skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
The answer to that is obviously: Yes, I prefer to know when and how I'm being manipulated, rather than walk around being blind to my strings being pulled.

I've come across the same reaction amongst my techie friends as well. I don't understand why so many smart people have such a big blindspot about this issue.
Reads like an unsatisfying self-justification to me. I think people read his posts not because they are long, but simply because he's a pretty decent writer with a pretty engaging style. Nevertheless, his style entails a lot of extraneous, decorative statements that get annoying when you're looking for raw information.

That kind of style works fine with, say, Violent Acres, because you know what to expect. But Yegge also writes semi technical material with the same style! In this regard, Eliezer Yudkowsky does a good job IMHO: long, but succinct.
Chandler 1.0 finally released
MA seeks restraining order to silence Defcon presentation about subway pass exploit
"Now the neighborhood is better, but so is the rest of NYC."

That sounds like a positive outcome to me.

"The poor make bad choices and have bad life skills (e.g., don't always show up to work)."

That is not true generally. If you are a hard-working person born and raised in a horrible place, it is hard to get out. And, there are people that are willing to work hard to turn their life around but could benefit greatly from some assistance. I personally know several people that benefited from government welfare/food stamps/WIC and who were able to raise their standards livings substantially because of it. It is true that there are people that won't work hard or who will abuse any help they get, but in my experience most people are pretty good.

Most importantly, children don't deserve to suffer because of their parents' stupidity. It isn't hard to see how children can benefit from moving from an inner-city school to a middle class one, if you've ever visited an inner-city school.
Pwnage 2.0.2 Jailbreaks iPhone 2.0.1
My point is about the "democratization" of classifer creation. I personally am not a programmer and don't have the talent to create a startup, and there are millions more people like me. However, if there were a place where i could feed some data and have a classifier hosted somewhere I could participate in this.

It's the same way blogs allowed many more people to start creating content on the web, whereas previously it required creating and hosting a website. Or how google app engine, might increase the creeation of web applications because previously a lot of people didn't have knowledge of administering and scaling unix/dbms based applications.

A large company would seriously have a look at roi, whereas many small entrepreneurs just have a go at it. Britannica (large company) is smaller than wikipedia (community of individuals), which is again smaller than the content on the web at large (community of incentivized small entrepreneurs).
Careful waiving fees and reducing costs for some customers and not others, as you might have the reverse effect. i.e. rather than delighting one customer, you piss off ten who see you giving special treatment to some random dude and not them.

We still do it, but in a pretty orderly fashion...we have a reseller system that provides pretty significantly lower prices to our customers that buy a lot and provide the software to their customers rather than using it directly. But it's a pretty predictable discount: Buy a lot, get it cheaper. We also, behind the scenes, gave all of our early adopter beta customers a free year on their licenses. Everybody. But we didn't talk about it a lot, because we knew that wasn't the way it was always going to be...and didn't want people thinking we just suddenly started charging more and giving less. T-shirts are also something that we give away a lot...but we give them to pretty much anyone who asks for one (when we have them). We don't even care if they're a paying customer. If they like what we do enough to want to wear a T-shirt with our logo on it, we want them to have one.

So, I dunno. Nickel and dime-ing has always seemed a little short-sighted to me. I'm maybe more of a cheapskate than most folks, but it still seems problematic. To put it in perspective, when I stay at a mid-range hotel, I'm delighted when I find that a pretty good breakfast and parking is provided for free...when I stay at a high end resort, I'm pretty seriously disappointed to find that a maybe slightly better breakfast costs $45 and parking is only available via valet and costs $25/day, plus tips. If I pay $150/night and breakfast/parking is included...why if I pay $400/night, do I still have to pay exorbitant prices for the other stuff? See, I'm cheap! But I'm not complaining about things costing more...just that it feels like the mid-range hotel is providing more service for less, while the high-end hotel is looking to extract money from me every time I turn around. But, then again, the Ritz-Carlton doesn't seem to be hurting, so maybe tacking on all those extra costs works fine when wrapped up in the trappings of "luxury".
The short analysis: first/early is a factor but not dominant. Each of the examples I cited would be "first/early" in the popular perspective. iPhone may end up re-defining the category the way that Palm and iPod did: from a marketing perspective "whole product" is a more useful target than "first/early mover."
Why this appears to be a good time for suing Microsoft.
Note: I use the first person in this comment but I'm not related to any of this tomfoolery.

The tone of this article is incredible. The quoted "stock answer" for how bloggers want to be approached is there for a reason -- people don't want to get bombarded with semi-spam about stuff they don't care about -- particularly if the sender is expecting the recipient to be a patsy to spam their readership with buzz about something they don't care about.

Newsflash: The internet is big. You, blogger, are not the center of it.

I'm close enough to the center of it you wanted _your_ billboard on _my_ property.

You might be a big shot in your circle; hell, you might even deserve to be a big shot as Pulver does but you’re not the only game in town.

Uhh, cool. I was doing great before you sent me the email? I'm doing better now that my readers see that I don't suck up every piece of PR BS that is spoon fed to me?

PR is a business. Do you think every firm out there has the time and resources to go around building relationships with every blogger they might want to pitch down the road?

That sounds like your problem, not mine. You don't have to buy me a plane ticket to invite me over to play XBox 360 with your kids one night a week. These "relationships" are pretty informal and inexpensive to maintain, and you'll learn a lot about the people you're asking to do your bidding by talking to them first. You might find out they're a prick and you don't want to send your stuff to them at all because it will end up like this.

And throwing the word “embargo” into an email pitch, while clearly ineffective with regards to Mr. Pulver, is an attempt to generate some excitement.

Cool. You should see some of the words that people put in emails to get me excited about replica watches or prescription drugs. They're a _lot_ more interesting than words like these that can be said on national TV.

Sorry your job is getting harder but don't come looking to us to fix it for you. The whole reason people look to bloggers for reliable information is because the individual blogger puts their reputation on the line with every post or comment. Pulver just upped his reputation by proving that he receives crap like this and he's not swayed by it.

I feel bad for the medium and big name people because of the amount of this garbage they must get on a daily basis, and I can't say I wouldn't do the exact same thing (or worse) in the same circumstances.
Agreed. It's particularly surprising that the employee didn't waive the cost, and raise hell up the chain about the policy. I thought Whole Foods was an "empowered" workplace where employees made the decisions about what happens on the floor. This seems like something they ought to have a say about, if they are, in fact, able to make decisions about how the store where they work operates. I'd certainly never be happy about charging someone $0.50 for ice to go with a beverage they were already paying for...every independent coffee shop I've ever been to will serve just about anything over ice if you ask (and in Austin, on hot days, I found they often asked preemptively if I wanted it iced).
I'm trying to draw a parallel between how content on the web is being created and how an artificial mind might be created. If you sat down at tried to engineer a giant encyclopedia within one company/community, you would end up with britannica (within one company), and wikipedia (within a community of enthusiasts), However, the web at large is much larger than both of these because of the economic incentives for people to create articles. Many people try and fail (in effect working for free), but the progress is rapid, as in evolution.
In the same way, incentivizing people to produce classifiers would have the similar effect of rapid progress.

If you think of intelligence as being the ability to predict accurately, having a giant web of classifiers that predict accurately could be construed as a form of artificial general intelligence, or a human type artificial intelligence. Having an enough data about the world, because you have created many classifiers that can recognize the semantic events in video and speech, would allow you to make all the same types of recognitions and predictions that a human would make.
"Apple proved this wrong"

Where is Skype for iPhone? Why isn't tethering built into the iPhone? Why did they pull Netshare from the app store?

"I expect Google's android to do the same."

First, what can Android do that Windows Mobile and Symbian haven't already been doing for years? Android is just Google's attempt to get its advertisements displayed more often on mobile devices. It is the same thing that every advertising company has been trying to do in Japan, the US, and everywhere else ever since it's been possible to advertise on phones.

Authorized retailers for AT&T/Verizon/etc. cannot sell any devices that aren't approved by the respective carrier. If the carrier doesn't approve the Android devices then they can only be sold at stores that don't sell service contracts. Those independent stores are not successful in the US, because everybody wants a phone tied to a service contract so that the cost of the phone is subsidized. If the carriers don't subsidize Android phones they will be priced out of the market.

Further, any carrier can block any device. IMEI numbers are allocated in blocks and it isn't hard to identify the model based on the IMEI number. Without regulation ("net neutrality") they can also block any application or any protocol from operating on their network.
Sigh!
There is a huge difference between manipulating someone and negotiating to get what you want. The first implies control, generally without their consent. The latter is all about understanding their needs (which are often emotional and may require asking probing questions, reading body language, making that person comfortable etc) and finding out how you can come to a consensus that satisfies both parties.

The problem I was alluding to is that technical people seem to think that using anything other than cold, hard facts to come to terms is "manipulative." And quite simply, the world doesn't work that way.

[edit]
Now that I re-read your reply, I think I took it completely the wrong way :-) Sorry.
>I thought Whole Foods was an "empowered" workplace where employees made the decisions about what happens on the floor.

Starbucks was like that initially too, but neither have been like that for years.
Au Revoir 35 Hours, Bonjour Stagnation
I've noticed intelligence is respected but conformity is respected much, much more.

From a recent article titled "Why Apple isn't Japanese"

"One notorious case in point involves Shuji Nakamura, the brilliant scientist who invented a revolutionary energy-saving blue-diode light source only to find himself mired in years of litigation as he struggled to extract royalty payments from the company that had profited from his invention. Nakamura ultimately abandoned Japan for California. Fasol recalls asking scientists at the University of Tokyo if they considered his departure a blow. " 'No, not at all,' they told me. 'It might be good to have someone more ordinary'." "

http://www.newsweek.com/id/73236/output/print
"In 1910, inner city crime like we have today simply did not exist."

Do you have any data to back up that claim? It's the exact opposite of any data I've ever seen ...

I've been told that violent death rates are ~ an order of magnitude lower now than a century ago. Take a look at http://www.ted.com/index.php/talks/steven_pinker_on_the_myth..., for example.

Hell, violent crime is down nearly 50% since the 70's (http://www.ojp.usdoj.gov/bjs/glance/viort.htm) when the gov. started keeping the numbers.
So why not use email?

If some aspect of being a community (at least in your conception of it) hinders the exchange of interesting information, then maybe it's not worth having.
The people around you (and the networks they open up) are very critical, and very location dependant.

Close your eyes and you would find it hard to tell if a chap who was educated in Hertfordshire was white or black - you would be able to tell in an instant if he had been to a good or bad school though.

The people you meet daily help form your expectations, can pass your CV to the right people, will only give respect to people who behave in certain ways... that kind of exposure and social pressure is exactly what helps you _avoid_ bad life choices, and if you don't get it then failing to make good ones is not entirely your fault.
I thought about this, and I don't think it would work. From the response crew's perspective, they want a massive traffic jam, because the cars are moving slower and paying more attention. So the response crews who would have to put up the screen would have an incentive to oppose it.
This mattered six or seven years ago (around when the project started). It's since evolved/devolved in a half dozen different directions, tried to take on too many markets at once, and failed to ship working code repeatedly, all the while running at full speed in every direction at once.

Everything it set out to do (basically, it started as an ambitious Open Source effort to replace Exchange, though it evolved over time into a P2P something or other and now appears to be a really complicated todo list manager) has been replaced by web-based tools. Chandler seems to have a web-based version...but it's not the focus, and so it will never gain traction.

So, basically, a six and a half year long project has produced a todo list application. I'm happy that they've finally shipped code, and I hope it signals an end to the crazy tilting at windmills that all of the folks involved have spent so much time doing. Someone should have pointed them to http://bikeshed.com/ years ago.
I own three copies of Cialdini's Influence, one for myself and two to loan out.
I've Been Threatened by Northern Leasing's Attorneys Over a SUCKS Domain I don't own
It doesn't have to work on everything to suceed, as long as:

- There are large enough subsets to be worthwhile in their own right (e.g. J2ME phones, all Blackberry handsets, etc).

- Customers only see apps that will work on their phone. At present the mobile app industry is not helped by confusing customers before they even make a sale - not everyone knows what their device can do.

- Quirks that make porting between devices hard (e.g. wierd handset bugs, or carrier specific changes) are documented well. T-mobile are probably already doing this and it would cut down development time for ISVs.
You realise that as the population shifts, a generation of kids grow up in nice area suburbia, and become those university students with ghetto parents. You can condemn people to generations of ghetto, or you can move them into suburbia:- this will not change the attitude they grew up with, but their children will grow up very different.

Every neighbourhood has bad people. Every neighbourhood has disorderly people. But if a neighbourhood has a few black people who are disorderly, every black person walking around is immediately stamped as being the same.

There is nothing wrong with being angry at people disturbing or changing your neighbourhood, but don't them stamp people as 'animalistic', 'ganstas', 'stay in farms'.
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The data you can gather from crawling the site aren't as specific as the data in the database. For example - you don't know the exact submission times of older pieces, only the day.
This is pretty cool.

I'm impressed that they have tested it in working in IE6+, FF3+, Safari 3+, Opera 9.5
Yeah, you're pretty right about that. That's one thing I notice driving to school every day. The average speed of cars traveling on the freeway after a highway distraction is significantly lower than the average speed coming into it. I've never understood it. It's as if people have forgotten how fast they were initially traveling. Very frustrating.
It's Bittorrent. Search Isohunt or TPB.
They got the restraining order in time to stop the presentation, but not in time to stop the distribution of the slides and source code. The question now is when will the torrent of the Defcon CD get posted?
Because, statistically speaking, race is a good predictor of violent crime.

According to Bureau of Justice statistics, between 1976 and 2005, blacks, while 13 percent of the population, committed over 52 percent of the nation’s homicides, or about 400% more than expected.

However, poor people (arbitrarily defining poor as a household income of under $25k) only account for ~double as many crimes as expected. (The government doesn't actually keep data on income of violent crime perpetrators - I used the household income of violent crime victims from http://www.ojp.usdoj.gov/bjs/abstract/cv05.htm weighted by census data from http://pubdb3.census.gov/macro/032007/hhinc/new06_000.htm as a proxy)

Now, maybe income is a better predictor; I couldn't say conclusively with the data at hand. But you have to agree that race is pretty important.
I started playing with this yesterday. It might make for a good alternative to canvas. At least from a compatibility standpoint.

Internet Explorer doesn't have native support for canvas or svg, which is why Excanvas and Raphael fall back on vml to provide canvas and svg-like support, respectively.

Canvas and vml really aren't a good match, though. Canvas is stateless, whereas both vml and svg insert objects into the DOM. It's this mismatch that really kills Excanvas' performance when rendering any kind of animation.
I like bootstrapping. I think it teaches you to run a business that will bring in revenue and profit, because it's your money. I think it allows you the option of scaling up, or down, as you feel is appropriate. There's much less of a "burn rate". There are fewer surprises when things take longer than you thought they would - that can give you a second chance when V1 sucks too badly.

But yeah, I'd take money if I needed to - when the only thing between me and success is ability to grow.
It is not always about having the better product; more a matter of traction. Case in point, why do so many people still use Twitter?
that sounds ill-advised, at best. i'd lay odds that pg pays enough attention to be able to connect the new username with the old one, if he put any effort into it.
He's touched on some reasons, but definitely not all of them.

A big part of traffic is that communication doesn't happen - because it can't. I can't tell the driver behind me "I'm going to be slowing down in 10 seconds, get ready." Likewise, it isn't easy to convey to someone merging onto a freeway that I'm going to let them in ahead of me so we both end up slowing down so that we're both still in contention with each other until someone takes the initiative.

Now, if only we had some way that cars could communicate with each other and the road so that they could regulate speed and allow operations such as merging as efficiently as possible. . .
Hey guys, Sam from YouNoodle here. The research and development project behind this was the biggest of its kind ever conducted. If you want to learn more about predictive analytics you can read some of the well-informed recent articles about Startup Predictor.

Harvard Business Publishing:
http://discussionleader.hbsp.com/anthony/2008/08/younoodle_i...

The Telegraph:
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/money/main.jhtml?xml=/money/2008/...

American National Public Radio:
http://tinyurl.com/625gva

Venture Beat:
http://venturebeat.com/2008/08/07/younoodles-startup-predict...

We are listening to your privacy concerns and will be making changes to how we convey our measures to protect you. Realize you're giving us sensitive information and we take our role in handling that very seriously. Appreciate any further comments or feedback you guys provide as we are iterating fast on this.
The Venture Capital Squeeze
The article about the 50% maximal cost used that exact situation as the attention getter.
Aneesh, it's hard to provide an objective experience if you use fake data. Nevertheles, based on the data we analyzed, a 500k valuation was the most likely outcome for the profiles of entrepreneurs you entered, working on a startup for approx 2 hrs/week. Remember that this is a 3-year prediction and the hours is relevant to that initial timeframe pre-funding. Many of those teams will have increased their hours/week during those three years; and 500k is an indication that they are most likely to achieve an angel round within 3 years, but not much more.
I don't like it either, but if they're going to do it either way I would rather at least get some benefit out of it
Writing a Ruby Client for a RESTful Web Service using Bricklayer
Who said elevator pitches have to be simple?
Murder rates by location:

Baltimore 1911: 5.8
Baltimore 2006: 43.3

Philadelphia 1911: 4.4 Philadelphia 2006: 27.7

New York 1911: 5.9
New York 1990: 30.7
New York 2006: 7.3

Newark 1911: 4.0
Newark 2006: 37.4

Chicago 1911: 9.0
Chicago 2006: 16.4

Washington DC 1911: 7.8
Washington DC 2006: 29.1

England & Wales 1910: 8.1
England & Wales 1997: 14.1

In many of our great cities, murders increased by an order of magnitude. Only in New York, where the finance boom priced out the poor are homicide rates down ( the crime all went to Newark and other ring cities, which is the phenomena I pointed out in my original post).

Pinker may be right about the middle ages to 1900. But he's dead wrong about the 20th century. The 20th century saw a millennium of progress get wiped away. Europe had two world wars that displayed levels of barbarism unseen since the Mongol invasion. Population explosions in Latin America, India, and Africa resulted in masses of people living in violent, malnourished, overpopulated slums. The great cities of the United States collapsed into burned out, dystopian ruins, which look like something out of the late Roman empire ( see The Ruins of Detroit for a small taste - http://detroityes.com/home.htm - but it is the same story in many other cities). What the hell happened?

Source for 1911 stats:
http://query.nytimes.com/gst/abstract.html?res=9F07E5D91E3FE...

For 2006 stats:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_cities_by_crime_r...

And stats from England:
http://www.parliament.uk/commons/lib/research/rp99/rp99-111....
The Tech (MIT student newspaper) publishes the banned DEFCON slides
My apologies - I was wrong.

Thanks for the info, learn something new every day.