skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Lessons interface designers can learn from teledildonics
Things have always been degenerating.
>Rather than take the knee-jerk response that politicians must just be in the pocket of big media, I'm going to look at how some aspects of human behavior make this kind of highly damaging legislation more likely.

Maybe I'm too cynical or listen too much to the Lessig crowd, but I think ignoring campaign contributions is naive. The government does see the problem, or at least individuals in the government do. But what politician wants to stand up for this and risk potential campaign contributions, knowing they are unlikely to garner enough support to pass legislation anyway?

One can look at this conflict two ways: 1) the politician's personal gain versus the overall benefit to the country or 2) short term benefit of immediate legislation versus long term benefit of future legislation versus reelection. Viewpoint 1 is more cynical and viewpoint 2 is more naive. In reality, it's a spectrum and each legislator has to make both tradeoffs in addition to their personal beliefs and understanding of the system. But, in my opinion both these tradeoffs are bad for the efficiency of an economy. This conflict of interest is the root cause of problems like this and discussion of solutions is almost pointless if we're not trying to address that root cause.
The author wrote, 'Facebook solves the problem of how to stay in contact with your 250 "friends". Twitter solves... well, ok, Twitter didn’t solve any real problem, but has still grown to become extremely useful.'

How can something be useful and not solve a problem? Twitter is such a great soapbox for complaints that many companies have felt the need to create twitter accounts and respond directly to their customers. Personally, I can find last minute tickets to a baseball game easier on Twitter than on Craigslist.
I've used this quite a bit and love it. My favorite part is that there are no dependencies (that aren't in the standard library).
Something often missing from vocabulary tests -- and arguably more impressive than raw, crystallized vocab -- is the ability to deduce the meaning of new words on the fly, whether from context or absent any context (in which case, the meaning is ascertained from roots, prefixes, suffixes, etc.). I'd love to see a test of this skill.
For instance, I doubt many people encounter the word "reck" in their daily lives. But I'd give props to someone whose brain would quickly draw the connection to the more frequently seen "reckless," thereby deducing that the word had something to do with caution or concern.

Similarly, your point has some validity. Most of the time, we don't acquire language through reading the dictionary; we acquire it primarily through context in the course of reading or conversation. This is why, when pressed to define words, we'll often reach for a string of synonyms, or else provide usage in sample sentences. I bet few people here, let alone anywhere, could render dictionary-acceptable definitions of 99% of the words they know.

(On the flipside, this is also why we forget most of the words we crammed in preparation for the SAT back in the day; we learned them completely out of context and in an artificial way).
My family owned a renthouse, and yes, it's awful. But the renters aren't planning on becoming owners of the house - this guy is.
agreed. look at craigslist - about as unsexy a design as you could imagine, but it solves real problems for people, and they use it constantly. quora - not so much, and fancier buttons and UI won't really change that.
> I would love it if one of the neighbors could obtain the house for free and keep it up.

Why don't you do it?
I only got 23k, I'm quite humbled. English is my second language and I'd hoped to have mastered it by now.
What Big Venture Capitalists Talk About
http://trends.google.com/websites?q=quora.com&geo=all... well, the hype is over - now they must show if they are great - or not. but a startup that does not have hard times is probably not trying hard enough
Quora fell apart when Ashton Kutcher and other celebs started posting.
"Why the difference?"

That's an interesting question.

My view is: cultures which are quick to forget the past find it easy to move on. Cultures which cling to their history, find it harder to forgive-and-forget.

Expanding on that: you have a limited amount of bandwidth in terms of attention. If your gaze is on the past, it's much harder to move forward; sort-of like it's hard to drive a car forward by looking at the rear-view mirror. On the other hand, if you force your gaze to the future, it is much easier to move forward and keep moving forward.

As someone said, "forgiveness is giving up all hope of a better past, for some hope of a better future".
Brazil vs Paraguay Live Stream Online quarter-finals of Copa America
I'm questioning the way respondents are classified.

I chose 'Canada' as my region since I'm from Montreal. My first language is English and I'm fluent French. I did the first half of elementary school in French. Firstly non-Quebec anglophones tend to have better grammar and larger vocabularies than anglophone Quebecers. Secondly it doesn't take into account that English can be a 3rd language . Most immigrants to Quebec are required by law to attend French language elementary and high schools (there are exceptions). Immigrant children who's first language isn't English or French (the majority) take on two new languages, English being their 3rd after French. English tends to be the social language for many.

Montreal has a strong tech industry employing bilingual/multilingual people many of which read HN and possibly took part in the survey. My gut feeling is that English speaking Quebecers are skewing the stats. More granular control over region will be useful; show some insight to this reality.

Note: I traveled through China and south east Asia last year and found the quality of English to be much better than I expected. Considering Indochina ruled by the French I didn't find a person who could speak it. To possibly classify any country as "non-English-speaking" is kind of silly. Every country is "other-English-speaking" but then again it's a subjective classification isn't it. Doesn't China have the largest English speaking population now...
Customerpain an India focused customer complaint site got featured
Food for Hair Growth
Analysis of HTTP Performance problems
Is there a shortage of single men? Yes. And no.
If you take a look at the javascript, there's an event handler that looks at different keycodes and assigns them to actions. PageUp, PageDown, Up, Down, Left, Right, j, and k are all assigned. It should be simple to attach handlers for mouse and gesture events too, and just call the same actions.
The author brings up the idea of an Etherpad for Emacs. I agree that this would be useful. I wonder how tricky it would be to get right.
Anyone acquihired here? How did it work for you?
Acquihired, for those who dont know is the process of getting hired into a company by virtue of a product/service that was built, as opposed to the product/service being acquired by the hiring company.
The Sculpting of Human Thought
What's the speed like? Looks like its built on top of some opengl C code, so I imagine its alright.
Even better would be a Love2D-like platform.
...is the tutorial any shorter than 400 page books?
I ticked 'terpsichorean', because it made me think "dreamy travelogue writing of a scenic beach with either terpsichorean sky or sea, it means X looks a pale shade of blue-green".

Google tells me it means dancing so I was way way off (maybe conflating turquoise and cerulean?).

But I have no way of knowing how many words that I feel comfortable defining are actually nowhere near correct, so to be any kind of accurate, they need to do some verification of correctness. All 'honesty' means is 'don't deliberately cheat' not 'don't be dumb'.
Mini application that opens a Terminal.app window cd’d to the front
Why would a clean, user focused "export my info" tool also be exposed to apps? I can't imagine a situation where those two features would be intrinsically tied. This is about an end-user-side button which dumps your friend network 'address book' into a simple machine readable format and downloads it to the users local drive. Implying such a feature would/could, accidentally/maliciously cause a user's contacts to flood out uncontrollably to 3rd party app developers reads like FUD.
Backup application with options to backup data to a local or remote location
A full web framework is not something you want to come standard with Python. Putting Bottle, Flask, Django, {your_favorite} inside the standard library would pretty much kill it. Development would screech almost to a halt since Python generally releases less often than any of these frameworks.

For example, we released 3.2 in Spring '11. There will be no new features released until 3.3, which is slated to come out in Fall '12 - about 1.5 years. In comparison, the popular Flask framework is about 1.5 years old and has had ~8 point releases, and it can add features whenever it wants at whatever rate it wants. If Armin wants to make a new feature today, he can do that and release it today if he wants.

On top of that, web frameworks are like a religion that we would have to choose. There's currently a separation of church and state that has worked well in the community and allowed different frameworks to do different things at different paces. I think we should keep that.
Great answer, thanks!

I suspected some of this stuff, and it's nice to know that other people also see that and it's not just me being paranoid.
How to Create RSS Feeds for Google+ Profiles
try gevent-socketio
yes, you can actually design a site for your project and host it on google code. directing your users to the gc-provided default is your choice.

the contents of your repositories are hosted available at projectname.googlecode.com, and you can serve HTML just like you can code. example: http://json-template.googlecode.com/svn/trunk/doc/On-Design-...

the urls are not as nice but github's aren't great either.
His point wasn't about making it more fancy but rather, less sterile. Even Craigslist has more character.
Excellent post. Technology doesn't propagate throughout society instantaneously, people have to invest in learning to use it first. Unfortunately many people aren't willing to do that, even when the immediate costs are very low relative to the future rewards (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hyperbolic_discounting, thanks for that list of cognitive biases).

Nonetheless, I am continuously astounded by the number of typewriters still in use.
uxorcide

"To change your software so the user experience becomes overwhelmingly worse. e.g. Some critics say Microsoft committed uxorcide with the Office Ribbon"
> it seems to me that the biggest thread to America is just smart people in general who have the motivation to carry out such a plan

Great point but had to FTFY.
This is a nice presentation. It would be great if there was a pdf to cover the services in the same logical way.
For subscription services, figure out what problems your customers have and create free tools, calculators, widgets, templates, Excel spreadsheets to solve them, then go promote that stuff.
I think you're on the right train of thought. One suggestion I would offer regards the intended result. How about taking the "set of selfish individual preferences" and route them go a variety of solutions both public and private? Instead of attempting to channel everything through government in a more optimal way, which is a laudable goal, give people more ways to solve the issues that currently may seem confined to government intervention.
I view every person as an agent acting in their own best interest. Why not view the answers given as avenues for groups and organizations to market their services to? Maybe you're creating a democratic system that let's people say exactly what they want, and define what they will pay for it.

Again, just musings- but I'm happy to have found you and your efforts.
Would a "don't allow others to export my information" feature, maybe with some granularity, help with this? So if your friend dumped their info to leave, or sent it directly to another app or service, you wouldn't be included* since you opted out of allowing others to export you?

* or, with some granularity and tuning controls, maybe for example just your name and it's presence in photo tags from your friends library, and nothing else, would be included.
How to Build Android Applications Based on FFmpeg by An Example
Last.fm web site primary and failover down
Australia? USA? Canada? There are many different resources besides simply oil (I am making an assumption that's what is in your mind because of the Norway example). Mongolia doesn't simply have oil (and they rank #92 in the world for oil production - so they don't even have much of it), they have richer mineral deposits.
Xv6* is a good place to start studying the workings of a Unix-like operating system.

* http://pdos.csail.mit.edu/6.828/xv6/
A Bit of Coin: The Bitcoin Revolution
Wordpress highlight post_states within admin posts and pages
Most of them just needs a website that teaches them how to use the search engines.
It would be a very good idea to specify the width and height attributes of the image elements in the markup of the overview pages. All the cropped images have the same dimensions, but width and height have not been set. Some pictures take a lot of time to load right now or are unavailable. The browser does not know the size of the image in advance, so the layout looks somewhat broken and keeps moving when new pictures are finally downloaded. Maybe there are many visitors on this site at the moment, I have seen some "Service is unavailable" errors.
Really cool - for some reason attaching geolocation to abstract pictures make them seem so much more real and interesting. Seems to be cracking a little under HN traffic?
"Obsession with Kashmir is burning rest of the India."

LOL. Nice try. It is Pakistan who is obsessed with Kashmir. The founder of Pakistan, M A Jinnah, wanted to be buried in Kashmir. Every time there's talk of peace between India and Pakistan, the Pakistani government brings up Kashmir.

As far as I know, the only "burning" issues about Kashmir that the rest of India has are:

1. Why aren't there more airline flights to Kashmir?

2. Why can't I buy land and invest there?
This is years old, maybe submitter should mention that.
Spitefulness is generally not a good strategy.
Watch,zindagi na milegi dobar,online free,megavideo
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The song Miss Hrithik Roshan, Katrina Kaif, Farhan Akhtar and Abhay Deol film Zindagi Na Milega Dobara. If there are errors in the letters Miss, please message in the comments section, we will fix it as soon as possible
So why don't you insulate the attic?
A thousand up votes! Keep calm, and carry on.
"twitter solves no problem"

I stopped reading there. staying informed is a real problem. It is just one twitter solves. Entertainment is not a problem but a desire, and another one that twitter satisfies. Quora works for both as well. I trust what I read on quora
Geek();
Clickable links

* The Web Design doc:
https://docs.google.com/document/d/14Ym6LTR9hLBGI0cM0mMU_BDE...

* HN Contractors spreadsheet:
https://spreadsheets.google.com/spreadsheet/ccc?key=0AlD_6iE...

* HN Co-founder wishlist spreadsheet:
https://spreadsheets1.google.com/spreadsheet/ccc?hl=en_US...

* Startup Ideas spreadsheet (now read-only, was writable by all HN pretty sure):
https://spreadsheets1.google.com/spreadsheet/ccc?hl=en_GB...

* HN internships and interns:
https://docs.google.com/Doc?docid=0ASrV38bNy1TlZHhqNjlmel8xM...

* The SAAS Model Spreadsheet (not crowdsourced/writable, but was very popular):
https://spreadsheets0.google.com/spreadsheet/ccc?authkey=CN_...

* The complete list of TED talks by date (not crowdsourced/writable, but still very useful):
https://spreadsheets.google.com/pub?key=pjGlYH-8AK8ffDa6o2bY...
Somebody just got back from one of those cool, all expenses paid, junkets to Seattle! I wonder which superstars of the Windows world he got to eat lunch with at the Redmond campus! MMM mmm good!
Fermi thermodynanics
1) Your opinion about quality of Mahalo content is obviously biased, so we cannot really rely on that.

2) Isn't it too expensive "burning $500K a month" just to find out what idea works?

Discovery phase should be lean, right?
In my experience, people will always find a way to pooh-pooh the open source contributions of organizations they don't like, e.g. Apple and WebKit/Darwin.
Several people also mentioned the "Quora elite's" attitude as a big problem in a thread that Thomas Hawk started on Google+ a couple of weeks ago: https://plus.google.com/104987932455782713675/posts/XXp28NN4...
Fermi thermodynamics
Cleverly Designed Inventions
The Internet of Things [Infographic]
I tell people to learn both, and I fucking hate Ruby. It's the way of the industry right now that if you want to easily get a job, you know Ruby and Python. I also think Ruby is slowly going away and Python is taking its place, but we could debate that forever and a day.
A game where you play Conventional Wisdom Slayer.
I'm a fan already :)
Shoot some green-smoothie bombs and vitamin D3 bullets at carcinogenic cosmetics and processed food-slimes. Hell yes.
(The expansion packs into other false "common sense" domains could be limitless.....)

Get to work!
same here, maybe the tweet caused servers to be too busy
Fox Spins: Claims They Are Victims of Hacking
What’s the Appeal of Freelancing?
Confirmation Bias and Art
I haven't done anything significant with Mongrel2 yet, so my mental model of its operation is probably somewhat flawed, but I was thinking about my above post for a while yesterday.

It seems like WSGI supports a subset of Mongrel2 features. Any "pure" WSGI app can run fine behind Mongrel2, but Mongrel2 allows much more than the WSGI model. For example, a response in Mongrel2 is just a socket getting written to. Mongrel2 can send a request to server A, and then receive the response from a completely seperate server B. Can WSGI support something like this? As far as I know, someone would need to reimplement a lot of Mongrel2's functionality in Python (which is idiotic) just for WSGI compliance.

Again, I've yet to build anything with Mongrel2 and I haven't read the WSGI PEP in a while, so please correct me if I'm wrong about anything. After thinking about it yesterday, I find the differences between a more traditional WSGI-esque model and something like Mongrel2 to be fascinating.
Conversation Agent: Update on Filters
Beta Testing Community and Business Groups
I'm also a long-term Quora skeptic -- and have been documenting the reasons why in the comments at http://bit.ly/imitates#comments for the last six months. Agreed about the likely outcome; hard to know about the valuation.

And agreed with the other commenters that StackExchange/StackOverflow is in a very different situation. It's hard to know whether or not they'll get to "mainstream"; but they don't necessarily have to in order to be a very successful company. And they've got a huge advantage of several topics where they are one of the best resources on the web -- and an much larger active community than Quora.
I'm wondering, though, what use would Google make of P9? I guess it might make a great fit with Go.
Please, I beg of you, in the name of all that does not suck, DO NOT MAKE THIS SERVICE!

It will be abused, people will spam, and others will be annoyed by the spam, and have to pay for the spam.

You have no economic incentive to take people off send-me-ads-lists. You will make money by the SMS, probably, or at least you'll charge incrementally, 100 some price, 1000 some more price, etc etc. It will be against your better monetary interest to accept "remove" requests, so you won't put any effort into the interface, you won't fix bugs, and you'll ignore any inquiry that isn't exactly correct, with well-formed sentences. You will make it easy to get a phone number ON the lists, since that is how you make money.

This is a recipe for disaster for the victims of your proposed service, and a moral disaster for your, as you will find yourself compromising your moral and ethical standards along the way. You will find yourself a near-criminal, universally loathed spammer within 2 years.
Oh no, Farmeville+ is on its way
What you are claiming simply doesn't seem correct to me. I am too privacy conscious to simply use a tool so early in its release, but my understanding is that most data can be extracted from Google using google.com/takeout. I know I can export my Google Contacts quite easily, and I have done that before in order to sync with my home phone (i.e. ipod touch).
yes, reddit + HN brought lots of people at once :/ hopefully back up soon (its loading, albeit very very slowly here).

github is still there for anyone wanting to check it out, the info and docs are best on the website though.
Benchmarking Ruby’s Enumerable
Five years latter, the U.S. has institutionalized a terrified attitude, at least with respect to air travel. At this point, the only thing that might compel me to put up with the useless, degrading, indignity of U.S. air travel would be a dire family obligation - like a funeral - which I couldn't meet in any other way. I am appalled that my fellow citizens demand this abasement.
And I am a native english speaker and you got a higher score than me. I never prided my language skills but damn, that's a shot right in the ego!
Thanks for creating that framework. I had seen it in use a few times but it didn't dawn on me until reading your comments above the relation to Plan 9.
Lint to "W3C Community Groups and Business Groups" proposal: http://www.w3.org/2010/12/community/
Powered heating is a fundamental human need in Minnesota. You cannot survive without it. Even in antiquity I can't imagine people surviving without fire.

Passive cooling, by contrast, is pretty much adequate (though that's not to say the heat can't kill you if you're out in the sun.) But in any case, when you look at the amount of energy expended on heating, the modest amount expended on cooling is a natural expenditure. I think in general that's why a lot of colder countries like Norway are more rich and prosperous than their warmer counterparts. When it costs $30,000/year just to survive, luxuries start to become a lot less costly as a percentage of income.
This is interesting and good info. I am of the mind that social networks that are privy to personal info should not be run by for-profit companies unless they are being paid directly by the users, not adverts. I'm not sure how widespread this belief is, but it is my belief, and I hope we can move things in that way.
Still incredibly relevant though. With Jason Chaffetz (R-UT) and others confronting the TSA in the House, and last week's court decision requiring the TSA to have a comment period, this issue's going to be heating up again.
But not having some form of geolocation can also add some mystery to a picture, making it more interesting in another way. But I like the idea to ask people via the internet where a certain photo was made. I have sometimes wondered where some interesting looking location, that I have seen on a photo, can be found. One problem with an internet community based solution could be copyright, if people are allowed to submit arbitrary scans of copyrighted material for identification.

Some pages were unavailable for me, server timeout error.
ASF wants to sue all website that use word Apache
Transfer all your Facebook photos to Google + with Fotolink app.
It seems like being single-file is mostly gimmick. What are the drawbacks to creating a folder with an __init__.py and a handful of readably-long files?
> human beings are "endlessly complicated and interesting."

Couldn't disagree more. Human beings en masse are endlessly boring and not interesting at all. Just because the soil of the earth contains a few diamonds doesn't make all the soil interesting.