skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Afterthought:

Will we see more democratic free market regimes now that the Cold War is over and the success of the free market approach is virtually undisputed? I think we have and are and will: in the many former Soviet republics that are eagerly embracing free markets (like Russia itself) and the EU (with its dicta of human rights and democracy).
I agree it's not a perfect correlation, but there would be some, most of the time.
You could do a Google search for them, I quickly tried "site:ycombinator.com legal" and came up with the following:

http://www.ycombinator.com/seriesaa.html

I'm sure we can patiently wait, they're doing us a huge favour which I for one, am very grateful for :)
I think there is something stunningly wrong with assuming your users are idiots.
This is a good strategy for YC: it "commoditizes the complements" (borrowing a phrase from http://www.joelonsoftware.com/articles/StrategyLetterV.html ) of a deal, lowers the cost of an early stage financing round (giving more value for their investment) and makes it easier for prospects to evaluate aspects of the offer in advance.
Democracy is neither a means to an end, or an end in itself. It's a form of government. It's not an opinion. Perhaps you meant "My opinion about democracy: is it a means to an end for me or an end to itself"

That would make more sense, but then you would not be talking about democracy, you'd be talking about your own opinion (which you're very well entitled to do)

Democracy is just a closer representation of the natural legislature of the body politic than many other forms of government. In fact, true democracies are so close that Hobbesian Law usually takes place, which is why a representative republic is much more tasty than true democracy.

BTW, there are no true democracies in the world today as far as I know. Thank goodness.
Please, for the love of god forget about fucking politics on HN, I stopped reading reddit for a reason.
I agree, didn't intend for it to come off as a complaint, was more curious than anything. Now I'm even more curious though.
Following the Tugging of Your Soul at Fresh Start After Divorce Blog
Gosh, so many start-up opportunities. So little time.
"It seems almost a right of passage with many Internet entrepreneurs to buy a really expensive car. Why? Why? Why? If I really wanted to spend that kind of cash on myself, I would get a full-time personal chef."

Because a personal chef doesn't show how wealthy you are every time you go anywhere. It only has that effect among the people who know you have one, and anyone who knows you that well already knows.

It's all about conspicuous consumption. I think this trend is on the way out (at least temporarily) though.
Use Social Networking for Market Research - Video
If this is the article I'm thinking about, it's a dupe, and the first time around sparked an interesting discussion on how much technology you want a good leader to have.

But it might not be that article. I didn't click. The title is pure flamebait, so I flagged it.

As the U.S. presidential season continues to heat up, it'll get worse. Mark my words.
Einstein versus Peer Review...
PG version: http://www.paulgraham.com/stuff.html
I don't understand why one can be so scary of filling a questionary for 15 mins and ready to pay, hm, premium for an easy thing?
>BTW, there are no true democracies in the world today as far as I know. Thank goodness.

So what's the difference between a representative republic and a democracy? Are you actually actually saying that for a country to be democratic all government decisions would have to be made by everyone?
Wuala Launches Social Grid Storage In Public Beta Tomorrow
you will not become a good "insert anything here" if all you have are great tools and no innate ability or vision.

Yeah.

I know.

But that's pretty well-understood. I don't think anyone ever thought that. No one really thinks, "Good tools==success". And so we are again faced with the typical 37signals blog entry, the shtick of which is to state humdrum truisms to a galley of fawning fanboys, who litter the comment section with love unlimited. But, as usual, they somehow still manage to deviate from more strongly stated opinions,

What do hackers want? Like all craftsmen, hackers like good tools. In fact, that's an understatement. Good hackers find it unbearable to use bad tools. They'll simply refuse to work on projects with the wrong infrastructure.

True, yes? All craftsmen demand the best tools, and there's no harm in having them, or refining them, or arguing over their merits.
This is interesting, and yet I'm not quite sure what this map is portraying. Perhaps a read of the original paper is in order, but as usual there is no link. Ironically, this time it's not the journal's fault, because the full text is online here:

http://www.current-biology.com/content/article/fulltext?uid=...

The web celebrated its seventeenth birthday one week ago. Anyone want to bet how much longer it will be before the NYT editors figure out how it works?

Unfortunately, I don't have time to thoroughly read the original article, nor do I really have the stats skills to understand it all. I will note, though, that the plot on the left really does seem to represent the two most significant principal components of the genetics data. The fact that it resembles the map of Europe is not a deliberately arranged feature of the plot's design -- except to the extent that the authors oriented the axes so that Italy's group was toward the bottom and Britain's was to the left. The plot resembles the map of Europe because the clusters of related genes resemble the map of Europe.

Cool.

Interesting features: English and French genetics overlap a lot less than the languages (I guess that's what happens when English citizens learn the language of their French aristocratic rulers). However, no amateur linguist would be surprised to learn that English and Dutch people have much genetic overlap. Hungary's poor overlap with Austria is interesting, as is the huge genetic distance between Finland and Hungary, whose languages are famously related to each other and famously unrelated to most other languages. Makes me want to study Finnish history. And what is up with Romania?

[After I finished the article I went to change this link to a no-login link, courtesy of Aaron Swartz's NYT link converter, but I found it seemed to already be converted. I'm so confused.]
I'm surprised the article made no mention of http://visualjquery.com/. It's somewhat out of date but it's still a great resource.

On the topic of frameworks, a simple way to speed up page loads is to use Google's AJAX Libraries API to load jQuery and other frameworks directly from Google's CDN:
http://code.google.com/apis/ajaxlibs/
why would I want to share internal business decisions with an external site?
I worked a hell of a lot more than 15 hours per week in undergrad, and I showed up to every class.

If you don't put much effort into school, don't blame school that you got little out of it.
Check out www.wikiwarp.com/go

made along with HN user jsomers
I don't understand why one can be so scared of cutting his own hair with garden shears for free in 15 minutes.

Hey, if you don't want to pay, do it yourself. I prefer to pay someone else to do it for me.
It sounds like you're just looking to hire people like you. You probably find it rewarding to approach a stack of resumes like that because every person you find who has a similar background as you is a validation of your own path.
Turn Your iPhone into a Barcode Scanner with ScanLife’s App
Great stuff. I wish more legal documents were standardized and in the common domain.
Social Network Marketing - The Wave of the Future - Video
Beer causes me to like different women.
Ah, but they use 503, not 404.
How is this any worse than having your email or bug tracking on an external site?
Science and health reporting in particular is notoriously bad.
Ask HN: Looking for tool that adds links to Wordpress from Firefox
I browsed around the WordPress plugins page, but couldn't find this tool:

When I come across a page that I find interesting, I'd like to be able to click an icon in Firefox that adds a link to the page on my blog. That way when people visit my site, they can see my recommended sites.

Preferably, I'd like this to be a section in the sidebar (do not want a new post every time I submit a new link). Currently, to do this, I have to copy/paste the URL into the the theme editor - which is a pain in the ass.

Does something like this exist?
In the last couple of years, I've encountered well-reasoned opposing views for the first time.

You didn't happen to run into one Mencius Moldbug, did you? ( http://unqualified-reservations.blogspot.com/ ) I've been going through a similar crisis of faith.

The book that put me over the edge was "The World of Yesterday" by Stefan Zweig. He lived through the transition of Austria from monarchy to democracy. Zweig pines for the days of monarchy, when taxes were a mere 2%, inflation non existent, there was complete freedom of speech, you did not need a passport to travel between countries, and warmongering politicians were far fewer in number. People need to learn that the ability to put a piece of paper in a box once every four years is totally unrelated to personal freedom.
It would have been a little better read if he had chosen reading material that wasn't middle-of-the-road stuff that might make the bestseller list or be assigned reading in school. How about the Turner Diaries (Timothy McVeigh's favorite) for the Right, books by actually Communists or anarchists for the left, maybe some deep ecologists? And some Loompanics-style how-to books about weapons, killing, and identity theft instead of the silly children's book he used: http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/0830606041/applefritt...

Is this just because hardly anybody has those books on their wishlist and he wouldn't have had anything to write about?
Most teenagers and college students believe that they're going to get rich. It's just that sometime in their 20s and early 30s, they stop believing that.

I think the big difference is that people who get rich and then lose it don't question their belief that it's possible.
Huh. I actually like that stuff...
TicketStumbler.com (YC Summer 08): a new way to find tickets
Basic idea is that you grab the bookmarklet (in the "post" section) and then can add images to your account in two clicks from whatever website your on.

This sentence should be someplace visible on the home page.
You have a hugely improved layout and page design than the original wikipedia, kudos.

And the related links feature makes ad-hoc browsing of wikipedia entries quite useful, again kudos.
Freebase Parallax Taunts Us With Awesome Semantic Web Video
One thing I like about ticketstumbler? They are going to be very profitable very quickly. Nice investment by YC
We already are profitable - ramen profitable :).
> Should I start focusing on one specific development area?

I would suggest focusing on being a database developer guy, the person who writes the best sql routines, triggers, stored procedures, indexing, etc. This pays a great deal of money and really is not as stressful as having to program a project to completition. With databases, the programming itself is done now you optimize the sql routines and indexing to make that programming work better, faster, under load and work with programmers on dealing with more complex interations with the database.
3. Money does buy you happiness.

4. Stuff does not buy you happiness.

This is what I've always suspected.

I'll post back here once I find out for myself ;)
Why for the love of god EZScan? why not any other type of 2D barcode?
Expanding to concert tickets in the near to far future?
Women (online) have attracted the attention of venture capitalists.
I really wish there was more to it then just sports but it's a good start. I love the interface

Do you guys plan to expand into other markets?
I like the geo cities feature. It's great to be able to see what's going on in my area without having to do a thing!
Google Now Allows You to Pick Your Friends in Reader
Concerts and theater are coming ASAP. Just has been hard with demo day and VC/angel stuff.
Customized user profiles are coming soon too!
Thanks, just added that to the bookmarklet!
Depending on how you figure things...near. 1-2 months tops.
Can someone tell me what is ground breaking about their system?
Court: violating copyleft = copyright infringement
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bernard_Chazelle
Olympic doping detection flawed?
Having contracted for msft for a few years I can tell you what you should already expect - it varies.

There are the fanatics that insist on using vista and live search instead of google because anything else would be "helping our competitors".

There are the normal xp/vista + VS people, I would wager most people fall into this category.

Then there are the awesome crazy ones, the people who write the .net CLR and windows drivers and stuff seem to use VS, source insight or emacs.

There are also macs around, but very few. There are a lot of tablet PCs, I think msft itself is the worlds largest consumer of those things.
You are going to run out of space real soon as you add new categories, if you keep your current layout. Maybe change it to "Sports" | "Concerts" | "Theater" . And then on mouse over display the actual sub categories(NBA/NFL/NCAA etc)
"Startup folks that worry more about software and scaling issues then how to actually get customers and make money."

Dead on.
Why weren't there more democratic free market regimes in developing countries? Democracy is susceptible to populist acts.

Isn't that like saying democracy is susceptible to democracy?

Let's use the word "market supportive" to describe governments that support and enable property rights and contract law ( the essence of a free market).

How many countries became more "market supportive" as a democracy? Britain, the U.S., Germany, Austria, France, Canada, Australia, China, Japan, Korea, Taiwan, Singapore, Hong Kong - these countries all either developed their market oriented legal systems as authoritarian states or they inherited their system from a colonial ruler.

I can think of numerous examples of democracies ( or failed attempts at democracy) moving in a less market supportive direction. Compare Britain 1884 ( the year of the Reform Act granting universal male suffrage ) to Britain 1950. Germany 1871 to Germany 1935. Russia under monarchy to Russia under the populist Bolshevik revolutionary government. Or Argentina in the first half of the 20th century to Argentina in the second half the century. France under any of the monarchies to France under any of the succeeding republics. India under the Raj to India post-Raj. Zimbabwe pre-universal suffrage, to Zimbabwe after universal suffrage.

The only counter examples I can think of are the former Soviet republics. However, that is not really fair, since 1) it would be impossible to be more anti-property than the Soviet system and 2) the Soviet system arose as a result of a populist revolution. Ireland might be another example, though I haven't studied its history enough.
I'm Irish born and I expected to have more in common with the french and the spanish (because the Celts drifted through both those countries) so I found it interesting that other than the British, the only commonality was with the Netherlands and Norway. I had underestimated how much raping and pillaging those vikings did ;-).
I think you made your point already. The author may have used the wrong scientific term in the article.

That does not, in the slightest bit, make it any less true. Whatever you want to call it, a persons personal ability has a very real impact on how they performa a specific task, independent of any equipment they use.

The point is to find the thing you are passionate about and DO THAT. Don't get caught up in trying to figure out the specifics of it. If you are good at it, none of that matters.
Definitely.

Look at Ticketmaster.com. That's what we're going to mirror in many respects with more customization, more accurate geo tracking capabilities, better search (which we already have) and happy customers (instead of TM's angry/disgruntled customers).

Once this happens (hopefully in 1-2 months) please email me and let me know what you think: dan@ticketstumbler.com
I've found it rewarding by seeing the team I helped hire, some of them eight years ago, do amazing things. I suppose, though, it might be time to speculate about my motivations and need for validation.
Here is an example some people on here might be able to relate to. Have you ever tried coding on a computer that isn't your own (the library, a computer lab, a friends house, etc)? You know how difficult it is, not having your own development environment and keyboard? Wouldn't you still be able to produce some really high quality code if you needed/wanted to? Now imagine if someone who was unskilled in programming sat at your computer. Would they know what to do?
this seems like a really boneheaded idea considering that search engine ranking algorithms penalize broken links
I worked for this company who implemented a product in Delphi. They knew it was the wrong but the fastest way to get the product to the market. After making a big profit the time came to rewrite the product and everyone knew that C++ was the way. Because of political manipulations Delphi was chosen again and it was back to square one after few months of development.

Wrong platform is a common mistake...
Only through repeated testing in case law will these licenses gain strength.

I hope it will become an iteration model. If a license condition not hold up on court, someone would rewrite it and everyone would just iterate to the next version of the license.
Build a better mousetrap, basically?
I've heard a few versions of this. The PG is good.

"Stuff has gotten a lot cheaper, but our attitudes toward it haven't changed correspondingly. We overvalue stuff."

In other words, Hoarding is a vestige.

I think this one has a lot of truth:

"1. The things you own have a cost of ownership."

Moving backwards in house size is nearly impossible. And it's largely because of stuff.

Ever rented a cabin or tourist flat. They're small & relatively empty, but most people find it really nice. I wonder if any of that is taking a break from your stuff.
Yeah, fix this error :)

This page contains the following errors:

error on line 18 at column 732: EntityRef: expecting ';'
Below is a rendering of the page up to the first error.
lmao I'm conservative, and a christian, but this is just plain old ridiculous!
There are also a couple of really interesting comments on the page.

Someone points out that this verdict that gives credibility to "open" licences such as CC and GPL as alternatives to Copyright would also validate more restrictive licences people might choose to apply.
Heh. It only seems like bullshit because we're missing out on the visual and audio aspect, so we have to take this guy's word for it.

Has anyone seen that movie and can confirm that it's an affirmation of love?
Agreed. I think the problem is that towns and cities are run as democracies, where every faction tries to twist the government to do it's own special interest. Thus homeowners will put in place 1/4 acre per house zoning laws, developers will get rights to build big box stores, etc. No one looks out for the whole. A university's only goal is to maximize the satisfaction of its students in order to boost its own revenue. It does this amazingly well.
It's not there because all those professional guilds legally require a college degree. It used to be you could just pass the bar and become a lawyer. The bar associations then got laws passed requiring an actual law degrees, so people took inexpensive correspondence courses. The lawyers then fought back by requiring the schools be accredited, and setting minimum rules for face time. Thus you are forced to pay very expensive law school tuition to practice as a lawyer. This pushes up the wages of the current lawyers, who got the law passed. The whole thing is a scam.
FWIW, Apple and Google are both overvalued. :)

Well as you said: 'growth bets'.

Google are a long bet, I reckon. So far they're proven for putting out good products. But to be worth the money they need to monetise at least some of these.
Up to now we have one success in that department: Adwords, which is extremely well thought out. But it's still just one point. They may not get another multi-$b cow.
Adwords even if they manage to fix content ads, would be pressed to find that much growth (but 100%-200% is not out of the question)

Apple may be justified. There is the old mantra of 'be very good at 2 things' instead of 'be the best at 1 thing.' Apple can do:

1- Software

2- Hardware

3- Marketing / Product Launches

4- Creating Markets & doing deals that put a nice chunk of it in their pockets (Itunes, App store)

Take any 2 and you have a potential player in a lot of markets theat may grow very big.

- TVish markets (some future apple TV?)

- bookish markets (Kindle?)

- thin clients (If the free with internet accesss PCs happen, who better then apple to make them? Nokia?)

- gaming (could happen?)

- GPSish markets (you never know where this might go)

- In-Vehicle stuff (Ipod type thing for music & aircon & stuff in your new BMW?)

You almost expect apple to grab a piece of any consumer electronics that come up. Problem is they seem to be running on momentum. Not sure that'll last forever.
haha sort of. Ignoring the TicketsNow conspiracies, which I'll elaborate on at another time, Ticketmaster doesn't do secondary tickets directly from their main site until an event is sold out.

They can't list specific tickets (sections, row, seats) for purchase - they assign it all to you after you pick a price level or section and enter the Captcha crapshoot. But I have to hand it to them, they did a really really good job on their new design.

The main problems with the secondary ticket market are fees, stigma and safety, which are our three main priorities. And SEO of course: http://is.gd/1pQx
That's right! I was vulnerable from reading about Bryan Caplan's book about rationally ignorant voters (http://www.cato-unbound.org/2006/11/06/bryan-caplan/the-myth...), and then I discovered Moldbug and he tipped me over the edge.

Thanks for the book recommendation, I'll look into it.
I think this trend is on the way out (at least temporarily) though.

It seems to me that it's rooted in human nature and thus unlikely to go away.
Well he is probably the world's most famous psychometrician and the article is about psychometrics. I suspect he is using the word incorrectly on purpose because he doesn't like the definition. It's kind of like if a famous conservative wrote a book about the flat tax and titled the book Progressive Taxation.
Facebook says Focus
An outstandingly well-designed and built car feels good.

Wait, I'm reminding you of this? Go out to your garage...
Liked the site a lot when I checked it out. My only complaint was that I want to see stadium seating charts before I pass to partner sites. Hated having to go back and forth. Did I miss the chart links?

Otherwise it is indeed some great work.
Yes, I can see that as a possible problem. I've seen fewer cliqueness in this crew (prehaps because they all come from varied educational and professional backgrounds), than I have in groups pulled mostly from tech academics and companies.
I was in B&N when you posted this and checked it out on your recommendation. Purchased.
No longer available? Tease.
This is exactly what the startup community needs. I am surprised no one has done it before, actually.

I know several rich post-startup people who would probably be angel investors if the process were more standardized. I bet the number of potential angel investors is 10 times larger than the number who jump through all the hoops to actually do it. With that much more early stage investment to feed on, there could be 10 times as many startups.