skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
"Maybe the answer is something really sort-of fuzzy. It seems to me that people tend to buy a house when they want to lay down "roots" in a place, but then that wouldn't explain why so many people just rent for a long time despite not needing the mobility."

Wouldn't this come down to the risk appetite of renters vs. homeowners? Perhaps long-term renters overestimate the risks/trouble of homeowning and overvalue their mobility. In a sense, renters may be willing to pay a perceived premium (i.e. "you're throwing your money away") because they feel that they are safer. This feeling would only be reinforced if they've had favourable historical renting experiences.

I can't help drawing an analogy to buying insurance; you hope nothing bad happens, but buy insurance anyway.
One of the reasons why I quit Reddit was because so many of the most upvoted comments were ones trying hard to be witty OR memes. Same goes with some of the things that are upvoted on the subreddits.
It is also important to mention prediction regarding prices of real estate (which also influence rent).
For example, prices of real estate in Japan are still falling down - nearly 20 years of constant decline [1].

There were articles in 2007 [2], how Japan's real estate crash may finally end after 16 years, but oh well.. we know happen in 2008.

[1] http://blogs.reuters.com/felix-salmon/2010/01/12/house-price...
[2] http://www.generationaldynamics.com/cgi-bin/D.PL?xct=gd.e070...
All I Really Need To Know, I Learned Playing Starcraft
Ask HN: Why open-source prefers Google Groups as discussion engine?
Node.js
http://groups.google.com/group/nodejs

Ruby on Rails
http://groups.google.com/group/rubyonrails-talk

etc

What benefits or special features do Google Groups have? Posting via email?
Seriously though. I think we'd all be much better off if most or all of the lawyers in government were replaced with engineers, and the language and mechanisms of laws changed to reflect that.

Then, if something didn't achieve its expected outcome (take your pick of well-meaning programs across the political spectrum that didn't return on their promises), it would be seen as a bug requiring a fix as opposed to a matter of ideology to be spun into a success by countless PR firms.

It would also be nice to have a group of people who collectively have no respect for large incumbent corporations at the helm of this country.

I firmly believe that any manifestation of the state necessitates somebody getting fd, but in this scenario it would be an entirely different set of people and in new and interesting ways. I'm all for it.
Reddit created Reddit Gold specifically because they were so cash starved.

I also question how much revenue they generate from ads considering the number of users who use Ad-Block.
This is exactly my point. We've seen several iterations of online marketing. Short of spam, e-mail has been such a powerful messaging platform that it hasn't changed - and hasn't needed to.

I don't think that e-mail is perfect. I think that there is something better. I don't know what it is and neither do the current batch of social network powerhouses. It's out there though - email conversion rates are far too low for it to be the end solution :)
I have fixed this as requested.
I'm sorry, are you serious? Apple chose, of their own volition, to modify, compile, and then distribute a derivative version of WebCore, a project clearly licensed under the LGPL. In order to be compliant with this license, all new/modified code statically linked to the code they took must be cleanly separated from the rest of the binary in a fashion that would allow a working replacement to be compiled and used in its place. So, whether they want to cough up the code for WAK* or "just" give us un-linked clean object files so I can link their work together myself, as it stands they are simply violating this license, and the only thing "in doubt" is their right to use and modify WebCore.
Is Intel's microcode core better than other competing RISC cores? Is it really that Intel's process is that much better? It seems like it's unanimously the best, but it can't explain everything can it?

I'm having a hard time wrapping my mind around this. It almost feels like Intel has simply added a layer of abstraction. It isn't clear to me that this is a bad thing. Intel has the flexibility of changing that microcode core as they please without worrying about the need for everything to be recompiled if they think of a better implementation with a different instruction set. For very specialized low power devices ARM makes sense. For more complex systems I'm not so sure. You see a strong movement in software towards increasing levels of abstraction. Why would hardware be different?

Is that a fair assessment of the situation? Or am I missing something?
"Restrict user commenting to 1/day until karma > X. No downvoting possible until karma > 2X"

Which would mean that your comment wouldn't be allowed as your account was created two hours ago ;)
The real question is, for all companies that try to control access to even single user software via online authorization systems, how wise does this look now?

I'm still playing Atari 2600 games, decades later, because they still work. Tying down use to a single-point-of-failure-authorization-system guarantees that your investment in creative works has a short shelf life. But most gamers know at least what the original Super Mario Bros theme song sounds like as coming from an NES.
Besides your Mom, no one cares about getting you well.

As noted elsewhere: The site exists because there are people who are interested in what I did to get well, not because I had any plans to create such a site. It gives them clues as to how to get themselves healthier when all else has failed. I talk about what worked for me in large part because I have zero interest in giving advice per se. I think that is part of what is wrong with conventional medicine: Doctors routinely prescribe treatments with short term benefits and long term costs, which is not so bad if you are basically healthy and can take the hit for an acute problem. But it's deadly if you have a chronic health issue. And the fact that they take this basic approach is no secret. It's done quite openly: We all know about the huge fold-outs detailing the negative side effects that come with most prescription drugs and the waivers that have to be signed before they will perform surgery. Since getting myself healthier relied heavily on trading short term costs for long term gains, I have zero interest in replicating a system that I am convinced is part of the problem.

So your best bet is to sell sympathy and motivation. My suggestion: make it more of a forum, allow other people to tell their stories as well. Focus on sharing emotions as much as sharing solutions.

I own several email lists. I cannot for the life of me get conversations going on them. I also briefly had a forum for the site. It was overrun with spam and had maybe three members (myself included). So I've tried that route and failed, quite consistently and miserably. It works better for me to try to get people sharing info when someone else owns/runs the discussion space. And that is a piece I am working on elsewhere, for the purpose of helping people help themselves. I'm also not interested in selling sympathy or motivation per se. There is a saying that "an example is the best lecture" and I have found that to be true. So I do offer myself as an example in hopes that it inspires people to feel "If she can do it, I can do it". But I have zero interest in being some cheerleader.

Again, I was not asking about monetizing the site. Only about getting traffic, a question you have not addressed. As stated earlier: I have several websites. I really don't expect this site to be where the money is. But it is the most mature/developed of the sites I own and it basically serves as a proving ground for me to learn stuff.
I use memrise.com for French and it incorporates these techniques in language learning. Greg Detre and Ed Cooke have a great site there.

For general info about the memory methods I recommend Mnemotechnics.org
Top Ten Fastest-Accelerating Cars (Countdown) | Top Ten Rox
strangely, to me Skype deal looks like Storagetek:

1.obsoleting technology (Skype's power is Internet (typically PC, not mobile device) to "real phones" only enabled endpoints - this power is diminishing with communication networks growing today in any other segment except the segment of "real phones"-only enabled endpoints)

2.and commoditization of the rest of their technology - i.e. speech and video over Internet, and their technology not even being better

3.and no noticeable presence in disproportionally growing and more numerous segment of devices - mobile

The Skype was just becoming a niche player (in its old niche) and one among many in the rest of the telecom world.
Canada is distinctly different than the US. I was also surprised when I realized this difference. The scary part of this all is that even though folks with good credit were able to taken advantage of full-term fixed rate mortgages (i.e. prime borrowers), the US still endured the housing bust long after the majority of the sub-prime borrowers defaulted.

I'm not sure about other Commonwealth countries, but Canada definitely does not have this option. Our mortgages have a specific mortgage rate term (usually 3-5 years), separate from the life-time of the mortgage (usually 20-30 years; the 35 was/will be no longer be available). This means that interest rate fluctuations are more devastating when they rise for those who put little to no money down on their expensive housing purchases in Canada recently.
McDonalds Hires 62,000, Turns Away Over 938,000 Applicants For Minimum Wage Jobs
My father uses J in financial investing. He makes a shit-ton of money.
It could be 'serverside' rather than 'clientside'.

As in, sure you can connect the AIM and MSN chat networks, but you yourself have to run a server to connect the two.

Currently one also has to have migration functionality written by themselves. Instead, amazon could provide it, just like AIM could provide an MSN gateway themselves.
This article used everything required to get a frontpage HN submission:

1. The word cloud
The people vs Goldman Sachs
The #1 reason companies use online authorization is because people actually pay for it.

Sony is all-too-familiar with people pirating games on their consoles. Online authorization eliminates huge swaths of pirates.

Most consumers aren't thinking about 10 years from now when they buy. They're thinking about getting their dopamine fix RIGHT NOW. And online authorization makes them give up their CC# to get it.
Interesting. The perception when I was in school was that the rent was too damn high. I never really looked at house prices, but I knew someone who got into a 2 bedroom off Main near Stadium for around $190k (in 2005 or so), which seemed reasonable considering its location.

related: Ann Arbor/Detroit HN group http://groups.google.com/group/hn-ann-arbor-detroit
Some BitTorrent clients can detect each other over a LAN (using Bonjour/Zeroconf and/or Local Peer Discovery) and prioritize traffic to/from each other locally. Thus, with a fast enough efficiency becomes less of an issue, although for large enough files physical media transfer might still be faster.

Of course, if your peers are on different LANs but in close physical proximity then physical media becomes much more useful.
It's more an advantage of very-specifically designed languages like Haskell, some of which happen to be functional because part of the reason they can be specified in so much detail is because of the lack of side effects.
What's Intel's advantage(aside from process)? And why hasn't there been a competitive ARM chip in the high performance market?
Yes, exactly. This morning, in response to a tweet from a developer at ASU's Cronkite School of Journalism's, I wrote a similar blog post trying to explain how journalism sites create one way comment systems and then ignore the comments and then wonder why the communities all go to hell.

At the risk of blog whoring, it's here: http://jerryasher.posterous.com/two-cents-on-why-journalism-...
So this only helps with things that me and my friends want, it doesn't change anything for things that only me or only one of my friends want.

Unless by friends you mean the extended circle of people that live nearby..?
I'm aware of that. Usually deals of that size are done at least partly through a share swap, not all cash. Microsoft needs to do something big. Skype just won't move the needle and it still costs a whole lot of money.

But there is indeed a problem caused by SAP's size. It's completely uncertain whether regulators in Europe would allow such a deal to happen. Microsoft and SAP wanted to merge many years ago (when MS was arguably more powerful) but it was called off due to regulatory issues.
This previous Hacker News thread might be helpful for language learning.
http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1603562
Here is what Microsoft should do with Skype and it's 140Million-member social network:

Beat Facebook. Turn Skype into Diaspora. (Specifically, take Skype's persistent chatrooms into the next dimension)

Integrate Skype with Windows Photo Album, Movie Maker, Spaces, blah blah. Mayke Skype a local application for managing your personal content -- photos, videos, thoughts, whatever.

Leverage Skype's encrypted P2P infrastructure to make truly privacy-protected social networking. Automatically send status updates and comments and stuff to a user's friends over the Skype network.

Make social network truly social, and not dependent on a central server.

Monetizations:
* ads in the the client software
* for-pay special privacy settings for business/paranoid:
An Enterprise version that runs inside a private (corporate) network, with centralized IT authority.
* For-pay broadcast-type features for self-promoters.
* For-pay "professional" and other custom front-end for more specifically-structure communities than Facebook's free for all pseudo-"Friend" relationship.

Let users import/export their data between Skype and other network and blog systems.

Skype could displace Facebook, making social networking better for everyone, and rain money on MS.
"I'm a web editor at a regional news site, and moderating reader comments is a huge pain in the neck"

Right. You're doing it wrong.

Stop moderating reader comments. Let readers moderate reader comments.

Stop creating one way comment systems. Create ways for readers to converse with reporters.

At hacker news for example, all sorts of entrepreneurs come by and all sorts of startup wannabe employees come through as well.

When was the last time you saw a reporter have any serious interaction with his readers in the comments?
It's not ridiculously hard to generate automatic documentation from comments. A healthy side-effect would be that the quality of the code would increase and precisely match the quality of the documentation. If the documentation is lacking, incomplete or wrong, you go and fix the comments in the source code and regenerate the docs.

If a programmer told you that if skipping documenting the source code would allow it to be delivered sooner, would you buy it? What's next? Skipping tests?

In my projects my team routinely generates not only API documentation, but also unit-tests from comments. This way, if the docs are wrong, the tests fail.
Yes that is correct. Geographical proximity can mean anyone who wants the same data you want and you are in a position to exchange it physically. So it can a friend you meet in college everyday or your neighbor even.
That is correct. But to keep things simple, I didn't go into that. My main intention was to see whether people actually feel the need for this and how it would scale.
Yes, I was thinking of something like Haskell.
The relevant element of FP is statelessness. That said, statelessness could easily be considered a leaky abstraction because, at some point, the machine you are working on has state. Your machine has CPU registers and memory and such, so the entire "statelessness" of FP is subject to the underlying system-level implementation.
I Love Charts
We're still young, so we've only had a few thousand people try us out for Chinese. Of those, a good number have learned hundreds of characters or more.

One caveat - until recently, we've only really tackled the problem of reading characters. We've just started to introduce approaches for learning the pinyin and pronunciation, but they're not as polished yet.

It's going to be a little while before we tackle writing - I'd try Skritter for that.
I don't think it's because the Boost guys thought it "too hard". Having seen/used some of those libraries, I'm 100% sure they can handle the alleged "hardness".

C++ in general values performance over safety almost everywhere (just like C). That's probably why they made certain parts exception-unsafe.
Maybe I can help. I'm relatively local (Gouda, ZH) and I've managed teams like the one you mention before. Shoot me an email, address is in my profile.
Starcraft is easily the most engaging and well-balanced strategy game ever made.

There are many reasons why the game is suited to the startup guy. Average games last 30min, which is perfect for someone who has a life and other things to think about. The game is easy to pick up, but always remains challenging. The ranking algorithm does an awesome job of matching you with people your level, meaning that you don't need to invest too much into the game for it to become fun.

The biggest failure of most games is that unless you're a "hardcore gamer," online play with better but anonymous players can be an infuriating experience. You'll get your ass kicked, while everybody flames on you for being a "fucking noob." Starcraft overcomes that by using an insanely great matching algorithm, and having a game that is well balanced and appeals to any level.

I don't spend much time playing games, but the few times that I do it is always Starcraft II (or Warcraft III), and I always have a great time while stimulating my intellect and reflexes.
Except that web development is more akin to microwaving Eggo waffles.
Ask HN: Tips on managing rapid growth in your company?
A lot of the focus in HN seems to be about how to get an idea to the initial start-up phase. But what tips to people have about the awkward adolescence stage of a company; you've found a successful market for a product, you're hiring lots of new people, and you're looking to expand to new revenue streams. All sorts of challenges start to pop-up and I'm very curious how others handle them. Some examples:

* How do you handle organizing the company into effective teams and projects with competing goals of growing revenue in existing products and establishing newer (though riskier) product development efforts?

* As more people come in, how do you best get them started, introduce them to corporate culture?

* Longer term employees often have a serious lack of people management skills; as you bring in new people with those skills, how do you start to build a management strength in a company?

* When is the ideal time to establish performance reviews? They have their ups and downs; it seems like a good idea but the incentive structure has to be carefully thought through.

* New product development doesn't always work out in an unproven or competitive market (yes, we should all be following Steve Blank here). That said, there's a constant tension between driving existing revenues and establishing new revenue sources; and the shifts often have a lot of impact on what people are focusing on. Too many shifts can be disruptive to morale. What techniques can be used to balance these?

In general, I'd love to hear from other people who worked at places that went from a dozen or so employees to a couple hundred or more and have stories about what did and didn't work.
The idea of a "social" bittorrent client is not new in the sense that the Tribler client defines itself as a "social application" - see: http://www.tribler.org/.

I think tribler defines "social" as those who you have social ties to rather than those who you are geographically close to. It thus leverages "socialness" for security rather than speed.

I think the tribbler's definition is correct. In the modern era, we often don't have social ties to those geographically close to us. Duality should simply be called a "geo-aware" client - not a bad thing.
Google predictions for the Eurovision based on search trends
Is 'Nudging' Really Enough?
it's not "native". look at the UIToolbar (or the fact that it's not a UIToolBar but an html div with transparent pngs). Look at the UITableView/UIScrollView (or the fact that it's not as but that it's a div with content scrollable and it's on magic javascript fake the same "feel" of a native app)...

It's a webapp. It just pretends to be native by being wrapped in a UIWebView and uses AVFoundation to play videos and stuffed gingerly on to the app store.

See this:
http://www.readwriteweb.com/mobile/2011/03/sxsw-mistakes-mad...

and this:
http://www.slideshare.net/kentbrew/mistakes-i-made-building-...
Though I was in a "channel" (as they call(ed) it) that was perhaps less attuned to freaks, I had the opposite experience at EA.
People who gained power and money in America's free market closing the door behind them.

It's really sad.
Ask HN: How many of you on HN use any sort of online dating services?
Pretty self-explanatory, just curious how many hackers and HN readers actually actively use any of the current online dating services.
Interesting. Not really sure how much mileage there is in an XML representation of MIDI, other than as an implementation detail for bigger packages. I'd venture a guess that 'end-user' adoption is low? In the sense of, for example, people exporting as midi-xml from their sequencer to email to each other?

To be clear, I was more enthused with the collaborative potential and the extremely low barrier to entry, rather than with the notion of a text-file-based representation of sequencing. This project seemed more immediate, hackable, 'tactile' in a way, and more shareable than other formats/tools that I know of; although of course much less powerful.
Hah! Yep, never a dull day. You can get a glimmer of things from here:

http://www.flickr.com/photos/memrise/3966430619/in/photostre...

and facebook.com/memrise has a few photos as well :)

If there's any interest, I can try and persuade him to do an 'I am a Grandmaster of Memory, AMA' on Reddit.
Apple did announce the APIs for iPhone accessories a year or so back with iOS 3.0. Scope and traction of Google's and Apple's specifications/APIs might vary.
Gaining Authority in the Age of Digital Overload
Sounds like something I'd love to be hearing about since I started in Chem myself. Is there a non-software tech news aggregator? Or even a blog by you with interesting developments.
By the word social (and now I think it can mean different things in different context), I meant that it is based on the concept that there is content which is common to a given 'social' group -- let's say with your friends who use Linux, you can use it to download a 10 GB distro. The set of those friends forms a social group that will participate in downloading the distro. You are right about the 'geo-aware' part but then there is no geo-awareness; it's all manual.
Fun post. Reminds me of my interest in large numbers a few years ago with googolplex, Graham's Number, Ackerman function, TREE(), Busy Beaver...
This is true. Part of the reason doctors have high salaries (and healthcare costs are high) is that the AMA issues licences and creates scarcity. In this sense, they perform a similar function to a union.

It does seem like an outdated way to see if a doctor is good or not. I'd personally find a recommendation from a friend or a bunch of positive reviews on yelp a lot more convincing than the mere fact they have a license to practice. It's pretty likely hospital administrators and others would be able to determine which doctors were good without a licensing practice (just like we find good programmers without licensing), and they have strong incentives to do so.