skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I think people love going to sites and search engines and finding information.

Yes, it's an online game! A game that, unlike most games, actually means something to other people!

If I had a cent for every minute that mankind has spent mindlessly playing Tetris or Windows Solitare, I'd be rich.
Mechanical Turk is an instantiation of that principle.

The money that's exchanged serves as a social signal from the world that your thumb-twiddling is inherently valuable.
It's like Clay Shirky's essay on why micropayments don't work, only in reverse. Micropayments don't work because even a tiny payment has big psychological consequences: It sets off our decision-making circuits ("should I really pay for this?") and our reciprocity circuits ("I paid for this, and it didn't make me happy, so you still owe me!"). The result is that we feel a micropayment as a consequential cost, even when the amount involved is tiny. Apply this in reverse and you get the Turk: Give someone a penny for a task and they feel rewarded, even though the reward is tiny.
No you shouldn't. You are devaluating the value of your IP everytime you give a free upgrade. There's a reason why companies like EA make buckloads of money doing upgrades of their game franchises.
Look at it Another Way
Laissez-faire no more: Second Life bans ad farms
Does it have to be Python? I'm sure you can use any webcrawler to actually crawl, and use Python to analyze the results.

Nutch (http://lucene.apache.org/nutch/) is a project to create a search engine, with a big crawling component. You can also find a list of crawlers here: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Web_crawler#Open-source_crawler...
hack senses fail
Ask HN: Would you be inclined to share that moment of genius
I know many hackers here have experienced the moment when they are deep into hacking and in the middle of it wrote a block of code that they felt was just pure genius.

At that moment, tears rolled and cries of joy go on in the background, and after the celebratory moment is over, you go back into hacking.

But wait a minute, at that moment, did you had the urge to share your masterpiece, your creation, with hackers around the world? What if you could?

I know, there's pastie and we all love it. But pastie is unsociable. Hacker's are social beings, we love "social networks", so what I'm proposing is a social network pasties. A twitter for pastie, you follow your favorite hackers. You share code, you optimize code, you do pair programming ( the pastie way ).

Forget any web-based input methods. The way you share your code is through a command line program/script.( or any good methods that the community can come up with )

Does this sound fun to you? Want to get involved? Vote up if you think this is a good idea. Drop a comment if you got ideas or feedback to share!

Email me at hacksignal@gmail.com
Very good point. If you look at my slide (NewsCred), my favorite person to twitter is a female: Padmasree - she's the CTO of Cisco. So that proves that there are women twittering, and more importantly, women in high-profile C-level jobs.

But looking again, there are 3 women in the list. So saying they can ONLY find males is a bit unfair.
You are assuming a non-founder CEO. I think he would agree that founder-CEOs are also a good predictor of success.
Reinventing your Career at Fresh Start After Divorce Blog
The Art and Science of Wheelchair Basketball
Stock-promoter.thesubway.com/thesub... - StumbleUpon
Or maybe they don't mind the work and get paid to work while working (e.g. they're doing Mechanical Turk stuff while at another job).
A great salon article that explains some of the motivation. I believe this was posted a while back:

http://www.salon.com/tech/feature/2006/07/24/turks/
See, I just use my twitter account for random nano-fiction. Same for more facebook profile. Far more interesting than what I normally do, which usually boils down to "Still haven't conquered world. Damn."

Also, it gives people a conversation starter with me, usually with the word "What the hell?" beginning it.
You'd be surprised at the loot some of these mental midgets pull down. I'm doing some programming for a firm that does stuff in the same realm (training/seminars to people who have big dreams) and they had a speaker at an internet training conference in town this weekend... $700 to be there and it was sold out, 150 people or so. And it's all basic BS about how to set up a site, affiliate programs, AdSense, collecting emails, etc.

If you can convince people they can get rich, you will definitely get rich in the process.
I live in the UK were basic health care is free

No, you like in the UK, where basic healthcare is paid for by taxpayers. It doesn't become free because the money is taken rather than given.
Looks like what they need's a bot that can act as a bullshit detector.
How is this different than Reddit or Mixx's community, self-service offerings?
I've done quite a few research projects on turk myself, and I've researched the motivational issue and pay is not the key factor.

this post shares some info from my studies

http://www.floozyspeak.com/blog/archives/2008/08/valley_of_t...
Gen Z Gets A Platform of Their Own: Diary.com
"What about fundamentals? Fundamentals is a word invented by sellers to find buyers."
Interestingly my father brought up the Spore DRM in conversation last night. He plays games but isn't a gamer in the sense that he follows online news or current industry events. It was from a more mainstream outlet that he heard about the DRM backlash on Amazon.
Has anyone else on HN used Mechanical Turk? What was your experience like? We're thinking of using it.
Fascinating diagram and layout, but damn that's got to be tough on dyslexics.
Its great, just depends on...
- what you want to do
- is it clear and possible to do
- how many people you want to do it
- what you want to pay

It doesn't cost much to get a taste of turk, go for it, you'll be surprised at the result.
> If I ever have a few billion dollars lying around, I think I'm going to
give it to jrockway ... just to annoy her.
Food for thought - Eat your way to a better brain
Won't somebody please think of the Twirldren...
Download Pushing Daisies Episodes
If you want to Download Pushing Daisies Episode and many others then you simply cannot miss amazing opportunity as you will enjoy downloading favorite TV series while saving tons of money.
I'd say forget all the rules/guidelines people have proposed. The only thing that matters is whether your startup idea compels you to work on it. Having to force yourself to work on it guarantees failure.

Or, to put it another way, the only way to work two jobs for an extended period is for one of those jobs to be a hobby.
Just a note - the reason that small diesels are not popular here is because of the California Air Resources Board's idiotic measurement methods.

They count total emissions not per-mile, but per-gallon, completely ignoring that the diesel-powered vehicle will go farther on the same amount of fuel.
I agree that in many instances estimating the life expectancy (from the customer's viewpoint) is difficult but in others it can be reasonably straightforward. In the software instance that we offer free upgrades for life we are clear that our customers anticipate building and maintaining a body of data over very long periods of time - they select our product because they are persuaded both that our software meets their data recording needs AND that we are going to be sticking around maintaining that software long into the future.
If you don't mind me asking, what kind of projects have you used it for?
Synthetic DNA on the Brink of Yielding New Life Forms
Why not startup => company => provides services and products => exit?
I think this is probably pre-profit pay. If your startup is cash-flow positive, then by all means, pay yourself a market rate!
Or maybe they are doing Mechanical Turk stuff while playing (on the phone, listening to music, "watching" a TV show, IM-ing), and Mechanical Turk lets them justify the use of their time as "productive".
Download Big Love Episodes
Imagine how easier and cheaper it would be if you could Download Big Love Episodes. The reality is that you can actually download all Big Love Episodes from the Internet at very High Speed
I used to work in the finance & investing industry before doing a startup. The slimy, misleading marketing proliferating itself everywhere is absolutely ridiculous. They're even pretentious enough to call their fees and back loaded funds "products".

If you've ever seen the movie Boiler Room, my second finance job was similar. My third finance job had similarities to Barbarians at the Gate (on a much lower scale) and the classic tulip bulb story: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tulip_mania

Strange world is the finance.
Expose New Linq Operations from the Screaming HashSet Collection
This post will show how to gain additional power that is fully supported from Microsoft which is often overlooked, yet it can solve some of the hardest problems (especially around performance however don’t prematurely optimize!).

Linq is not just about databases. It’s about reading the registry, your hard-disk, or even a list of function pointers to be invoked. Linq is about more event then sets (collections). It’s about making tasks easier in many cases and vastly more powerful (and most importantly your code more readable and maintainable at the same time).
And low torque makes driving depressing.
One line of code, no loss in near native OS level performance. Linq rules if you know the knobs to turn.
I would also take a look at Heritrix (http://crawler.archive.org/) -- it's what powers the wayback machine.
I'm not a god of hacking by any means, so perhaps I've just rarely experienced true code-block Nirvana. But, in my experience, the beauty of software doesn't often arise from isolated, context-free blocks of code, just as it's hard to appreciate a great novel by cutting-and-pasting individual sentences and paragraphs.

The authors of programming books struggle with this problem all the time. A lot of what they have to say only makes sense in the context of projects that are longer than what a book can contain. They can't provide convincing real-world examples, so they are forced to rely on toy examples, which often fail to get the point across.

The pure-genius moments that I respect are the ones where the code blocks themselves are the most boring. When I first encountered (e.g.) jQuery, I realized I was in the presence of true genius. But I find that jQuery code is not very exciting reading, in and of itself. The typical line of jQuery is straightforward and transparent: It pretty much describes exactly what is going on, using idioms that you recognize from other languages (like CSS). The charm of well-written jQuery is that the individual statements are so straightforward that you can skim them -- you can look right past them and concentrate on the big picture, which is where all the important stuff is happening.

It's the assembly of your blocks of code into a marvelous, comprehensible large-scale structure that is the challenge of software. And it takes time to appreciate that. That's why the phrase "deep into hacking" contains the word deep. You have to live inside a problem for a while before its true structure -- and the elegance of the best solution -- becomes clear.

Of course, maybe all that I'm saying is that I'm not the intended audience for your proposed project. :) Other people, working on other tasks or with different languages or styles, might find it very useful!
Google Pledges To Discard User Data After Nine Months
Do you have a link for your six weeks ago asasertion? I don't doubt what you're saying, but that kind of data really interests me.
[From slinkset help] "Right now everything is free and you can insert your own ads in the sidebar. Down the road we'll be charging for stuff, but we're still working out exactly what and how. For existing sites, it's very unlikely that we'll insert ads or start charging w/o warning."

I find this problematic. Charging for such service is fine, but I need to know the price before I'll devote my time and energy into building a new site under it. I think it would be better to work that out first and then give an exact offer. Other than that, it looks interesting.
US ponders anti-trust action against Google
3-D printing migrates to consumer market
I'm from NE ohio. I just have a site for playing around but you can see some of my (current) projects at krenz.tastyspleen.net
I've used it lots of ways.

transcription of audio interviews, paid 8 bucks

help me brainstorm a problem while I was flying from city to city for work, they did a good job on that one

validate a hunch we had at the office on some language in a research assignment, basically quick proof, get a taste on whether or not it was connecting with them

many times ive used it to get what i call fuel before a meeting, get a quick read on folks on brand or research aspects of something

i don't use turk in the traditional sense, i see it as a personal army ready to process whatever you got, a survey np, help you think outloud np, research when you cant, np, turk is pretty cool, but it all depends on what you want to get out of it
>AND that we are going to be sticking around maintaining that software long into the future

Personally I would have more confidence that you would be around in 5 years if you were charging for upgrades.
The article appears to focus on the "Fernando Gómez-Pinilla, a fish-loving professor of neurosurgery and physiological science at the University of California" and a paper he has recently published.

http://www.nature.com/nrn/journal/v9/n7/full/nrn2421.html
By that argument, it's not "free" to just walk down the street, because your tax dollars are paying to maintain that street - and reading a book at the library isn't "free" because you're paying for it through taxes. Heck, almost nothing's "free" by those criteria.
It's a bad idea to use mirroring and rotation when creating glyphs. The reason is that it ties the correct interpretation of a string to its position and orientation in space. Generally we want meaning to be absolute. The meaning of a string shouldn't change depending on your position relative to it: if you fire a Latin 'b' into space, it's impossible to tell whether you meant 'b','q','p', or 'd'. The problem is worse with the alphabet in the article.

In case you were wondering, the symmetry of the shapes does not allow any interesting logical operations to be performed by reorienting the string in space, except as it happens by accident.
Executive summary: Use Seagate drives.
Ars at DjangoCon: Build your own social network with Pinax
I loved my Geo Metro. It had four doors! And got just under 50 mpg. It was not a luxury car by any means, but it got me where I needed to go.
I'm sold. I'll use it today and report back. If you ever need anything: dan@ticketstumbler.com.
Could always start the company is a country where healthcare is provided ;)
Just a theory I've been kicking around. I'm very interested in feedback if anyone wants to discuss.
"But, in my experience, the beauty of software doesn't often arise from isolated, context-free blocks of code, just as it's hard to appreciate a great novel by cutting-and-pasting individual sentences and paragraphs."

True, I have to agree with you that this applies in certain cases/languages.
Infovell's 'research engine' finds deep Web pages that Google, Yahoo miss
Somehow I don't think such absolute statements can be made about using synchronous I/O or asynchronous I/O. I've used both; and in its place each turned out to be right.

What does everyone think?
Ask HN: What code should I be looking at?
I started programming some months ago (PHP and javascript) and have grasped the basics. The more I learn the more I realise that one of the most important things is to write well structured code.

Can you recommend some open source projects in PHP that are well written and well structured that I should be looking at to see how it's done right?
Good luck, have fun, and report back!
Trying to protect print business, celebrity mags risk losing all to web
What he probably meant is that high CEO pay is a good predictor of failure. If the CEO of a startup that is looking for a big exit demands a high salary, that means he/she is not too convinced about the big payoff to come.
This is a pretty weak batch of CEOs.
Except for it's architecture, which seems slightly more pluggable than the ASP.NET's, this seems pretty much exactly the same as the ASP.NET's caching layer. Not to mention ASP.NET supports automaticly invalidating cache-dependencies.

Making this pluggable to support both ASP.NET and memcached, would be a simple matter of writing a wrapper class and defining a simple interface. Should be done in about 30 minutes with minimal loss in features.

This has been around since at least 2002. So I'd hardly say there is anything radical about this.
Thanks for these. They both look 'high end' rather than small and customizable, but I'll check them out. Thanks for the tips and links
I'm thinking about using MT for a more mentally intensive task: have each HIT involve reading a paragraph or two of a given text, and write pairs of questions and answers that could be obtained from the text. Is this feasible?
Huh!

You know, I was going to be snotty and disagree, but I just did a search for myself and my book on Live, and the results were FAR more ordered and accurate. Thanks for the tip-off!
Yes but be cautious. Make it too vague on what you want them to do combined with a low pay amount and you'll get weak data.

Be clear on what you want them to do.

pay them decently, not 1cent, maybe more like 5 cents or more

and test it out, see what kinds of data ya get back, tweak, and change it up

Most turks aren't going to be BS ya but some will, in the end however you only pay for what you feel is quality, but if you deny folks over and over and the reason you're getting crap data is not them its because your HIT is too vague and you pay crap, well you'll get a rep for being lame on turk and more crap data will follow.
it is not about politics,dude,don't comment before you read
Michael Hammer, author of "Reengineering the Corporation", is dead at 60
Lots of stuff is free.

Come couch surf at my place. I pay for it, but you enjoy it: it's free to you. Here's an ice cream cone. Once again, I paid, but you enjoy it.

To you, it's free.

Now -- use the powers of government to force people to pay taxes to buy you an ice cream cone? It's not free to you any more.

The danger is that you start feeling like I'm going to give you ice cream cones anytime. I can correct you of that assumption pretty quickly. But when the giver is some anonymous blob, starts looking like free money.
Lies, Damn Lies & News Statistics
This is the final article of 6, but it's the one that has links to the other 5 ...
>The unix text utilities were written in the 60's and 70's when computers were 33mhz and had 5MB of ram.

I'm not positive (I was born in the 70s), but I'm pretty sure they had less RAM and speed than this.
I got into PHP by way of Drupal. I tend to think of myself not as a PHP programmer, but as a Drupal programmer who is therefore stuck with PHP. I don't work with any other PHP frameworks; If I wanted something that wasn't Drupal I'd be using Ruby.

Now that my biases are clear: You should take up Drupal. It's a big system with a lot of architecture, but the core is not too big; it's being hacked on by many thousands of people and is continuously evolving as the community learns; and it hits a sweet spot between being well architected and being open to the kind of simple cut-and-paste anarchy that makes PHP thrive -- it's designed to let you obsessively customize everything, but it tries to encourage you to contain your creativity within pluggable modules that can (at least in theory, but often in practice as well) be manipulated by noncoders.

If you want to try Drupal and you are a coder you must read VanDyk's Pro Drupal Development, Second Edition ASAP. Trust me on this.

As for Javascript, which is arguably more important: jQuery, jQuery, jQuery. Also: Douglas Crockford, Javascript: The Good Parts. And learn your CSS if you haven't already; I did that by reading Eric Meyer's O'Reilly book, followed by Dan Cederholm's book.
Link to article: http://www.scottberkun.com/essays/38-how-to-pitch-an-idea/
Congrats on your big speedup; successful optimization like that is always a rush.

I wonder what the result would be if you did everything you describe, but wrote the code that's now in C, in Python instead. I suspect the speed would be very similar. (I like C, for what it's worth.)
What's interesting about this posting is unbenost to my co-founder, yesterday I was discussing some of the issues we were facing with a "retired" unix programmer and he talked about early sorting and searching methods. It was quite remarkable what they achieved with very little in the way of hardware and memory.
I'm not sure that's true. e.g. if you have a company that has real estate worth $10/share, and a business that's worth $10/share, and the stock trades at $15, you don't really need to know whether the market underestimates the real estate, underestimates the business, or some combination of the two.

I guess for certain kinds of dirty hedges (e.g. trading the crack spread and trading oil refinery stocks) you might need to know that.
The Amiga 500 came in the late 80s and had a 7.14Mhz CPU and 512kb of RAM, and it was considered awesome... So yeah.
This article begs the question, is XUL worth it? I used to be a huge XUL fan years ago. It was a way to create great cross-platform interfaces and, heck, when you look at Firefox you can see that it looks more native than most toolkits. But, my hopes for an independent xulrunner have simply been dashed.

So, the question is, would it be easier to create native interfaces around WebKit and code on that than the combination of coding on Gecko and having "free" cross-platform interfaces. I'd say it probably is still worth it, but we'll see as open source programmers will generally flock to whatever is nice to program in - and with Google's interest, I wouldn't be surprised if an independent WebKit based browser project popped up from some enterprising individual.

Personally, both seem to fit web standards nicely (not perfect, but as someone who has been around a while, I'm happy by comparison to what used to be) and so the competition seems like a good thing - especially since open source can offer a cooperative competition insofar as any WebKit programmer can look at the Gecko code and vice-versa.

To an extent, I think a good bit of this is the "Java is crap and ugly", "Ruby is slow and unscalable" argument where people just like one and so they disparage the other.
My 1990's Amiga 1200 had 14 MHz and 2-8 MB ram, so you're off by 20-30 years :-)
They don't allow for styling, best I know.
Cash discourages spending, cards encourage it.
The points he makes at the end of his "My Investment advice for 2006" are dead-on, especially points 2 and 3. Investing well in the market requires a lot of time - saving money doesn't, and investing in yourself (side projects for example) probably has the greatest potential for wealth generation.
Just to clarify, is this you - https://www.23andme.com/about/advisors ? Thanks.
But, as a look at Facebook's numbers would show, they began using it in far greater numbers.

I think that adding the feed and the apps forced me to use Facebook the way it was meant to be used. I got rid of all but 70 friends, people I cared about, and suddenly it became a very productive way to plan out events and talk to friends in the middle of class. No spam, no feed updates that I don't care about.
I know a lot of people who would love to have a Diesel Cooper Mini, but like the Fiesta, it will never be sold in the US. I'd love to have one and run it on biodiesel. (This month, I am using Waste Vegetable Oil derived fuel.) My dad would love to have one, and he's almost 80!
Nice, but are your growth issues so bad that you couldn't make this a blog entry on mediawombat.com instead?