skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
The whole purpose of my post was about the attitude demonstrated by the poster. I was pointing out and arguing against the blind 'America is the Greatest' thinking that it demonstrated. The fact that the poster felt so sure about it without the need to provide any evidence was proof enough I believe.

In this context I feel that using the very word (jingoist) that the poster said he was trying to avoid was certainly justified. Perhaps I could have avoided directly using the word 'ignorant'.

Anyway it doesn't surprise me that some people might disagree with my post. But I believe the prevalence of this attitude is a truth and actually an important truth. Possibly a substantial cause of the financial problems the original article was about.
Sept 16th: one day after public launch	10%

October 11th: less than one month after public launch	50%

Ermmm surely one day after public launch, most traffic was coming from blogs, news sites, and other "launch hype", which explains the low % from websites.
I don't think you can conclude anything else from those figures.
Deskography - show the world where you work
How can a comment about a committee in Sweden be partisan? Are they running for some kind of office here? There's nothing partisan here. I'm not recommending a party, and heck, I like the Swedes.

Look -- I'm ignorant. I've admitted as much. Why not have a reasonable conversation about it instead of all the hand-waving and yelling?

As far as I'm concerned, I was making a blanket statement about Noble prizes in soft sciences and the humanities. It's a generalization. Probably wrong. Guess what? I still get to make it, and I still think it's funny. If you'd like to discuss it reasonably, I'm game.

I'm happy with waiting 20 or 30 years and seeing how Krugman's research does. Are you? Or do we have to settle this now for once and all?

Last I checked, economics is a field with a lot of opinions. How can you be so certain Krugman has such great ideas? Geesh. We're still debating Keynes and Smith, you have to admit there is some room for opinion here, right?
I like the slides app, and it was a good talk, but does the world really need another web framework?

Is creating a new framework just a way to build a cool community/userbase to sell things to later?
they bundle it with the latest Office installer (including the OSX version)
At the risk of nitpicking, it's not like they're closing their doors. An early founder is leaving the company (which sucks) and is taking an asset with her. Beyond that the other co-founders + the hired help are sticking around, along with the company's brand mark, website, and everything else that's made them tap tap tap.

As far as selling Where To as a last resort goes, please. They were never going to euthanize their cash cow. This is a great opportunity to exit that investment -- I think it's a fair move -- but it's BS to present it like it's "the only remaining choice."

It's a time of change and I'm sure they'll cope well enough. Tap tap tap's a neat company and I'm excited to see what they put out next.
Love it! My only suggestion is to check the hoverstate style for the bookmarklet. A normally resized browser window completely hides the arrow.
How many issues do the magazines for $20 a year have in a year? Too bad, you can't get a magazine that cheaply here in Germany.

By the way: There is a website to the 'Why not?'-book (http://www.whynot.net/). It tries to be a web-2.0 idea exchange. But browsing it did not gratify me as much as reading their book.

Especially I like 'What would Croesus do?' (How would you solve your problem if resources were unconstrained?) and 'Find new problems for your solutions.'.
Idea exchange - Using Everyday Ingenuity to Solve Problems
What Would Croesus Do?
The Olympics.Streaming, high-quality, LIVE video feed.
The low bandwidth quality SL content easily beat the high-bandwidth quality of Flash streams on sites like Hulu and Amazon VOD.

And that was just the beta.
For a long while, it was installed on OEM computers like Dell and HP, so users didn't need to install it.

It still is installed by default on most consumer-line Dell models.
This is pretty cool. I can even see using it on Linux, because I still haven't figured out how to get the Japanese input method to work there decently.

My one issue is that selection is a bit odd. If you type a word, the whole word looks selected, even though it doesn't act that way. If you hold down the delete key, it deletes one character and stops. It works really well if you already know what you're typing and make no mistakes, but slightly less well otherwise.

I really like what the Mac does here: use underline to indicate "still working on this word", so selection still means selection. But that might not be feasible (portably) in an HTML textfield.
An early view of the Treasury plan
Correction, your interpretation is that it says: Economic conditions vary. In bad times you can't take as much risk. Bad times are here. Stop taking risks.

That said, the presentation says what it says; it talks about the what happened, how we got here, how it's gonna be like what (their) companies are supposed to do now.

And what they're supposed to do now, is exactly what any sane company (outside of SV perhaps?) would be doing from the minute they open shop.
Ideas Waiting to Happen
Set Operations in the Unix Shell
Windows 7 has a name: Windows 7 Er, Windows 7?
Amazing... the sheer volume of news.YC folks jumping on the defense wagon here. If I wouldn't know any better, I would say that 37Signals personally offended some you.

To do some reflection... I can't help but wonder how many adjustments a company such as 37Signals is going to have to make to their operations compared to the average overfunded "innovator" from Silicon Valley...

I know for damn sure who to put my money on.
Good advice. I am looking to build a site similar to Weebly, but for a specific niche audience. I like your idea of static pages. Thanks!
For these sorts of questions, the water is very muddy in the US, due to the proliferation of consumer goods. That's the thing that happens in a rich society; people who are unhappy for social and economic reasons (shitty health coverage, unable to afford ridiculous housing/higher education costs) are still able to buy a lot of trinkets which, of course, fail to deliver on the hedonic promise. Rich is definitely better than poor, but clutter does not equate to wealth, and often makes a person worse off rather than happier.

Someone might be unhappy because of his mediocre health coverage (even the insured are screwed), low occupational autonomy, meager two weeks' vacation allowance, inability to reach the level of stability necessary to responsibly procreate, et al. He's 35 and not really poor; he has enough discretionary income to buy a $30,000 SUV-- which would be considered a luxury outside of the US (in Europe, because of the high gas prices moreso than the cost of the car). He does this to procure "happiness". It fails him (he returns to baseline) after three weeks. Why did he buy it? Because he lacks the power to make meaningful improvements to his life, whereas trinkets are cheap.

"Consumption" is a poor predictor of happiness because most consumptive activity is utterly devoid of hedonic value. On the other hand, increased security and autonomy would make people legitimately happier.
http://nymag.com/news/features/51170/ (print link at the bottom)
I guess I don't get the mystery around this experiment. It is essentially the major plot point of "2001", no? Is it really hard to believe that HAL could have played it a little smoother (say, by not killing people) and win? All you need is to be mortally desperate, articulate, and lucky.
I keep my New Yorker subscription only to have for reading on flights. New Scientist gets me sleepy whereas New Yorker gets me engrossed in impossibly long articles. Sadly this means sometimes I'm reading copies that are 6 months old.
As someone who has gone through Y Combinator early on, I think networking was actually a bit under emphasized. A lot of networking can be useless if you don't follow up in depth; but our company has gained immeasurably by identifying people who have built and scaled businesses (technically and otherwise) and then got them to sit down for an hour or two and teach us about an area that we're weak on.
Voted up for conversation potential.

In my opinion, its inane, but provocative.

Happiness is best studied at an individual's cognitive level. I don't think that by the time you aggregate it and compare it to income the numbers have any meaning whatsoever. Lots of correlation in the world. Lots of folks who don't know science. Lots of folks who don't know the history of various governmental schemes and how they failed (or worked).

In a way, because it's provocative, it's really kind of sad. A commentary on the average state of discourse.
Guy's Index of Absurdity: The Top Ten Ways to Tell If Things Are Really Bad
Apple's Tuesday notebook event: what would you ask Steve?
I would love an example.
There are, of course, a few doctors who reject the very idea that mere scientific evidence should be able to tell them what to do. But in general, most doctors want to provide the best care they can for their patients, and that includes scientific evidence.

However, it's extremely common for doctors to prescribe medicine off-label, before the full level three trials have completed for that use (which can take a decade). There is often compelling evidence a medicine is effective (in the Bayesian sense) far before there is official "Evidence" which counts for "Evidence Based Medicine".

The very fact that it's called "Evidence Based Medicine" should set off alarm bells. Being against it sounds like being against science in medicine, which would just be stupid. In fact, it's code for "restrict public care facilities from being able to offer a full range of medical benefits to conserve money".
Going by the numbers this should be a serious downgrade from windows 2000
But that has nothing whatsoever to do with aesthetic.

I think YouTube is doing a good thing. I think that the more open video is, the better it is for people. My gripe lies entirely with the fact that YouTube is an extremely ugly site, and with video - unlike some things - there are very attractive sites to compare with. Vimeo and Hulu do it right, both the overall aesthetic and the vanishing bar in particular. YouTube makes it so that I would never be able to really use my computer like a television, whereas in Hulu I can get fairly high-resolution video of, say, Arrested Development, and watch it in an environment that's even slightly better than watching it on TV.
That's why I think that for video sites, making deals with foreign providers will eventually prove to be the sensible thing to do. If Hulu finds a collaborator overseas, it would help them a lot. The problem is motivation on their part.
This article is nothing more than an advertisement. The company that makes freelanceswitch also owns the sites listed: FlashDen, AudioJungle, ThemeForest, iStockPhoto
grand canyon is in az and yellowstone's in wy.

i'd be bummed if i couldn't ever travel to either again.
Is the etymology there R2-D2 -> Rjd2 -> RjDj?
It's a sort of reversal of how they expanded their numbers with the XBox 360, so it wouldn't be a 2 versus the PS3.

Still, I like it. It's no-nonsense and it's got a nice ring to it.
U.S. Treasury Said to Invest in Nine Major U.S. Banks 
U.S. Treasury Said to Invest in Nine Major U.S. Banks
Just wondering, why the obsession with happiness? As a society, shouldn't we be out for the greatest output so that we can crush all other societies and take over their resources (violently or not)?
my point was that a startup should look for alternative business models than advertising, which bets only on eyeballs. unless you truly have a new way to handle and display advertising, that is
the excerpt uses very grim words for something which is just "describing".

that said, I agree with your last 2 sentences
I'm probably not enough of a graphic designer or artist in general to do exactly that, but this post made me realize how I should really think of ways to make some money on the side.

And also that, just trying can sometimes be enough!

What would you see as the closest thing to stock photos for a programmer? You can sell your software of course, but it feels like it needs a lot more investment and that a few hours at night on one small bit of software won't make it.
YouTube - 80:20 rules - Building software smarter
Slighly flimsy "article", no more than a pamphlet.
Very cute idea, but it's way too slow. Nobody wants to wait several seconds for the server to return a composition.

I guess this might be nice if you are a Japanese person at a kiosk in the US (etc.), but you probably can't install a bookmarklet in that case anyway.
Sock puppet?

Or 13? 'cause crushing other societies and taking over their resources is a little old hat. Better to trade with them. Better for us, better for them.
For non-americans, what happened a month ago (see supertracker) that caused what looks like the start of a landslide for obama. Was it palin?
It was the changing of the campaign narrative from being about all sorts of things to being solely about the economy in wake of the financial crisis. Barack Obama is widely viewed as being more sound on economic issues.
Bush signs controversial anti-piracy law
That's pretty excellent. I was in a Japanese class and wondered why the systems for typing were so app-centric. This seems like it could work anywhere (though, out of curiosity, does it work on IE6?). Well done.
What I'm hearing is that the economic crisis is the cause. When polled for "keywords", people vote the economy at 55% and the rest of the issues are in single digits. The economy went up as a major issue as McCain's numbers went down.

In general, McCain should be at double-digits according to most of the fundamentals. I'm amazed that it is as close as it is.
I better be impressed, or I'm sticking with XP.
Pretty damn cool.

I only used it for about 30 seconds, but two things stood out. One, when I press space (I assume it's henkan like usual), I assume it's doing a dictionary search. The wait is pretty significant for something that needs to be near-instant. Second, triggering the henkan seems to prevent any further input.

Minorly, my phrase didn't henkan: koreha, yamanotesendesuka.
Deep Tagging, Linking, Searching and Commenting for Videos
Do you know of any services that provide deep commenting for videos?
Enlightenment and Illume running on phone brings new air to Linux mobile
Thanks for the laugh. It is great to laugh at some of the silliness in investing. It helps keep everyone in check.
Wow, I used to have an Amiga and even I can't get this to work.
The point is that you will naturally do well in search engines if your site is useful. You don't need SEO, you need a good site.

If your site is shit, you deserve to have a low ranking, and it's likely that an SEO consultant won't get you a good rank anyway,
MS's blog post linked: http://windowsvistablog.com/blogs/windowsvista/archive/2008/...

This did not need an entire blog post. The title's one liner sums it up fine.
It... did have "crunch" in the URL. What were you expecting?
What fundamentals are you referring to that favor McCain?
I've also met some invaluable SEOs, especially in the magazine and publishing businesses, that thrive in large corporations as the bridge between the editorial staff and the tech team.

Are these people really SEOs, people who optimize only for search engines, or are they UI designers, who make the site good for its users? If you are making the content good for humans, then you are not an SEO -- making a good site is not SEO, it's making a good site. It will probably be good for your search engine ranking though.
One of the trade-offs of using an unobtrusive approach (no DOM insertion) to maximize compatibility is that we're limited to the decoration offered by a vanilla text control. Otherwise, the flow of insertion/deletion/selection was based on OS X, so I think you'll find it familiar.
it’s probably going to confuse everyone and couldn’t be more bland

Probably not. It is a little bland, but there is nothing all that exciting about an OS like Windows. Its most exciting function is drawing window decorations and showing icons on your desktop. Who cares?
Thanks for the information. I seriously thought it was much more like the Moneyball situation where it was just a bunch of old schoolers not accepting reality & empirical evidence and instead relying on standard practices and conventional wisdom.

P.S. We just fully implemented Twisted at TicketStumbler :) (I heard you guys use it, and love it, at Justin.TV).
And they still take the biggest Federal handout per capita... Such a scam.
I'm not the first one to say this, but I'm worried about Windows as a platform.

The code base has now been recycled 5 times over, and they keep adding layers to it instead of cleaning it up.

(One thing I admire about Apple. When the OS code got old and crufty, they weren't afraid to start at the beginning and do it right.)

Windows has had to promise and deliver complete backward compatibility to retain their market share. They've painted themselves into a corner, and at a certain point, they are going to have to break that promise or figure out some clever way to unchain themselves from that anchor. (I think I read something about them trying virtualization as a possible solution.)
I set up djangohosting.org, which was just a static site w/o any server side programming. Affiliates are making me about 90/mo.

It did take about 8 months for traffic to slowly build up to this point though.
"Better to trade with them. Better for us, better for them."

That would be the non-violent slow social take-over. Still depends on high social output.
Sorry. I meant the fundamentals indicate McCain should be way down in the weeds. Specifically:

- One party president for last 8 years

- Republican dealing with major economic crisis

- Low approval ratings on everybody in Washington. McCain is not Change Candidate

- Dems are outspending McCain by a factor of something like 3-to-1. (probably a debatable ratio, depending on how you count. No argument that Obama has his own satellite station playing campaign commercials, his own 1/2 hour special on all major channels, did not take fed money, etc)
I can't resist posting some patterns observed by a neighbor at Alexander's actual residence in Berkeley:

"Another Pattern Language: Real Life Patterns Chez Christopher Alexander"

http://internettime.com/Learning/alexander.swf
Hah! I thought he meant he quit the company! And then I realized it was his account.

After the first sentence, at the peak of the article, I quit.

I mean no disrespect; just lost interest. :)
Windows 7 != Midori ?
So when you go to the market and sell your hand-grown tomatoes, is the guy you're selling them to taking over your home garden?

Trade is not social take-over. You can trade and have any society you want. All is required is established contract law and private property rights.
I've been to them - I'd be slightly bummed, not extremely.
It is. It feels like you're on another planet (relative to Texas).
Many investment bankers made 1M every year without doing much
Silverlight reported on 1 out of 4 PC's - version 2.0 to be announced
Any URL / Alexa-type service that can confirm these statistics?
In Alaska, milk is $7.00/gallon. We need people up there to run the industries but the living is tough.

There are scams operated by the government far worse than Alaska.
It's probably a lot of things. Some of it was that McCain (as with Obama before him) had gotten a short bump from his convention. So he was a little higher than he should be for a brief point there, as all politicians usually are after their party's convention.

Palin energized the base at first during the convention, and certainly got a flood of media attention, but then she scared off moderates, especially the women she was hoped to bring in. They've overwhelmingly decided she's not fit to be President (the numbers are so big that even a very significant % of people who will vote for them think that).

Then there's the economy. It's pretty easy for the Democrats to point out that the Clinton years were very good. Taxes on the wealthy were higher than they were now, we had a budget surplus and national debt was under 5 trillion. Now we have a huge budget deficit and the debt has more than doubled.

In fairness, that's probably an oversimplification, as it's not all Bush's fault. But we Americans pretty much blame or credit the President, and, by extension, his Party, for everything good or bad.

So Obama's same message of McCain = Bush grew in effect. Then there were the debates (2 Presidential, 1 VP), where public opinion polls all concluded that Democrats won. Plus McCain's erratic behavior in choosing Palin, suspending his campaign, and introducing a new and not very conservative or detailed plan to buy up mortgages at a debate. He's giving off one signal after another that he's the inferior candidate.

So it's been more or less a symphony of destruction. Just one mistake after another on his part, combined with the economy.
I don't think he said anything about SEO really. He just wants a search for "How do I foo a bar" to find the "How do I foo a bar" question on his site. Since there are no links to that question, the only way for Google to find it is via a site map. Totally reasonable.
If you've followed Krugman for long, you've seen this coming for quite a while. The possibility of his winning an economics Nobel have been rumored for years. The interesting thing to me is that, when reading his columns, I often get the sense that Krugman doesn't really believe in economics. He talks a good economics talk, but he hasn't internalized its lessons. He's like a brilliant Christian apologist who doesn't believe in Christ.
I think Palin is a big part of that dynamic, especially after the Paris Hilton line of attack. Say McCain had picked Romney, they could have been hammering away at the experience card on both foreign and economic policy. By picking Palin, McCain basically killed the experience campaign, especially when she started blathering in uncontrolled settings, and they've gyrated around ever since trying to find a compelling narrative without sufficient knowledge or experience to address the economic realities. As evidence, independents now break in a big way for Obama where they weren't prior to Palin.

EDIT: Just to be clear - Palin got the ball rolling downhill, after an initial and short bounce. The economy kicked it that much further.
So Keynesianism is back (arguably it never went away.)

Well, if big governments can spend hundreds of billions on saving banks maybe they can drop some change (a tenth of that sum) on health, modernization, and infrastructure.

And ideally a thousandth of that sum on making who was responsible for this scam go to jail.
You're forgetting RNC spending which draws the money comp much closer. Also, 538 is really good at reviewing the respective ground games. Obama built a powerful organization during the primaries (he had to) and they've kept on building. I wouldn't be surprised to see Obama ahead of his polls by three or four points in the final counts.

On the "should be" line, let's just reflect for a minute that America, after 8 years of a ranch farmhand, is about to elect a black technocrat with a Muslim name as POTUS. There's no "should be" for that scenario. It's utterly amazing.
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