skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
The problem is that the companies producing luxury goods benefit from providing as little information as possible to their customers. It would be better for society if the companies with the most knowledge of how to produce a particular type of good could be incentivised to educate consumers rather than to capture as much consumer surplus as possible with dubious market segmentation partly based on keeping people ignorant.

This seems to me why people complain about IP laws. They encourage one type of good behaviour - innovation - but also discourage another type of good behaviour - sharing.
seanMeverette..

What Chicago startup did you end founding or joining?
"Normal" people never just click around and see what happens. They're afraid of breaking something.

The author is not asking for a manual, he's asking for a better design for first time users. I had a similar impression when I tried Quora too. It seems to be mostly designed for power users who have already invested the time to familiarize themselves with the site. However, only tech-savvy people are going to do that, which will make long-term growth difficult for Quora without a design change. On the other hand, it will maintain the overall quality of the site by limiting its appeal and size.
Look pretty deeply before you believe the Symbian sales numbers.

Almost all the paid downloads are games. That's fine if you want to make games, but be aware that not many app makers are making money (or at least no where nearly as much as they are making on Android or iOS).
It'd be cool, no doubt; but if I was born in Australia (as I was), it'd have sucked.
My father-in-law, for one.

When my wife was younger (I believe 10?), her father tried to force her to program in BASIC. She ended up hating computers and programming in particular.

It was only recently that I was able to get her semi-interested in programming, but I don't think she'll ever really be interested in it.

Personally, I had a similar experience to that of the original author. I inherited a Tandy1000 from my grandfather, and one of my father's friends was a programmer. He had made a version of Monopoly, and gave us the source code as well as the software. I was curious how the thing worked, and spent my afternoons changing the colors of dice, how much property was worth, etc.
As with Perl, your inability to read Latin is not the fault of the language.
By the time an ambitious student finishes high school, they will have learned some manipulations in linear algebra and calculus by rote but they won't have any real understanding. If they enter college and study some further mathematics, the first task of their professors will be to undo the damage.

We don't need to teach more, we need to teach better. We should not chase nominal accomplishments such as whether students have "covered" differential equations and discriminants by high school's end. There is already too much of that. The same is even more true for the foundational material taught in middle school. If you skate across the basics in an effort to cover more, earlier, you risk serious damage to the students' development in mathematics and science.

The problem all comes down to 10% curriculum and 90% teachers. Curriculum only seriously concerns me when it overconstrains good teachers and prevents them from doing their job.
It's "you're guilty", not "your guilty". >_>

Seriously though, calm down. Both your post and the post you're referring to have plenty of upvotes, which is a strong indication that they are not unwelcome contributions to HN. Personally I think it's important to maintain civility, writing quality, and professionalism in an online discussion, and I'm glad that HN values that. It's a lubricant that enables more productive, more rational, more open discussion without getting distracted by juvenile things like distracting humor and emotionally charged debate (as when someone lumps an entire group of people together, makes generalizations about them, and compares them to racists).

HN is still one of the few places on the intertrontubes where it's possible to have a mature, rational discussion. If you find someplace better, by all means let everyone know.
Participation would probably result in learning more. Some have said they find themselves spending too much time checking for answers though. On the subject of the Cone of Learning: http://www.brainfriendlytrainer.com/theory/dale%E2%80%99s-co...

It seems that it was originally called the Cone of Experience and the percentages were not given.
I am in the exact same boat. I visit HN 10 times a day, but this is my very first comment here.
Same here. I almost never comment or post. I learn/read a lot here and mostly don't think of a contribution worth posting.

I actually think that most comments add more noise than information, and therefore decrease the value of a thread as a whole. This get worse as commenting gets easier, because easier posting means more comments, but most people don't actually have something interesting to say/write. Information gets diluted and less accessible/visible.

In fact, this applies to the whole Internet and I sometimes wonder how much time it would have taken to learn the same things I learned while browsing through tech-related blogs by, for example, reading books (which are, often, denser in terms of information).
I recently bought this book and it might be of help since it is explaining exactly the causes (and treatment) of negative self-talk.

Not sure whether I can post recommendations here (I'm not affiliated), but since it was already recommended here at HN and just in case you want to check it out, it's called "The Now Habit: A Strategic Program for Overcoming Procrastination and Enjoying Guilt-Free Play" by Neil A. Fiore, and it seems to have helped a lot of people.
I think it is pretty well understood that the manufacturing cost of the Microsoft products are close to zero.

When I buy headphones I expect more than a license to use technology.
Global warming pisses me off because it isn't so much science as it is religion.

Whether it gets hotter, colder, drier, wetter or whatever some will take that to be "proof" of global warming just as others will claim the opposite.

The really offensive thing to me is the science part. Papers that don't provide facts or, in some cases, sources for their facts, publications that give such shoddy work a free pass because it happens to agree with their editorial stance. Organizations that go out of their say to smear and silence skeptics. The list goes on.

Whatever the case climate models have a pretty poor track record when it comes to making predictions.

Last month I saw something about climate on Discovery. It was talking about "Snowball Earth", the period nearly 600 million years ago when ice extended to the equator. The show claimed that we could trigger such an event. What's more, snow and ice reflect sunlight that could cause a (excuse the pun) snowball effect: as the ice grows it gets colder.

What many seem to forget are two things:

1. What they're describing is called a divergent system. We don't live in such a system because, if we did, the earth would've either frozen solid or boiled away in the last 4 billion years and we wouldn't be here; and

2. The earth is an incredibly complex system with many interplaying variables such that making predictions and identifying cause and effect is incredibly hard.

They way I see it, the pro-AGW crowd need to:

1. Prove the earth is warming. This is far from fact. For one, it depends on your point of reference. Compared to 1890 it's warmer and for this reason the link to the Industrial Revolution and fossil fuels likes to be drawn but what about 500 years ago? 5000? 5 million? The earth has been an awful lot hotter than it is now.

2. that warming is man-made;

3. That warming is bad. It'd be bad for some but I guarantee you it'd be good for others.

4. Human intervention can alter the result;

5. That cost isn't prohibitive.

as far as I'm concerned we haven't even settled (1) yet.

In the meantime those that raise such questions are demonized. Those that benefit from offending industries aren't the least bit interested in the truth either. Instead of science we have politics and religion.

But I for one am sick of hearing that whatever happens is somehow proof of global warming.
Ask HN: sort comments by time posted?
This may be a stupid question, so be nice if it is.

But is there any rhyme or reason to the comment structure? It's mildly irritating to go back to a topic and have to sort between old and new comments.
"Junior! Time for COBOL class! Get in the car"

- but I don't want to go... I'm busy with Ruby right now

"No excuse, we've discussed this before. And when you're done with your Java homework you can go back playing with your trains and Rails."

- awwww.... sob
No single Android phone does as well as the iPhone. You're comparing two completely different things.
One random memory from Build Brighton that just came back to me; when I was at uni we once went to a demo of live coding music[1] at a club, put on by the aforementioned hackerspace.

One of the 'acts' involved someone waving a chair at a laptop while wearing a gimp mask[2]. That person later turned out to be one of my lecturers who had been teaching us to write softsynths. Good times...

[1] https://secure.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/wiki/Live_coding

[2] http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/technology/8221235.stm
Why not read the wikipedia page he linked before attacking him like that?

An ice core from the right site can be used to reconstruct an
uninterrupted and detailed climate record extending over
hundreds of thousands of years, providing information on
a wide variety of aspects of climate at each point in time.
> I have never needed to use a goto

That's because you have not yet programmed enough / read enough programs.

> I did not look at the code very closely but one goto I saw seemed to point from the main loop into a function. Which to me seems like an odd use, a use that can easily be avoided.

Goto from one function to another? Not possible in standard C. If this was written in C it is most probable that compiler optimisation caused the direct jump. Even if you were not indeed talking of something like that you missed the obvious that compilation optimisation and imperfection of the decompilator are the far more probable cause of presence of curious goto.

You could also have noticed the far more interesting use of cast of char* to function pointer which are then called. Did the original programmer wrote this mess? Hint: probably not too...

As for the quality of the source code of the Linux kernel, well, apart from if you work on safety critical software (in which case it's like comparing apples to carrots anyway, because they are far more important differences to general purpose software than the mere presence or absence of gotos) I doubt you've seen a lot of far better code.

Indeed I even doubt you could advance reasonable reason for why goto should be 100% banished in all situation, especially when doing dynamic allocation or resources. Maybe you don't even have ever read the original Dijsktra's paper or the Knuth's paper http://pplab.snu.ac.kr/courses/adv_pl05/papers/p261-knuth.pd... (curiously (or not) it's the case for many cargo cult goto haters even for just the orinal Dijkstra's paper)
Technically, they aren't lying about the product here. The foam in the 555 model degrades the performance, compared to the 595. It is a lower performing product, and it's pricetag reflects that.

I do, however, find it ironic that the $199 555 model physically contains more "parts" and more manufacturing costs than the $349 595 model.

Curious if anyone has thought about the correlation between shareware/trialware software and these headphones, being that HN readers are generally more software than hardware people. I mean, the only difference between my 30 day trial of Something.app and the unlimited version is a 32 character string, and depending on my current morality level, I could find any number of those strings floating around the internet.
At my workplace I need to code in Java. After programming in Python for 2 years I am simply hating the experience. Nothing to do with OO, but the language is a lot more verbose and I personally find it a bit irksome.
> How many of you soak up all this knowledge like it's nicotine but don't comment much or post at all?

That perfectly describes my relationship with Hacker News.

As another first time commentor but long time lurker, I'd like to thank those of you who do comment. You've created a truly great resource.
How about a computer hacker break into Cuban internet users with the news with what happened in Egypt.
I think it has something to do with the number of up votes a comment has as well as the karma of the commenter perhaps.
I used to comment but found that I got dragged into heated "discussions" that were big time sink. I then tried short responses/comments, attempting to leave the investigation part as homework for the interested readers, but I was called as troll and asked to clarify things in long posts again. Also similar to frevd's case, my points of view don't usually align with the mainstream trends in HN. I just rather get my stuff done than spending time arguing with people online.
The list of business titans who either never attended or dropped out of college is so long it makes you wonder if graduating from college is actually a liability.

Paul Allen, Richard Branson, James Cameron, John Carmack, Andrew Carnegie, Michael Dell, Barry Diller, Walt Disney, George, Eastman, Thomas Edison, Larry Ellison, Henry Ford, Bill Gates, David Geffen, J. Paul Getty, William Randolph Hearst, Steve Jobs, Ingvar Kamprad, Kirk Kerkorian, Ray Kroc, Ralph Lauren, Craig McCaw, John D. Rockefeller, Steven Spielberg, Dave Thomas, Ted Turner, Ted Waitt, Steve Wozniak, Frank Lloyd Wright, Orville and Wilbur Wright, and Mark Zuckerberg.

Some lesser known billionaires: Eike Batista, Ronald Burkle, Richard Schulze.
And .NET 1.0 came out in 2002, which isn't even 10 years ago yet.
Not that I do, but what if I said I had learning difficulties? Or never went to school. Your saying I'm not allowed to contribute?
And add to that the cost of paying a provider for 3G Internet connection every month, and the allure of a phone that lasts for a week and can make calls and send texts shines through.
Casual games are real games even if they don't have significant replayability (though some do).
These little balls are a bit hard to hit. What's wrong with ordinary tabs?
Applications of logarithms
I haven't be scammed of $100,000 yet so I guess I'm not completely like you :p
I'm solving the "I have no technical co-founder" problem by becoming the technical co-founder.

Let's hope it works out. I am very familiar with tech and computers, but not in the programming sense.
> Just because he starts his posts with a lol, and a smiley mean NOTHING.

Actually it means a lot. When you read, your neurons get tingled. How this happens is affected by writing style. Not everybody has the time or energy to be a hyperrationalist information absorber that processes data into the same thing irrespective of the order and manner it arrives.

edit: I think you've misinterpreted my post if you think I said anything about whether his writing style is bad -- I've just said that it causes people to react a certain way. (Though, if you want me to declare which side I'm on on that matter of whether it's objectively bad, it's the opposite of yours.)
not fair - they don't add that here in Germany afaik.
Vitamin D is critical for the mood, but it requires sun for the body to produce it, and sun is rare in all northern areas, especially in the winter.

Thanks for the hint.
I'm assuming they're talking about NSLs

They're are not talking about the number of NSLs issued, they're talking about potential violations of the law, some of which involve NSLs. That's the confusion.

Incidentally, the link you posted is the FBI responding to the same OIG report that the EFF references.
There is a lot of worry out there in the entrepreneurial community about competition. Almost no market is a zero-sum game, even when you could "get killed" by a huge player there is always room for you to form a niche. Pretend you have no competition at all, and unless you keep hearing from former and potential customers that they prefer MS whatever, don't worry about it.
It's actually a good thing.

Considering that a post can hit the front page and then disappear within hours, I don't think that it is necessary to organize by time.

The most relevant comments (calculated by number of upvotes in a given period) are at the top and the spammy ones (or those that don't add anything to the conversation are the bottom).
I agree with all of your points, except one - when I'm doing something of leisure, i.e. commenting on hacker news, I actually don't think about my grammar or spelling and nor will I begin to.

As far as I'm concerned, people pulling people up on their spelling and grammar is a step to far.

Edit: Spelling and grammer excellence isn't in the guidelines http://ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
I feel ya. It's almost like the self-help book industry preys on our vulnerability and appetite for this sort of information, though I certainly hope the authors set out with better intentions.
He's comparing the only thing that matters any more - ecosystem mindshare.
JSONloops, A real-time multi-user audio sequencer built in node.js and jQuery
This article is good for Sennheiser, I just ordered a pair of the 555's from Amazon for $85
It's easy:

You: Boss, we need to talk.

Boss: Ok, let's talk.

You: I decided to leave ${CompanyName}.

Boss: Ok, is there anything we can do to make you stay?

You: No, I've made my decision. How long do you want me to stay to transfer my responsibilities?

Narrator's note: the standard is 2 weeks.

Other things: they might ask you why you're leaving. It's not the time to provide them with a list of complaints (especially if you haven't raised them in the past). You can be vague but truthful: the other opportunity looks like a better fit for you.

That is essentially the script I followed when leaving my past jobs. All my bosses were professional about it and understanding.
Wish he could have been bothered to describe how he thinks things should be done differently.
Isn't there a toolbar or something for showing unread posts? I've never tried it, but I think there is some tool some HNer created to deal with exactly this. (If so, can someone provide a link?)
Of the people I know who think they're smart enough to drop out of school and start a successful business, most of them are smart enough to start a business, but not necessarily the one they want to start.
the worlds best minds aren't those with tenure
Wouldn't that lead to the top rated comments being rated even higher, while newer (but still good) comments are left by the wayside?

This would happen simply because the commenter posted outside of the time the topic was most popular (most viewers).
In a well-functioning market, the price should be driven by
competition towards a level a bit above the production/R&D costs

The main issue is that R&D is largely a fixed cost. It takes the same amount of engineers to write the Bing engine or the Dropbox I/O layer, no matter how many users are using it.

How do you decide the strategy for recovering a fixed cost of millions of dollars from the price of the individual product? Price all DropBox accounts at $10 and you may not have enough margin dollars per account to cover your R&D. Price all DropBox accounts at $20 and you may not have enough volume to... cover your R&D.

Assuming the incremental storage for 50 GB costs $2, it's ok to recover $8 and $16 respectively for fixed costs. Just because they are fixed doesn't mean that the user shouldn't have to pay for them, or that it should pay in the same amount. You could argue even that the R&D should be paid in a 2:1 ratio as well by those benefiting from 100 GB versus those benefiting from 50 GB. It's the risk of the entrepreneur to decide where to set the bar so that, at the end of the day, the margin multiplied by the volume recovers the fixed costs.

Competition driving the price towards a level a bit above the R&D (fixed) costs doesn't work at all for products where the marginal cost is trivial but the R&D expenditures are huge. Why Ask, with 1-5% market share, cannot compete with Google Search, which has more than 60% in the US market? Crawling the web, building the index and removing spam costs more or less the same in terms of R&D if you aim for an approximative identical standard of search quality in the search engine. But having a market 10 times greater or 2 times greater (in Google versus Bing) means that one allows himself 10 times or 2 times the total fixed costs at equal levels on a per user basis. No wonder Bing losses millions while Google uses the ad revenue to subsidize its other operational branches.
I have to say I'm a bit surprised by the sentiment favoring working at big companies among the majority of comments here.

One possible explanation:
1) Statistically, most engineers work for big companies.
2) By human nature, people tend to stick to their current jobs, most likely a big company job.

Here is a related thread at Quora:
http://www.quora.com/If-I-want-to-be-an-entrepreneur-later-s...
i have shattered the paradox
I consider myself technical but I can't comment here about that kind of thing since I will not be knowledgeable enough to hold my own... I feel like I'm just about intelligent enough for other non-technical discussions.

I actually agree, I find it a lot easier to learn here than I did at University. I think it's because I'm mixing with people that care about knowledge.
Is an MBA really that raw of a deal??
You've missed your own point. By NOTHING, I meant that it "has absolutely no connection to how much respect [he] give[s] readers, and how much [he] think[s] about [his] responses."

He just might not be so hot on English, it doesn't mean he hasn't considered what he's going to say.
> You'd be surprised how many people would give you a blank stare if you told them their next phone needs to re-charged almost every night, in exchange for being able to play angry birds...

Reminds me of portable (laptop) computers.

Weak processors. Awful graphics performance. Heavy. Awful battery life. You'd be nuts to make one of these your sole computer.

Until those problems mostly went away. Today, most computers sold are laptops.

I think it's unwise to assume that the drawbacks of current smartphones are permanent.
"The barrier to entry of participating on HN is not how you word, or begin your point - but the value you add."

The original impetus behind HN was that it is a place where people can have civil discourse online. Proper grammar and spelling when writing are a part of that - it is the equivalent of not drooling from your mouth when speaking.
I think you and Fred Wilson are talking about different things.

Being a "jerk" is about backstabbing people. That's not a good long term strategy.

Being "difficult" is sticking to your vision and not being afraid to offend people defending it. That's a good long term strategy if you're a good entrepreneur.
I wish he had addressed the fact that school is incredibly expensive. It's much harder to start a business when you are 100k in debt from your expensive MBA (or your undergrad for that matter).
Both of these claims are tossed out as random assertions with no support. Why would Zuckerberg be better off if he had finished undergrad? Why would the Facebook experience have been richer if crafter by a post-college founder?
Big Company vs Startup
Try something with your non-technical family members:

"What do you think of the iPhone?"

then

"What do you think of the Android ecosystem?"