work we calculate our SLAs etc.
So that might be an option after all.
How much tagging is going on at Twitter?
"How is that" clearly refers to Bing's response. I'll admit that I interpreted your post "I think this response is convincing" as referring to lysium's response to your post. It may have been clearer if you had written 'the response', or more directly, 'Microsoft/Bing's response'.
You made my day when you said you liked the filters :) We put in a lot of effort to make sure the filters made the photos look pretty.
http://twitter.com/mattcutts/status/32568287384571904
Because I have my bar set to auto hide I totally forget about time when I work. Alarm reminders are great to remind you that you should take a break :)
Actually, it would have had no benefit whatsoever, and that's per the IRS. They looked at the estimated collections, calculated the associated processing costs, and concluded that the whole thing was a wash (or 'revenue-neutral', to use their language).

However, it would have provided a solid bit of business for supporters of the accounting lobby, who have - I suspect - contributed to the campaigns of each and every one of those 17 who heard what the IRS had to say, and backed this anyway.
It's an interesting supply and demand question. If everyone suddenly started valuing "passion" more and "money" less, then as you said, given the current pay scales then maybe lots of accountants would switch to being rockstars.

But as well as the running out of cash problem for the new rockstars, the remaining accountants would presumably be able to charge the rockstars a fortune to do their tax returns (fewer accountants = less competition), which might persuade some of the rockstars that accounting isn't that bad overall.

This does break down in the extreme case where people don't value money at all, but that doesn't seem like a very likely scenario. Sure, I have a passion for being a rockstar, but if being an accountant for 3 years could give me enough money to pay for my rockstar career for the rest of my life then I might develop a passion for accounting.
Why does Apple always take their entire online store down whenever they do product updates? It must cost them hundreds of thousands if not millions of dollars in lost sales every time.
This recipe should be called "3 easy steps to become Six Sigma consultant".
You could even write an ebook and sell it on the internet :)

On a serious note - I think the pattern is clear and it could be replicated successfully on different areas of life.
Thank you for taking your time to present it here.
I'm wondering, if this is really the case, why does Microsoft not just point that out, but instead comes with ad hominem arguments?
'Imitation is the sincerest form of flattery.'
But,
'Flattery is the worst and falsest way of showing our esteem.'
Jonathan Swift
It isn't clear whether Bing was taking special interest in click data off of Google searches, or giving it special weight in its own results.

Google seemed to think so, but even if Microsoft was treating the data they received as neutrally as possible, it doesn't change the request made of them. Google wants an exemption.
{Y Combinator,Russia's DST} invests where others fear to tread
Why is Canada excluded?
The top portion is 309 words. The portion after the tl;dr heading is 386 words.

(used cat | wc to do the word count).
IE introduced expression() in CSS decades ago. Like -webkit-transform, they are both private non-standard way of doing animations. IE4/5/6 even had hardware accelerated 3D graphic and dynamic music support, dHTML was cool before HTML5 coolkids took over.
Perhaps the free press generated by every brief downtime more than compensates for it? (that isn't me being sarcastic, it's just a guess)
Two titles: "$SOURCE invests where others fear to tread", where SOURCE="Russia’s DST" in yesterday's ft.com story (linked to), and SOURCE="Y Combinator" in today's print edition. By Richard Waters in the FT's Inside Business column, ft.com free subscription required to read.

The story is an op-ed on how the Yuri Milner/ Ron Conway backing of $150k to every Y Combinator startup risks pulling the rug from under the carpet of the traditional, large injection VC model, by meaning that maybe the angel round is the last that many start-ups will need.

See http://apps.ycombinator.com/item?id=2154706
If you don't mind...
Could you elaborate a bit what do you mean by saying "[...]they lack the right mindset" ? What is the "right mindset" for developer?
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It didn't offend me personally at all, but I like to try to put myself in the shoes of potential customers when I view sites like this and my wife is one of the 'personas" I use. [Honestly, she probably wouldn't have been offended either, unless she saw it right after after she saw the news. It's a context/frame-of-mind thing, I think.] Many people are emulating that type of ThinkGeek/Groupon writing these days, and I think sometimes they fall a bit flat. I was just curious about your results with it...and I thank you for updating me. I wish you would do some A/B testing - not just with this, but everything - because lost customers don't usually speak up.

I know there are several HN members that have easy A/B testing services (http://visualwebsiteoptimizer.com/ is one that springs to mind, but I know there are others.)
Attended Max Levchin & Peter Thiel: VC in 2011, tonight in SF
Just wanted to see if any other HN members attended Max Levchin and Peter Thiel's talk tonight at the Commonwealth Club in SF? It was great to finally see them both and hear their thoughts on startups, investing, and the world generally. The three criteria they look for in startups:

(1) must be a radical, revolutionary idea

(2) with a narrow focus and solution

(3) targeting a huge market
Thanks for your support.

Finding a "right" company can be challenging indeed.
Yeah... pretty big let-down.

OKC jumped the shark?
Sounds like the customer service end of the business didn't talk to the technical side. Since there wasn't a push button functionality for account recovery (and it had probably never even been done before in a quick-and-dirty fashion either) to them it was gone permanently. The photos probably would never have been recovered had this issue not gotten so much attention though. This probably forced the two sides to talk (either an exec said, "Fix this" or someone on the tech side saw the publicity and said, "Wait a minute. It's still recoverable. WTF was that rep talking about?").
See "regulatory capture" wiki link below. What'll happen is what always does in the US. They'll assume the only people who know what they're doing are the regulatED, and there's your revolving door.

Pretty sweet choices: idiocy or corruption.