skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
"Why would an organization like Stanford [put] this on the web and give it away for free??"

The question is better put as to why should they not. Stanford is a non-profit institute devoted to education, the advancement of science, etc. At this time in history, one of the most cost-effective / high-impact means to fulfill their objectives is to produce this material on the web.

The objective of a school like Stanford should not be to keep this material exclusive. There is no risk of going out of business -- the college experience plays too important a role for too many people. And there are tangible benefits to 'being there'; the networking plus the diploma can be helpful. A school like Stanford, or MIT already has to turn away way too many completely qualified and gifted applicants. Stanford can not effectively scale to address increased demand for the full experience. If it can help those it turned away to still learn, great.

It is also important marketing on both a short and long term scale. On an immediate basis, a potential candidate now has an opportunity to look inside to see whether college, and Stanford, is right for them. If they don't consider the lectures worthwhile, it is better to know that now. On a longer time scale, this bolsters the reputation of Stanford by showing their excellence of education. The meme occasionally circulates that some of the Ivies (and their technical equivalents) are soft, coasting on wealth and their laurels. As a Carnegie Mellon graduate, I can now see how Berkeley, MIT, or Stanford's coursework measures up. [I am ashamed that my own alma mater continues to retreat in the other direction, and worry that this will be a long-term competitive disadvantage.]

Likewise, as you describe, many may be convinced that a lower tier school is as comprehensive as the top tier. When we see these schools provide their lectures, a more fair comparison could be made prior to making a commitment.
Computology
Almost nobody has yet lost money on typical retail bank products. Even a checking account is better than the mattress. Retail banking is doing just fine. Not that that's too relevant.
There are financial dis-incentives to saving cash, like taxes on the interest and low rates of return on your money. At least if you spend it right away, you get something neat in return.
Not entirely true. They've really gotten it where console gaming is concerned, moreso than anyone else. The Xbox has been consistently better than its rivals at that.

They're now serving up millions of dollars worth of games per month (allegedly 70% of Xbox owners have used Live Arcade) and are moving into streaming video too. I can now watch MSNBC through it.

They've achieved the dream an internet-connected box on millions of people's TVs. Apple tried and failed miserably with their TV product.

There clearly are people at the company that get it.
Ah well.. i would look at it as yet another explaination (excuse) for failure!
http://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2008/10/11/business/20081...
Shouldn't be an excuse for the behavior.
"I’m retired from blogging and have moved to the comfort of my email newsletter, where 9,400 of my close friends and I have a nice intimate discussion."

I like Calacanis and the things he has to say in his emails, but to say the 9,400 people are his close friends and that he has an intimate discussion with them is just stupid.

He's a blogger using the Cartmanland technique.
Flickr Blog: Lessons Learned while Building an iPhone Site
Vanguard sends me a report containing all the securities involved in my money market funds (which, by the way, have prevented me from losing anything in the late stock crash). Are you saying that these reports (or reports like it) are commonly fraudulent?
E-commerece: at the tipping point
Slime mold photos
A sneaky ploy to gain more subscribers?
If you build it will they come?
Is Minnesota the next VC hot spot?
Yeah and I'm ashamed I did it... It's just that I didn't want it to be affect by what I say online as a developer. I guess I'm uber paranoid that all this good fortune is going to run disappear because I posted something stupid.
Ask the users! I'd answer a poll at the bottom of your page... Where is your page?

Answers:
1. Way way too many (I'm to the stage of browsing that I'm posting comments! ehhe).
2. Great answer to the initial question so I'm pretty happy now.
3. Very very far from angry (see 2)
4. MacBook Pro (10.5.5) 2.4Ghz Core2 Duo 4GB RAM.
He made a lot of sense, except for one point. He said, "if you're not a developer, go out and find one on Elance for $15-20/hr."

Sure, this could work out, but the chances of an arrangement leading to a successful startup are pretty low. He got very lucky.
without reading the article I would guess it's becuase Css coding isn't really programming
"All you have to do is listen to your CEO talk to people for a week and determine if she uses these lines."

Little sexist there. Why does a sucky CEO have to be female?
"It was also made clear by Toni that Automattic would maintain Gravatar as a separate brand and continue its evolution (instead of just absorbing it into WordPress)."

I just looked at getting a gravatar for my Github account. I didn't do it because the signup page told me I was actually signing up for a Wordpress account and I needed to choose a handle I could never ever change. I wanted an icon, not to make an irrevocable decision and sign up for some unrelated site, so I gave up. The author writes "Gravatar was a feature"; I felt the same way: I was left wondering why GitHub would outsource a feature for another company to confuse.

Lots of nice history here, though. Great blog post.
I have this problem every so often; you're not alone. A few weeks ago I don't think I did any meaningful work for an entire week straight. I just screwed around each day, telling myself that the next day would be "super hardcore work day" and every following day would have to follow suit.

I eventually snapped out of it, but it took that whole week of just recharging my batteries to get back into it. I even managed to start working a few times during that drought and I always stopped almost immediately afterwards, never getting into the zone.

Maybe it's the nature of the work, maybe it's a common character flaw of people who do our work, I don't know. All I know is you're certainly not alone.
Whenever anyone says this time is different it's a pretty sure bet that this time is the same as the last
Yammer To Add Groups, Tags and Threaded Comments
I bet everyone is that way instinctively, just some of us think enough to overcome it, for better or for worse.
The source of the e1000e corruption bug
The global pool of money doubled from about $36 trillion in 2000 to $72 trillion, explaining the greater demand for "safe" investments with good returns.

Numbers from "The Giant Pool of Money" episode of This American Life. Transcript: http://www.thislife.org/extras/radio/355_transcript.pdf.
1) It didn't beg the question.

2) Bad news, obviously. For people who like bad news, good news is bad news. You just need to avoid the assumption that the phrase "good news" means the same thing at different levels of abstraction.
Google Techtalk - Programming Bits and Atoms
Kwanzoo Launches Quiz Widgets To Help Boost Your Ad Revenue
The Great Pizza Orientation Test
Google Adds Gadgets To Gmail (Docs And Calendar)
Downturn may prompt increase in provisional patent applications
EMI To Sell Albums on Airport Kiosks
I wonder if the correct approach is to use "she" when talking about positive things so people don't think you assume all CEOs are male, and use "he" when talking about negatives so people don't complain you think all bad CEOs are female.
Yeah - I have a bucketload of problems trying to convince my old man I'm a professional because I don't wear a tie to work.

I haven't worn a tie since I worked in a supermarket, and I sure as hell wasn't a professional there.
I think it was inevitable that Automattic would more closely integrate the two products, but they're doing it in a way that maintains both brands. As far as having to choose a permanent identifier on signup, it's not the path I would have chosen (signup forms need to be as dead simple as painless as possible), but it certainly doesn't seem like too high a hurdle for most people to jump.
Time for Microsoft to Buy Netflix?
'The Brain Trust Program', by McCleary, a neurosurgeon tells what is known that you can do now. Not that neurosurgery repairs myelin, just that he keeps up with the literature.
What's wrong with using dummy text? How else can you ensure that as the content expands the page will not break?
Google Techtalk - Carbon Dioxide Capture and Sequestration: Hype or Hope?
It's just a giant thundering herd in the valley. Sure would have been nice to hear exactly one of the so-called intelligentsia saying things were going to be bad 9 months ago.

Not that it isn't true, because if enough people controlling enough money believe it to be true, it'll be true.
Each core has its own cache.
I wouldn't say lucky. I'd say dishonest.
This time is different, for one unemployment is only 6.1%. If it goes to 8%, it will still be significantly less than the depression. I know he is slogging away with the day trading and it looks like hell, but step back, look at the long term picture and realize it has to go back up again. If it doesn't, we're in for a lot bigger problems than "my retirement account went down"
at the time delicous came out I wasn't aware of any other competing products. i also thought about a web based bookmarking service before delicious, but i never would have thought about the sharing and tagging links aspect. did someone release a similar product earlier?
It's not an excuse - it's a reason. Jason should expect this to happen and act accordingly instead of feigning "outrage". I do like his $1 idea though.

Maybe I'm just cynical, but when thousands of people are involved in anything, I pretty much expect idiotic things to happen.
Thank you for pointing this out.

People's willingness to point out what they know about markets _for certain_, without being willing to actually make the bet, has always amazed me.

The truth is, if someone was 100% certain that the market would not recover from where it is, it's easy to bet on that without committing any capital and you'd even make the money if the market stayed exactly where it is.

I see a quote on Dec 350 GOOG calls at $24. If you feel lucky, write ten contracts and take the $24,000... all you'll need is your broker to trust that you can cover the bet if you're wrong.

It's ok to hedge your language, it's alright to admit you're guessing. The less often you make definitive statements, the less often you'll look like a fool in hindsight. And the less often you make definitive statements that exactly mirror a market position, the less often you'll look like a fool in foresight.
It's amazing how Guy just recycles the same crap endlessly for decades.
Dude,
the very first thing I did, was press the first button I saw (the search button).

"The page you were looking for doesn't exist."

Needs a little more testing
So what, I'm meant to reply with something like "Um, my users are people..." and then you say something like "Well people pick shit passwords..." and so on.

Did the SHA eat your babies or something? :P

Seriously though, probably "over the top" was not a good choice of term. In a perfect world, I agree with the unspoken point you're trying to lead me into, which seems to be that all applications should never compromise on their security regardless of convenience or who their users are etc. But surely you must agree that in the real world this isn't always viable. I don't have unlimited time at my disposal.

If my current situation allowed it, I would use bcrypt based solely on the fact that OpenBSD recommend it.

However, my current situation does not allow this. Therefore, I have made a pragmatic decision that will enable me to continue moving towards my goal. I'm not going to apologize to you or anyone else for this.

I appreciate that you are passionate about what I assume is your chosen field of expertise, but perhaps in the future you could try talking to people more so than down to them. You might just find it yields friendlier results.
Tech Giants Back Global Plan to Shield Online Speech
What happened in Argentina's Total Collapse in 2001
One hour video.
Sarah Palin's War on Science
OMG, that woman is a bigoted bimbo.
This is an interesting one

At no other time in the history of our markets have the words “blue chip” completely lost their meaning.
Facebook App Payback Time Rewards Amateur Movie Critics With Tickets
What class of programmer are you?
I want to know if he ever went ahead with his gambling hedge fund:

http://is.gd/4YSp
Good thing sheer brain power is only a small part of achieving remarkable things.
this study is just a whole lot of bullshit.
It's ok, but I find it too "sunny day" to really be meaningful. You end up thinking your site looks awesome, and then when you get real, quirky, half filled in, random content in there the site looks broken anyway. You're better off to get some real content in there first and then design around that.
From the article:

My suggestion for you is to do the following: start
your CSS stylesheet with

html {
font-size: 62.5%;
}

NO, NO, AND NO! I set my font size to what it is for a reason. Web designers need to learn to deal with it. If you're manually tweaking font sizes, you're doing it wrong. Please, leave them at the default values; they're that way for a reason. I want a website that doesn't cause eye strain. Make sure your site scales, and things work without absolute pixel sizes.
Well, you know best ;)
holy cow!
The only difference between this and Pate? Oysters aren't cute.
Most of us are remarkably similar regardless of race, religion, nationality, education etc. are like that.

I think that those who go with a utilitarian approach think harder about the decision, but that might be just because it makes the decision harder. You need to work out consequences. It's a stretch to say it makes it smarter.

But when you get right down to the root of your stack of 'whys,' you generally hit a principle at some stage. When your trying to rationalise morals, that is. Even Bentham the old time 'extremist' utilitarian had 'the principle of equal consideration.'

Your Constitution & other fundamental documents that you sited earlier are essentially principals (held to be self evident, no?). If you are going to try & rationalise your ethics, most strategies can be deciding on what level to define you principles, define them somehow then apply. Most people instinctively do it at the same sort of level as the law. Some mostly pretty bookish characters go to a slightly higher level.

In that respect, the US founding documents (which I am always surprised to hear quoted & treated in the way that they are) conform to that. Confucius as an example goes to a slightly lower level.
SAML single sign on help at Inkling
Inkling is looking for a contractor (2 weeks and onward) to assist in our single sign on effort. The first priority is to become a SAML 1.0 compliant Service Provider, but allow for flexibility so we can roll this out to more clients in the near future. Our current strategy is to lean on the Service Provider abilities of either OpenSSO or Shibboleth.

We want people with strong experience in either OpenSSO or Shibboleth. A big plus if you can argue the merits of one over the other. We are also looking for someone who can help us communicate with our clients about the administrative steps that need to be taken. We're in Chicago, but you don’t have to be.

Inkling was started in Dec 2005 through Y Combinator (ycombinator.com) and in our humble opinion, our service offering, Inkling Markets, is the best prediction markets software service available today. And it’s been that way for almost 3 years now, because it’s easy to use, runs fast, and remains reliable.

To apply
Write jobs@inklingmarkets.com with SAML as the subject. Please send along a resume, references and anything you think would help introduce yourself: where you blog, anything open source you've developed, etc.
Ask YC: Do you mention that your service is free?
Let's say you're developing a web application for a problem space where, until now, people have come to expect some kind of pricing model. And you've developed a way where you can do it for free.

When you're in this kind of disruptive position, how much attention do you draw to the "free" part of your service?

Is it cheap to mention that you're free? Is it informative? Would it be confusing if price is never mentioned at all?
use of 'she' as a gender-neutral pronoun is bullshit counter-sexism... think reverse racism...
I'm not sure if Tim's historical analogy is on target, time will tell. But his rational prior to the analogy is the best short summary I've read so far. O'Reilly's more lengthy version is also worth the read http://radar.oreilly.com/2008/10/web-20-and-cloud-computing....
Is it cheap to mention that you're free?

No.

Is it informative?

Yes.

Would it be confusing if price is never mentioned at all?

Yes. There are many companies which don't publish their pricing -- rackspace is the first example which comes to mind -- and nobody would presume that their services are free. In most cases I'd make the opposite presumption -- that the pricing falls into the "if you have to ask, you can't afford it" range.
Google Labs Adds More Gmail Goodness: Gadgets for Calendar, Docs
Cognitive abilities of 11-years-olds are up to three years behind where they were in 1975.
Incomprehensible.
doesn't everyone using IE have issues? zing
You SUCK.
Shows how stupid modern society and technology has made us.
Google Kicks Ass.
Well, pmarca predicted "nuclear winter" in April and people thought he was nuts. Not quite 9 months ago though:

"We raised the money to enable us to keep scaling given our accelerating growth (over 230,000 networks on Ning now, growing at over 1,000 per day) and to make sure we have plenty of firepower to survive the oncoming nuclear winter. At current growth rates, we don't need it to get to cash flow positive, but having lived through the last crunch, it's good to be conservative with these things."

http://blog.pmarca.com/2008/04/ning-news-serie.html
But, since it then allows the developer to use em measurements everywhere, doesn't that allow your override font size to look better on the page?
Gmail doesn't mention that it's free, but Facebook does.

It does have a lot to do with expectations, so I agree with you.
No, you've totally missed my point. I wanted to know, do you not have real users? Can arbitrary people not sign up for your application? Does it have a closed user base? Is it an enterprise product? Because, then, maybe password storage isn't an issue for you.

Otherwise, your users aren't simply giving you "shit passwords". They're giving you their bank password. Normal people do not make up 16 different passwords for all their web applications. If you take passwords from normal people on the Internet, and you ever get popular, you will come into possession of a large database of Bank of America credentials.

So yes, maybe you ought to consider being careful with them.
You know, if you use a user style sheet with !important you can keep your precious font sizes just the way you want them.

The rest of us want a webpage that is pleasing to look at.
The only reason he uses em and not px is because IE won't let the user resize the text if the size is specified in pixels.

Every other browser handles font sizes specified in pixels just fine.
I like the album that Modest Mouse album quite a bit...

OK for Modest Mouse it is actually, "Good New for People who Love Bad News"

http://www.amazon.com/Good-News-People-Who-Love/dp/B0001M7P7...
Tell the people who are signing up that the premium service is free for 30 days, after which they can either keep on using the free service or join the premium service for 25% off. Put everything in big fonts with no small print or ambiguity and probably 5% will be up-sold.
I hate Sarah Palin. I hope some-one assasinates her.
She's the biggest idiot ever to run for vice-president.
VCs in $15M round are Zuora's newest subscribers
Flawed tests.
Brightcove Snags AOL Video Deal
I agree with the article, it would be a good move for Microsoft overall...however, I'm not sure how happy the userbase would be if any the comments to the article are to be any representation. I don't understand why some people are so hardcore "if Microsoft touches it, I don't want it!"
Thinking Machines Chess (AI shows visualization of possible moves)
She's killing the US's dominance in science & tech.
Now the freaking chinks and niggers in China & India are taking away our software business.
I think the first bit is overly complicated. For example, the first @import statement loads a good chunk of code from a third party site for no good reason, really. A simple * {border:0; padding:0; margin:0;} will suffice for most sites.

The rest of the article is excellent, and the way he handles IE is by far the best way to do things, avoiding corrupting your css with mishmash and hacks.

A great resource.
You over 39?
Will someone please tell Tom Preston-Werner to shut-up?
Fuck Microsoft.
I have this problem every so often; you're not alone. A few weeks ago I don't think I did any meaningful work for an entire week straight. I just screwed around each day, telling myself that the next day would be "super hardcore work day" and every following day would have to follow suit.

I also have this problem. It seems like every once in a while, I get stuck in this weird anti-productivity loop. I know I should be doing things, and I'll tell myself that I'll start in just a little bit or the next day, but end up not.

I've noticed that I can put a halt to this process quickly (hopefully this works for other people as well) by forcing myself to stop thinking about whatever it is I'm doing for a while, and do something creative or intellectually stimulating that is entirely unrelated to the problem at hand.

In my case, the "recharge" activity tends to be one of:

- playing musical instruments

- reading

- drawing / painting

- going outside and doing one of the above, or thinking about nature, physics, etc.

- studying (as in going through a book that I need a pencil and paper to make sure that I am understanding what's being shown in it).

In the case of studying, the subject matter doesn't have to be entirely unrelated to what I'm doing. I've been using Concrete Mathematics for this purpose lately. Studying, however, doesn't help if I'm stuck in anti-productivity mode and feeling like my brain's a bit burnt out though.

If I don't force myself to do one of my "recharge" activities, I remain in the "anti-productivity loop" for a while, at most a week or so.

It should be noted that the "anti-productivity loop" is a powerful force. It's easy to fall into, and it takes a bit of a force of will to break out of.

Perhaps it would be more appropriately labeled "state of negative-flow".
Why not just make it free?
Fuck Guy Kawablablablaaa. His slit-eyes disgust me.
Startup Hackers, it's the Sales skills that you need to learn next
You are absolutely right! I mod you up.
There is no such thing as reverse racism. There is racism or not.
World Best Roulette System - Win at Roulette
I found a unique roulette system that offers a new kind of playing roulette. They have a demo version so I downloaded it. The results were astonishing.
We never get a chance to ask [Palin] in detail about these things, but she is known to favor the teaching of creationism in schools [...], and so it is at least probable that she believes all creatures from humans to fruit flies were created just as they are now.

This is a straw man argument, and the whole article is dependent on it. That said, I believe that you couldn't find a person on either side of the political divide who disagrees with the statement.