skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
The UN's behavior is nothing new - it's pretty much always been this way.

It's the United NATIONS - it is concerned with states and govts, the majority of which are totalitarian. The individual rights frosting is full of weasel words and is basically intended to give regimes that kill their citizens the ability to point to other countries and say "they're doing bad too".

The UN has, however, become more effective at random corruption.

Yes, the UN had some role in reducing smallpox. We can argue about that would have happened faster and with less cost if the UN hadn't been involved.

Perhaps the UN's greatest sin is that it sets things up so basically decent countries like the Netherlands become involved in atrocities. Then again, the Dutch still support the UN, so ....
“Why Do Leaders Matter? The Role of Expert Knowledge,”
As I've said, I am looking for additional people to start the company with. That simple.
Sharecropping in the Orchard: Everything old is new again
CNN Downplays Bidens Deceptions
I do. It really is a great service. For $13 a month you get pretty much all the music you want streaming to your computer. For someone who is at a computer all day, its great. Also, as someone who goes from obsession to obsession, it really does fit the bill. The one drawback is that artists can mark their tracks as "Buy Only" and while it was rare to come across this at first, it seems more and more artists (probably the labels actually) have been restricting their music. With Best Buy coming into the picture, I can only see profit becoming a bigger factor. I imagine I will cancel my subscription sooner rather than later. How do you do business with a company that tries to sell you an HDMI cable for $80 with a straight face?
Or, from another angle:

What kind of effect will making the number of votes, answers, and views more prominent than the question have on the site? Will it encourage gaming the system / posting for points rather than to be helpful?
What if there isn't one?

1) The site builder added a certain effort treshhold to block out spammers.

2) The complaining user doesn't want to invest the effort to cross the treshold.

These statements are mutually exclusive. The only way to resolve this problem is to remove the need for a treshold. (i.e. remove spam from the internet)
Another important point: One is much closer to anarcho-capitalism in philosophy than the other.

edit: if you downmod me, please explain why. this is a great opportunity to learn.
Wolves use tag team endurance hunting to bring down big game. They don't always hunt that way but the effectiveness of tag team endurance hunting probably has a lot to due with the evolution of wolves.

Edit: We where not always clever. Anyway building big brains takes a lot of energy and nutrients so having a high energy diet with meat supplements is vary useful for creating big brains. I think there was a transition period where humans where starting to get good at hunting and gathering which increased the value of large brains and at the same time giving us the resources to support them.
Compare Media Coverage of Presidential Candiates with Everymoment Now
23 Personal Tools to Learn More About Yourself
Sure. I was critiquing the customer service attitude/response, not the technical details.

Even if something isn't feasible, that doesn't make the customer wrong.

Complaining customers are opportunities to step away from the whiteboard and listen.
TripLog/1040 with a UI done right
Kinda like MSNBC's?
Best Buy to Buy Napster In $121 Million Acquisition
> Fuck no. "Beta" is just an excuse to release buggy software and not have to take responsibility for it.

Fuck no. Under conventional ("software engineering") definition, beta is a stage when a product may be missing few features (e.g. complete help system), but when you can already show it to the public. Unstable versions or those missing major features are labeled as alphas if they are released outside of the development or QA. These are typically released in a restricted fashion and are not available to a general public.
To relate this to startups: see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cliff_Young_(athlete)

A 61-year-old farmer, in 1983 he beat a field of professional athletes in a 875 km race because he didn't know you were supposed to sleep.

If that's not a metaphor for how to run a startup, I don't know what is.
Ask YC: Using Employee Stock Purchase plans to cover short positions?
Can individual companies enable this sort of behavior legally? Is this more of a technical or ethical question?

Edit: this sort of behavior: short selling your own stock
Good article - thanks for posting.
The Significance of Google Chrome
The Rise and Fall of Lisp at the Jet Propulsion Lab.
i think this is more an ethical decision. however, if i were an employee and my company offered me stock options instead of a check, i'd be looking for a new job.
I know a number of OSS contributors that would fall foul of that. Think for instance of somebody that dropped out college and is working in something non-IT, but still likes to sling code. It's just a really useless requirement, especially given that you have to pay $200 on top of it. If there were real, you know, proficiency requirements or something that would be one thing, but anybody who's had any job in IT for two years?
Can you give us a little more to go on? You are posting from an account which was created one hour ago and you can't say a thing about where you are based and what your track record is with startups. If you can't give a little, you probably won't get a lot.
Really? They're paying a little more than 1x the revenue per subscriber, which sounds like a great deal. It's not an ad-supported web2.0 company.
Please contact me at the e-mail address above for more information.
According to the article some hunters use speeds of around 4 to 6 miles per hour to chase down antelope to survive.

We may not be marathoners, but the saying "A human can outwalk a horse." is both ancient and true.
He did know. He was just able to run while others were sleeping.
The question I meant to ask was: "what would you do if there isn't a solution to the customers problem?" + explanation why this particular question doesn't have a solution.
I think you clicked the wrong bookmark. Reddit politics is this way:

http://www.reddit.com/r/politics/
Erlang: An introduction to "Applications"
Almost all acquisitions fail? Could you elaborate why you believe that? Will you not consider acquisition as an exit strategy?
Buy once. Play anywhere. Note what's missing: the word "forever". Hey MSFT, hey Sony --- the first track I bought on iTMS? STILL PLAYS.
Interview With Ex-IMF Chief Economist: Banks Won't Be as Profitable in Future
This still vastly overestimates the impact of domestic drilling. We have a world oil market. Thus, if prices drop in the US, less overseas oil will come here. This means that the impact needs to be compared against world oil consumption, which is 4 or 5x as big.
If you read the Rubyful Soup web site you would've noticed that it's unmaintained and the author recommends hpricot.
If you have not played this game, you must. It is easily one of the best games I have ever played. The story is really that good.
Your business as a voluntary, optional rating system is great. But if credibility ratings were mandatory, how would dissenting voices be heard?
Why is MarketWatch.com saying the price was $54 million?

http://www.marketwatch.com/news/story/best-buy-acquire-napst...{08814974-C2C6-4134-BAE6-AC9651B16AB8}&dist=msr_2

^ holy mangled URL, so much for pasting that here.
It's really cool that a site like NewsBusters is making it to HN, but really people, I like the fact that this site is a retreat from the stupidity of the politics.
Talk to a lawyer; but I'm pretty sure that using employee owned stock as collateral for covering a short position is illegal.
Example for www.mypretendcoffeewebsite.com

Customer: "I would like it better if every time I opened up your web page a slice of buttered toast came out of my CD drive."

Response: "[APPRECIATION: Thanks for your feedback]. [EMPATHY: We understand your desire for a tasty breakfast], and [PLAUSIBLE CONNECTION: we see how a website about coffee should help you plan a more complete meal]. Unfortunately, I'm not aware of a way to do this right now. Just for future reference, [OPPORTUNITY FOR MORE INVOLVEMENT: if we were able to do this, would you like to help us test, and would you be opposed to margarine]? For now, what if [SOMETHING CLOSE TO A SOLUTION: we began building a complementary breads chart, like [example]]?
SQL injection used to turn Businessweek.com into virus hive
But without the creepy Scientology-Cruise baggage.
Your dislike of the design does not necessarily mean that a designer was not consulted.
Somehow tags don't seem to be the best way to organize this type of question asking and information gathering. They're certainly helpful for searching and gathering semantic data, but I'd find it much more useful to see the site have "sections" for different programming languages a la C++, Perl, PHP, Python, Ruby, etc.
In my opinion, the colors don't look good together, and the main page is way too busy. Tags have too much emphasis. (Reddit does the same thing, and it's ugly there too.)

Anyway, I am not the target demographic, so my opinion really doesn't matter.
Voting is good. for most part, people are just to lazy to give a comment(me,too!). So, web 2.0 sites developed such voting and poking things to get us out of typing.
Web Meets World (a.k.a. Web Meets Money)
Social Media ABC's - D is for Dooced
Add .NET to the list of languages whose libraries don't work with my OpenID. (So far, only the Perl libraries seem to support delegation. Considering how widely-documented delegation is, this really surprises me. It's a conspiracy, I tell ya.)
agree. It is not an ad-supported company which make its subscriber more valuable because they actually paid.
Can America Invent Its Way Back?
In this specific case, the tagging works out a lot like "sections" anyhow - I do believe that most of the questions are language-specific, and that if you go browse the tags, most of the ones with a lot of questions are language tags.

The tags-as-sections thing breaks down when you get a little more abstract than "x language", as the tags used will be ambiguous (people can retag stuff though, so that's something of a moderation system).
My dad is a chemistry professor and I've never heard about the journals charging the authors. To the contrary, good journals do pay some symbolic fees to the authors.
Sorry - initially posted the paginated version by mistake.
I'm afraid the comments so far proves youu wrong. There are people here who use PHP.

As for this, er, "MVC-code"... People say OO, MVC and design patterns and all that is overengineering things. This is was 62 lines of PHP to implement a simple switch statement for 2 options.

That's pretty hardcore.
I'll buy anything not published and DRM'd by EA.
i miss the good old days when you could tape your favorite song from the radio(you still could, if you actually like radio songs). Modern technology solved some music recording and distribution problems, but it introduced all this bullshit. Was it wort it?
Follow up - theoretically, if I thought my employer's stock was going to go down but wasn't privy to nonpublic info, could I put on a short position to lock in gains or ride out a dip? Or is just working for that co enough to make that illegal?
I was amused by the contrast between (on the one hand) Joel's long list of instructions and "how-to" hints in his blog post, and (on the other hand) the seeming absence of instructions/guidance on the site itself.

The way I see it, the site is right now (mostly) good for two types of questions:

Really basic programming questions that could be answered by reading some docs.

Really domain-specific questions that are hard to find info on online. If you're working on something really interesting, but don't know enough about the domain to know where you should be looking or what you should be searching for, you can get really good guidance from the people on stack overflow who know what they're talking about.

It's also good for getting an idea of consensus about certain technologies.
Wallop Takes A Leap Into the Deadpool
With regards to your first question:

We plan on issuing dividends - that's it. We will not be acquired unless 1) We have a family and/or close friend emergency that requires ridiculous amounts of money crucial to someone's survival or well being; 2) Tom or I become sick of what we're working on and want to work on something else or 3) We're not making enough money to live off of.

We're already profitable so I'm not too concerned with #3 yet. Anything I've ever wanted I already have - more money is not going to make me any happier. Also, I worry that I don't have whatever is it takes to have gobs of money and not change as a person.
> the great depression was a result of a free market moving
> without any government oversight or interference

Citation?

To put forward an alternative - Friedman demonstrated that the depression was caused by the government failing to honour its a promise fundamental to its fractional model to see banks through liquidity shortages and a (quite understandable) general lack of confidence resulting from the damage that caused.

I agree about the market running amuck, but not a free market - the housing bubble is linked to the credit problems and the government had a heavy hand in causing that.
Don't buy that textbook, download it for free
Lehman Bros., Merrill Lynch, Icebergs, and Voters
I notice the article doesn't say that Apple was invited to the party but refused to show up.

Apple is already on record as saying they belong to the "buy once play anywhere forever" group: I can play un-DRM'D movies on my iPod Touch today, and if it were possible to buy un-DRM'd movies on iTMS, Apple would make an additional fortune from iPod and iPhone and AppleTV sales.

Judging by recent events with the record labels refusing to allow Apple to sell non-DRM content and studios like NBC dropping iTMS over a pricing spat (a move they reversed after discovering that nobody was buying their content elsewhere), I'm guessing that Apple is forcibly excluded from this group.

I may be wearing a foil hat, but my thought is that the entire point of this alliance is to come up with a DRM'd alternative to iTMS that consumers will actually use. If Apple were allowed in, they would still control the market and the pricing, which isn't what the studios want.
Feels like it does mean the designer did not do a good job since I'm sure much of the YC crowd is more or less the core audience for Stack Overflow.
The difficulty comes in having to browse through the hundred popular tags to find one specific language tag where you want to ask a question or provide help to people.

Granted, it's not that hard to do, but it's not optimal from a usability perspective.

For instance, PHP wasn't listed in the popular tags even though it's one of the top ten most popular programming languages (http://www.langpop.com/). To find this tag, I had to click Tags, search for PHP, and click PHP.
Yeah, it's weird, how people even use the terms pre-alpha, alpha, beta, or beta invite-only. It just seems that if people can get to it, then it's public.
World of Warcraft Expansion Coming November | TechJaws
I'd love to know which journals actually pay the authors for their work. The best (Science and Nature) certainly don't.

Ask him though about page charges and other fees (e.g. color). I'd be shocked if he never paid them.
Duke Nukem 3D Gets New Engine | TechJaws
With regards to your second question:

I've read varying numbers, but all the empirical academic studies I've encountered agree: the majority of mergers & acquisitions fail. (Side note: if anyone has empirical counterexamples, I'd love to read them. Please post here or email me). Also, before TicketStumbler I used to work at a financial transaction services firm involved with senior lenders, M&A and private equity.

The only ones that succeed at a rate above 50%, by their measure, are ones where the Companies involved are very closely related. The measurements for success are tricky, which is why it's important to read the criteria used within the study.

Most retail bank acquisitions are successful. Additionally, Johnson & Johnson has a robust track record of successful acquisitions. Google does not.

Here are some qualitative and quantitative articles on the subject (I wasn't able to dig up my favorite academic study on it; I'll keep looking though). Additionally, if you have access to LexusNexus or something similar, there's a myriad information and studies on the topic. In short, acquisitions are more often than not a fool's game that many people & companies have strong incentives to carry out.

http://is.gd/2Fla (PDF from Wharton)

http://www.theseus.fr/03370970/1/fiche___pagelibre/

http://findarticles.com/p/articles/mi_m3257/is_n1_v43/ai_696...

http://news.cnet.com/8301-10784_3-9796296-7.html

All else equal, the usual winners of an acquisition are: the fee trolls, lawyers, the shareholders and upper management of the company being acquired (unless it's hostile or due to negative circumstances, but even then..) and the upper management team of the acquiring company.

Generally speaking the losing parties are: the acquiring company's shareholders, and employees at both companies.
That is true, although for asking questions you can just tag it as the language.

Php probably wasn't listed in the popular tags due partially to the windows/.NET tendency of the site, and the tendency of the people participating in the beta to be the type that doesn't like php.
I was under the impression that most people understood pure democracy is doomed from the start. Guess not.
Well, that is mostly a combination of PHP's total lack of anything resembling sane syntax and a plain bad example :)

However... if you have a bunch of functions with names like:

get_foo_data
get_bar_data
process_foo_data
process_bar_data
display_foo_data
display_bar_data

The phrase "I AM DOING SOMETHING WRONG" should immediately appear in your mind, even if you've never heard of OOP.
> huge boom in the US occurred thanks to the war production.

Myth. Every meaningful measure of standard of living and financial conditions continued to deteriorate through the war. Unemployment only went down because millions were drafted. GDP temporarily went up because of war materiel purchases, but this had no knock on positive economic effects.

> Nothing happened to the US market once the war was over.

Yes it did. Unemployment shot way up. It looked like the depression was going to continue just as it had. The difference was that most of the New Deal was scaled back. The government lowered intervention in the economy compared to the 30s and growth took off. The war did absolutely nothing to end the depression and made life worse.
First photo taken of a planet outside our solar system
GOOGLE planning 'data barges' at sea, away from national laws and taxes
LCD Monitor with ECO-Features and LED Backlight Uses 28% Less Power, Contains No Mercury
They can read the papers, and subscribe to the journals-- they just don't get the member's discount.

Seriously: do you know of a (useful) professional organization that has no restrictions on membership?
I am in no way affiliated with Stack Overflow - I've just been a user for the past few weeks so please don't lecture me about satisfying the "customer". During my time on the site I've seen the creators attempt to walk the delicate line between ease of access and attempting to curb the abuse that comes hand-in-hand with that. Personally, I think that they've made an incredibly open system that anyone can contribute to if they want.

You may have been confused about the scoring system using to calculate reputation. It's a little more fine-grained than a traditional up/down karma system. Since voting up gives you +10 rep, getting 15 rep is as easy as getting two people to vote up your submission.
That's an interesting point of view. Apart from financial gains for founders, acquisition also makes sense for the consumers in many cases. E.g. it makes sense for the company building a spreadsheet app to get together with the ones building the presentation and word processing apps. The alternative is for every company to build everything (or at least everything in each app suite), and that's just wasteful.

That's just the product development side. There's also marketing, manufacturing (not in web apps), and distribution (also not in web apps) synergies.

I'm curious to understand your logic against acquisitions. Integrating 2 corporate cultures, creation of larger bureaucracies?
Podcaster Developer Uses Little-Known "Ad Hoc" Mode To Distribute Banned iPhone App
Speaking of online credibility...

Here's a past post and comments by Duncan Riley (the article's author) from techcrunch. Judge for yourselves:

http://www.techcrunch.com/2008/01/29/its-fair-to-say-that-ge...
Wall Street's Collapse Delivers An Overdue Wake Up Call To Startups
This idea of the war as a creator of strong economies doesn't stand up.

If it was then we could create wealth by wandering down the road and throwing bricks through people's windows and smashing up their cars.

Wars cause a sudden drop in population, which causes labour to become more valuable (historically something that tended to happen after major plagues), so there are individual stories of improved circumstance. Wars also require people to make sacrifices in their standard of living and succeed in achieving this more easily than under other circumstances.

Regardless of all of that - you can't demonstrate that the US in the 50s had a stronger economic situation than it would have done had it been allowed to continue along its course without a war.

> Nothing will happen to China once its main customer
> goes bankrupt.

If we see a major downturn in consumption as a result of the things that are unfolding now, I'll be expecting massive upheaval in China. People have seem general improvement with the party's policies to date but will become less accommodating when the state continues to take a share of a shrinking pie.
Hubble Finds a Mystery Object
Yes, it's slightly better with it, but not much. For me, google really sucks.
http://www.bloomberg.com/apps/news?pid=20601087&sid=a4G....
How not to use Powerpoint
And even furthermore, most of the research being reported in these journals was paid for with taxpayer money.
What I would love is to have an open-source dropbox like tool that can be installed on my own personal webserver

its called "git". its trivial to set up a syncing service using any dvcs
Millions of people supporting the McCain-Palin ticket in the United States believe that the earth is 4000 years old and dinosaurs and men existed side-by-side.

No, they don't. The writer of this article is as ignorant as the imaginary people he is attacking.
A. The activation limit in BioShock was already removed, and Ken Levine has said that once sales aren't a concern anymore, they'll (2K Games) will remove the online activation as well. So DRM isn't a huge issue here

B. It's not published by EA, but rather 2K Games. Which is owned by Take Two, not EA (which hasn't managed to acquire Take Two yet).
That is an HTC phone.
Ask HN:  Couch vs HBase vs Hypertable vs All
I am interested in people's thoughts on distributed, column based databases. Issues like scalability, reliability, speed, etc.

I have made considerable use of couch lately, but haven't given much time to try the others. What successes or problems have people seen with them all?

Thanks in advance.
In a big company, some problems can't be solved from the bottom up. Maybe you should find a better place to work.