skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I think it's a matter of how HIGH the bar is showing itself right now. I mean, upper literature has never been commonplace entertainment, not any more than it is right now. Back in the 20s people weren't all discussing the finer points of Steinbeck and Faulkner. We only remember those guys now and assume everybody was like them - and that therefore we've dropped - but I'd guess we have more people into upper literature now than they had back then.

The problem is that cultures change so rapidly. We have a hundred new mediums presenting themselves every decade, and each of us finds solitude in a different sort. It's natural for some people to prefer texting over literature, just as it's natural for some of us to shun the Internet entirely. I think the Internet gets this more than the literati do. We get that just because fewer people read books doesn't mean that there's a threat of books vanishing altogether. It means that the market gets smaller and more focused, and you get a much cozier reading community. I'd guess that of the students I was with in high school you could get a good 40% to write a decent essay if you needed one - and that's a high percentage, when you compare that with the percentage of people who need to be able to write decent essays in life.

Shakespeare couldn't spell his own name, from the fragments we have of his writing. He wasn't "literate" by the bar this article would like to set. He just came up with play ideas and figured out how to word things vocally. He created what we'd call great literature without the tools that we assume literature needs to get started.

As I said: the Internet gets it. The sci-fi literate get it, too: and no surprise, since the best science fiction writers today are on the truly cutting edge of literature. It's the conservative literati that still doesn't understand that literature changes with every decade, that what's true today might not be in 2010, and that that's not necessarily a bad thing.
Really? What if there is something better, and just you don't know about it? Is what you have currently still the best?

What if 'you' above is expanded to 'everyone'?
From the article: The new, unnamed product will continue to have "technologies and features that others can't match," according to the CFO.

I took that to mean that it's entirely new, but it is a press release, so maybe they're talking about some minor change like it's something new and wonderful.
I vividly recall writing that. Glad to see that someone else felt strongly enough about it to include it in their site.

Some good links below, including some to pg and dhh. Pretty good company, I'd say.

[EDIT: A little scary, too. Anything any of us say here can end up anywhere. Kinda makes one wanna slow down and think a little before posting.]
Affordable Family Restaurants in Downtown Chicago - Associated Content
Steve Jobs in good health following second surgery - report
I am a photographer myself. I don't do it professionally -- I don't try to do it professionaly -- because I enjoy it as a hobby, and don't like the pressure of doing photographic work for others. I did photograph a wedding for a friend because they asked me to, and it was very very stressful and complicated. Wedding photography is not easy.

Good wedding photography is even harder. I am getting married this fall, and was shocked at the mediocrity of most local wedding photographers. I could hardly believe some of them claimed to run a wedding photography business. Not necessarily "bad" photos, but, photos lacking character and interest to the degree that they might as well have been taken by random people at the wedding than by a "professional" photographer.

But this is also true in other fields. There are mediocre software engineers who hide in the bureaucracy of large companies and get the same salary, plus or minus 5%, as really good software engineers at the company.
" Once you stop thinking, "How could the government solve this problem?" and start thinking, "How can I start a business to solve this problem?" your perspective on the world change dramatically."

I have yet to encounter a critique of capitalism that can't be rephrased as a business plan. I think libertarianism as an ideology has survived for so long because it's adaptable in that way.
The software industry gets a heck of a lot from the government. It has been one of the top funders of development work, both as a customer and a direct employer. Many of the common software tools and technologies we use today wouldn't exist if not for government-sponsored research.
In general I agree with your other points, but let's have a little balance.
Uh... that's a bit far. Even Ayn Rand would probably quibble with that definition. Certainly freedom from physical suffering is orthogonal, no? Or you're saying that it's OK to, say, stab you repeatedly as long as you're on my property and I'm not stealing anything from you?

And sure, sure, I know you can get around this by defining your body and mind as your property. But then the whole thing becomes kind of a silly point, no? Everything can be a property right if everything is defined as someone's property. That's hardly profound.
Except for the government subsidies that sponsored the development of the Internet back when it was called the ARPAnet, of course.
As for functionality, I think you're A+. Presentation... probably a solid C. I'm not crazy about the color scheme and your results are a bit cluttered and hard to read. Cool concept though, definitely.
He mentioned that anyone who did mediocre work just to get to the job they really wanted was overpaid. I'd say that's true all they way down the line... including journalists who slap together worse top 10 lists than most bloggers.
Yes, it's possible to accomplish many great things without government intervention. Except for creating the Internet in the first place.
Happy bastille day! (a week late)
"The main economic motives of startup founders seem to be freedom and security."

I would say that these are the economic motives for just about every human being. Economic "freedom" and "security" are often euphemisms for living a carefree life of luxury. Who wouldn't want that? Add "power" and you've got the economic motives for every money-grubbing scoundrel that ever existed. Everyone would love to get rich quick, it's just that startup founders looking to flip fast are willing to take more risks and sacrifices to attempt it.

A founder motive that I can appreciate is the desire to create great and interesting things that improve others' lives.
Wow, this is a great snapshot into what it will take to move a language to App Engine. Kudos for him taking this up as his 20% project, certainly sounds challenging.
The problem with Drizzle is that it doesn't do what web developers need. No, we don't need stored procedures, triggers, views, or anything else that Drizzle is removing. What we really need is the kind of replication that something like BigTable, Cassandra, or Hadoop's HBase provide. Drizzle doesn't cover that.

So, let's say that Drizzle is 50% faster than MySQL. That means that we can delay thinking about scaling out a little, but it still doesn't solve that problem. Also, if you are going for no-single-point-of-failure, it doesn't handle that.

I'm personally hoping that the documentation on Cassandra takes off. As a web programmer, I want a replicated data store and I don't care too much if it's "dumb". Drizzle is simply giving me a database with joins, but nothing more.
Are you implying that any parenthetical remark is out of bounds? It seems to me that "saying how great an article is" captures more of the intent of the prohibition than you suggest.

That said, this particular parenthetical remark isn't all that great, albeit for reasons other than the one you cited.
Russian Internet social maps – Yandex vs. Google
Richard Stallman-- GCC, Emacs, and the GPL.
"That's one small step for [a] man, one giant leap for mankind."

Neil Armstrong was a test pilot and knew more about risk taking than Godin ever will. From what I know of Neil Armstrong, he represented the US with dignity and humility and helped make NASA look like gods.

Even MTV wanted a piece of Armstrong's credibility in their initial ad campaign. Armstrong was a purple cow on the moon and Godin only mentions him to get some of that credibility in his post.
The OLPC features something similar to this:

http://wiki.laptop.org/go/Journal

http://laptop.org/en/laptop/start/journal.shtml

You know, for all the trash talk about the OLPC and it's lack of a regular GUI, it sure does have a few innovative ideas in there that we could learn from.
Bill Joy-- BSD, VI, later work at Sun.
Maybe, but the Lifestreams people are suing anyone who doesn't pony up for their patents. (E.g., Apple for Time Machine, which is a real stretch.)
Memo To VCs: Every Great Idea Doesn't Fit In An Elevator Pitch
The functionality is already a jump over everyone else in this space.

Forget graphical issues; do a real usability study. Then start funneling ad traffic to the site and start A/B testing more usable interfaces (aka don't take my word for it, use data!)
That was a great quote and I am so at that point right now.
But we're talking about salary, not "impressive stuff on the resume". The market value of combat experience per se is basically zero (or else veterans would make more than non-veterans at other jobs, which they don't). Being able to fly other aircraft is irrelevant when all you ever touch is an A330. These guys can probably drive lots of cars too, but they don't get paid extra for it. Training ability has value, but not that much more than the value of those being trained (or else, again, we'd see teachers paid more generally). Likewise long experience is a wash in our society. We don't value it per se.

And with your emergency management point, you need to show that senior pilots (as opposed to pilots generally) actually correlate with people who are more capable of avoiding crashes. I'm not sure that's true at all. Note that the fuel exhaustion emergency you reference was the pilots' fault in the first place (along with some dumb procedures by the airline too). History is filled with both young and old pilots who have saved (and crashed) their aircraft with their skills (or mistakes).

Again, the point here was "senior pilots are paid more than they are worth". Your response is more along the lines of "senior pilots are really cool and totally deserve it!", which is sort of non-responsive.

The real reason that senior pilots are paid so much is that they are unionized, skill-essential employees who don't compete in a market with non-union equivalents (the proof here being that non-union pilots in commuter jobs get paid dirt wages). This is exactly the same reason that the longshormen in the article are overpaid. It's dumb, but it's not so dumb that employers want to rock the boat trying to fix it.

Just don't fool yourself into thinking that any of this has to do with their l33t skilz. It's a market thing.
Welcome to the MYOB WEB English Forum - MYOB Forum
Now We Know It's A Bad Recession: Even Porn Industry Getting Slammed
I love how these slides clearly demonstrate the difference between UI and graphic design: the examples are bare bones yet highly functional.
Shuttleworth challenges open source to out-pretty Apple
I'd guess that any service that transfers funds between people would be susceptible to charges of money laundering. Tipjoy doesn't currently make it easy to transfer funds, but they would like to:

http://tipjoy.com/faq/#q8
Link's expired
Absolutely. Particularly strained bits:

Sounds like a good plan. Let's think about the optimal way to do this.

Disagreeing by agreeing is a powerful technique. But it's pretty obvious in this case. I prefer disagreeing head on, if I have a solid argument.

They want enough money that (a) they don't have to worry about running out of money and (b) they can spend their time how they want. Running your own business offers neither.

I have a friend who "ran his own business" for 4 years while doing his medical degree, and accumulated over a million dollars in the process. That's not enough to change your lifestyle to be like the mega-rich, but it's certainly enough to gain the freedom to spend your time the way you want it. Think of it this way: $1m gives you at least enough money to spend 10 comfortable years doing other stuff and figuring out what else you really want to do.

And as anyone who runs their own business can tell you, that requires your complete attention.

That's not true for all businesses. I have a business that I haven't paid attention to for over 9 months and it's still generating revenues (couple of thousand dollars a month). Sure, revenues go down, but even with minimal maintenance you can keep them dropping reasonably slowly.

There will of course be some founders who wouldn't like that idea: the ones who like running their company so much that there's nothing else they'd rather do. _But this group must be small_.

Why must it be small? Maybe this group is much larger than the other. Where's the evidence, or even argument, that it must be small? It seems to me there are far more people running IT businesses than people starting up in the valley. I would think actually the number of people who enjoy running an online business must be large.

I could go on, but this comment will turn into a rant. I'm quite disappointed in this one. When DHH gave his presentation I thought it was quite interesting that Startup School was hosting a talk that went directly against their principles ("make something ppl want and don't worry about the money", for example), and I was curious what pg's answer would be. I'm not convinced by this answer. It seems weak and somewhat dishonest.
The fact that they have valid business reasons not to support my use case doesn't magically make my need go away.

It's perfectly reasonable for them not to want some people as customers, but virtualisation on Apple only hardware covers nothing like as many people's needs as virtualisation on any hardware and any underlying OS.
I thought that as well - that i would talk to my parents more if they spoke via AIM/MSN/IRC. Then they actually got onto AIM and started talking. And I started calling them up (if at college) or going into the other room (if during break).
Surely another method could be implemented. I don't want to give an upvote to an item before I read it - at least, not in good faith.

Personally, I currently use instapaper.com...
From what I've seen, Libertarianism seems to be the most logically consistent and internally consistent ideology. I think it glosses over some aspects of human nature, but if you accept all the tenets, it can achieve an unmatched level of internal consistency. I suspect this is why hackers are attracted to it.
See also:

sed arkanoid (http://sed.sourceforge.net/grabbag/scripts/arkanoid.sed)
sed sokoban (http://sed.sourceforge.net/grabbag/scripts/sokoban.sed)
Why do you think they couldn't walk away? Sure, if Basecamp doesn't get an update for years, it will go down. But that will take some time. Imagine Basecamp is making $1m a year of revenues, and they stop maintaining it and marketing it. It's still a useful product, until someone build something better and cheaper. Even then, people are usually slow to switch. They could easiy make $800k in the year after they stop maintaining it. Then $500k the following. Then $200k the following. Probably some people would keep on paying for several years because they're used to it. That's not bad for not putting any work in it.
I don't understand how shared assumptions being the basis of logical argument constitutes a flaw. Could you explain this further?

We argue about experiences in science all the time. We do this by documenting steps regarding how we rendered our experience so that other people may also experience what we did and perform measurements and comparisons and analyzations, et cetera, and once we've done that, we can apply other intellectual tools we have, like logic.

How do I render a religious experience for myself?
Memo to self: MAKE IT FIT.

VCs don't give a crap. They should not. Neither should your banker, mother, potential business partner/co-founder, etc...

The onus is on you, the founder(s), to be articulate enough to make it fit.

The focus is on saying things the way the audience understands. That takes two things:

1) Understand your audience (three books could be written on this alone); and

2) Be articulate enough to express your idea in a way your audience will be receptive to it. This is heavily dependent on #1 above.

If the guy you're talking to says "tell me in 30 seconds what you are doing," then you better explain it well, and do so in 30 seconds. You could explain the most complex idea succinctly if you wanted to, and were articulate enough.

It's the same as writing: The introduction to your business plan, for example, is an elevator pitch. The first paragraph of a cover letter is also an elevator pitch. People will decide whether you are onto something or whether you are full of it.

This Hank Williams guy (the author of the post) might simply not be the articulate type. He says the idea "is bull." Does this satisfy the need? No, it merely invalidates it. Whatever he says, people will still expect an elevator pitch. People will still listen to your idea with a short attention span, simply because there is so much bullshit and trash out there.

Make your pitch longer and plant the seeds to your own demise, people.

So yes, my response to this "I feel like ignoring the audience" post is:

Memo to self: MAKE IT FIT.
The story behind the DNS flaw
Yes, I find that there's a disconnect the notion of liking places where good ideas win and a dislike of 'bloat.' What's one man's bloat is another man's potentially useful library / tool-chest. Emacs stays around because it's useful to many people. For software, that's an important kind of 'win.'
This is awesome. The neat thing is that fitzpatrick will probably be able to actually pull it off. I just hope it'll be able to run Catalyst.
Sometimes things happen that you have no way of predicting and making a contingency plan for. I had the world's least annoying pregnancy (no morning sickness, gestational diabetes, or pre-eclampsia worries). I stayed within the recommended range for weight gain and exercised throughout my pregnancy. I turned 24 shortly before my due date, so complications from advanced maternal age weren't a worry. I was told I'd probably have a boring (in the medical sense) delivery.

Turns out that it was anything but boring. I went into labor on Christmas Eve and almost didn't see Christmas morning. It got to the point where they rushed my husband out of the room and me into the OR. A half an hour later they told him they were doing everything they could, but he might not be bringing anyone home from the hospital. Thankfully, that turned out not to be the case.

However, those complications ended up changing our childcare plans. Without getting into private details, the daycare we had selected during my first trimester wasn't qualified to handle my son's health issues. Most daycares weren't, and the few we found that were ran in the $2k+ a month range. But they also had huge wait lists. Since I had a decent network and could work from home, we decided that was our best option.

Fortunately, my birth experience is atypical. However, a lot can happen in a year (conception to the end of a 12 week maternity leave). Most of the people who are scrambling to find daycare a month before maternity leave is over usually had something come up during the last month or so of pregnancy. Daycare wait lists are ridiculously long where I live, so if something changes your daycare plans, you may have to get a nanny or stay home for a year until a place opens up.
"A person's religion says a lot about their epistemology..."

Where do you draw this from? Have you any citations you can make? This seems like something I'd be interested in learning more about.
Google's Wikipedia clone Knol launches.
"They avoided risk, played it safe and chose someone who wouldn't make a ruckus."

Yes, you really need someone who's prone to making a ruckus when you're flying to the moon in a rocket-propelled tin-can.

Anyway, the final decision about who would go first was decided (to Buzz Aldrin's everlasting disappointment) by a coin-flip. So it could have been Aldrin who is celebrated as the first man on the moon, and Godin would presumably be saying what a dull man he is as well.

What is so inspiring about the Apollo missions is the massive investment (in emotional and financial terms) in a huge, co-operative endeavour which brought together the best scientists, technicians and pilots of the day. They didn't need a flashy front-man: they needed people with brains and nerves of steel. It's an awe-inspiring achievement which (as Arthur C Clarke said) will outlive all of us.

Recommended reading: "A Man on The Moon" by Andrew Chaikin.
Software engineers in the US get "government favors and protection" from US immigration policy. If anyone in the world could move to the US and work here, without jumping through the hoops of visa regulations, then American programmers would face a lot more competition from non-citizens than we do now; the pointy-haired bosses could get most of the cost benefits of cheap foreign labor without the headaches associated with managing workers ten time zones away.

(Many other professions would also benefit from cheap labor and therefore we, as customers of the labor, would benefit from lower prices, but I think geeks are at risk of losing more than we gain.)

I hear a lot of libertarian geeks complain about the unfairness of the progressive income tax or the welfare state, but not so many complaining about the unfairness of our immigration policy.
Just because you're being subtle doesn't make you any less rude.

Perhaps a better argument against: Are all dangerous ideas of equal value? How would you compare a reinvention of Jazz with iTunes? (A more polished and legal replacement of the original Napster.)

Ah, I see now. You meant the score as just a tongue in cheek thing.
Ask HN: Anyone going to Facebook f8 today?
If so, would you like to stage a get together?

Send me a Twitter @daveambrose.
Perl and the GAE deserve each other.
There is research that indicates that "willpower", at least, improves the more you exercise it:

http://www.nytimes.com/2008/04/02/opinion/02aamodt.html?ex=1...

Unfortunately, the article doesn't list the specific research papers, but it suggests that consistent exercise over time increases it ("using your nondominant hand to brush your teeth for two weeks can increase willpower capacity"); the article gives no word on whether exercising willpower to exhaustion is a better or worse strategy, though.
The layout sucks and colour scheme isn't great either. I think you've tried to cram everything before the fold which gives it the visual headache that it does. Sparse it all out, seperate the map from the controls.

Would be cool if the map geo-located my ip and displayed my local results on first visit. -edit- Ahh it looks like you're already doing that but didn't work for me (showed london).

Overall nice idea and it works quite well.
Regarding tip #4, resetting the root password: Usually one needs to type "sync" afterward to make the changes persist after a reboot.
Google Unveils Knol aka "The accountable Wikipedia"
Hackers tend to be libertarians for the same reason that neither the essay nor the 18 comments so far mention demographics more than glancingly: they've stumbled into a high-status/high-reward niche in society, and like most people who do so, they prefer to think that this means they are exceptional. Libertarianism is an ideology for those who fear constraints on their own (self-perceived) excellence more than they fear luck. It attracts mainly those who have had very good luck, and it tells them a bedtime story about how that luck is really talent/accomplishment.