skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
i really like the idea. I like it so much that a few months back we launched a similar product. Check out POPrl.com you can also view stats (http://poprl.com/stats/0Kb) among other features. I would love to work together if you're interested.
Over-simplified. There will be bubbles and meltdowns as far as the eye can see, simply because the boom-bust cycle is built into the capitalist model.

And it's fine that way. Far better than the dull, grey unproductivity of all other known alternatives.

That said, I agree with his point, to an extent. One of the things that keep people from declaring bankruptcy is that it would have severe, lasting consequences - destroying their credit record, and preventing them from being a director of a business for quite some time. Some similar system should exist for any corporate leaders. You don't want to go too far in that direction either, though - otherwise, you might stifle the risk-taking that does get us to interesting new places.
He mentioned trying this approach and not being satisfied:

"The sweet penguin juice roaring through my veins commanded me to adopt a needlessly arcane solution, so I started putting all of my article drafts into a private Bazaar repository on my personal web server. Real men use distributed version control systems for everything, right? It was unnecessarily excessive and got cumbersome quickly."
link :)?
I actually don't understand how publishing houses still have control over this industry. With recreational/consumer books, authors need the publishers marketing machines. With textbooks,

- Many can just prescribe to their own students. 'Introduction to Economics' could sell 1k units a year in just one University.

- Authors are presumably already known/respected/wrote the previous version.

- Many academics prescribing the damn things freely admit that one doesn't differ too much from the other.
I'm running this on Hardy and it runs... OK. More of an interesting POC than anything else. However, I think it forcefully demonstrates one of two things:

1) Wine is amazing.

2) Wine is a mess.

I dunno. Maybe both. I know, I know. It's Codeweavers. Still, that's Wine.
It's small and functional like the Air, but it still won't run OS X which is why all comparisons of PC's to Macs are, to some degree, apples to oranges.
Taleb is the man.
No, I meant lazy. Sitting around doing nothing would require a lot of mental effort and work. Thinking about programming would be relaxing and enjoyable.
I had similar issues with my site (though I think it looked a damn site better than yours), trying to read your site, my eye is just going all over the place.

I think you are killing usability by not making things clear and simple.

I used crowdspring to get a new design on my site. Costs a bit, but well worth the time and effort.
Is it just me, or is the idea of using a repl on a computer in space simply fascinating?
If you think your numeric type everywhere may change down the road, you could split out the operation and e.g. define let add = (+) and sub = (-) ... etc. and use those in your code, so you will only need to change them in one place, should you change your numeric type. Abstract out the operation. (Then you're back to using prefix notation.) Or, change it once, and let the compiler show you everywhere else it needs to be fixed.

Haskell's type classes are a better overall solution for numeric types, of course. Not having a parallel to Haskell's deriving show in the OCaml standard is also annoying, but it's available elsewhere. (See: http://alan.petitepomme.net/cwn/2008.07.08.html#4)

Still, most (though not all) numeric operations fit under either exact (int, bignum, ratio) or inexact (floats) without much ambiguity.
Apple update finally fixes important DNS bug
I think it's unreasonable to expect that even a masterpiece (which Bioshock is not) would appeal to everyone. Any creative work's impact is measured by its appeal to its core audience, who are often people who live and breath the medium or genre.

For instance, one of my favorite movies is Kill! (http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0063186/), which is a brilliant and quite funny re-imagining of the samurai flick. It's a pretty good movie in its own right, but what makes it truly masterful is how it subtly twists the norms and tropes of its genre. These little touches are not aimed at a broad audience, they're aimed at people who are predisposed to like samurai movies, and have already seen a few dozen samurai movies in their life. That's not cheating, either, it's just knowing your audience and giving them what they want.

As to the bad dialogue, voice-acting, etc. I think it's hard to break it down into anything so specific. A story is good if it allows you to suspend your disbelief. Bioshock didn't, but it wasn't necessarily because of any of the things you listed; you could just as easily have liked the game in spite of them. For instance, one of my favorite games of all time is Deus Ex, and it had absolutely laughable voice acting (check out http://ispeeeelmydreeenk.ytmnd.com/). Any great creative work is going to be more than the sum of its parts, and just because video games involve computers doesn't mean that they're somehow more quantifiable than painting or poetry.
Thanks PG, Can you name some of the books which you found more useful ?
Interesting, but only part of the problem. Regulators need to actually do their jobs and enforce transparency of Wall St. balance sheets. Oh, and Congress? No more campaign contributions from corporations. You work for the voters, and if enough of them want you to prop up some company or repeal banking regulations, they'll tell you.
A URL pointer service with tracking metrics - smart idea, good version 1. I like that the metrics updated immediately after I clicked a link I'd made. The interesting part to me was that it showed relevant Twitter, delicious, etc traffic - for both the cli.gs link and the long URL. Signup was simple and professional. Ignore the people who are expecting a perfect version - you made it clear up front that you're not finished under the hood and haven't applied polish yet. I see you're going to have charts and graphs eventually; nice. I wonder, will you also pull client IP addresses through ip2geo to show maps of visitor traffic? Lots of possible features to add. Congrats on v1 - keep rolling out the reporting tools and polish. If you do, demand for your premium plan should fall into place.
I like your theory, but I'm not sure it'll stand up to (future) history. Baby boomers aren't retiring - instead, many plan to work until they drop dead, either because they have no retirement savings (and hence can't withdraw them) or because they have jobs that they enjoy and can remain effective in even until old age. The latter group of people are most likely to have significant retirement savings, so they may just end up passing their assets to their kids.

A lot of predicted demographic time-bombs may not materialize because of this. The social security crisis may be a nonissue - if every retiree worked just 2-3 years more, social security remains solvent for the forseeable future, and many retirees plan to work more than 2-3 years into retirement age.
I really like this essay. It almost makes too much sense, like it is too simple an idea to have gone ignored for this long, but the premise is hard to argue with: you can't accurately predict events that happen very rarely (on the time scale that we have accurate measurements for) that have extreme outcomes.

Also, reading this reminds me how doomed younoodle.com is.
If needed, you can always install Kalyway to get your OS X fix and have the best of all worlds.
I like your theory too, though I fear it may be wishful thinking. Those that do continue working are working at lower-paying jobs, and continue drawing down their savings. And if the jobs aren't that much lower status (i.e. McJobs) then they just put more pressure on the income of the generation behind them.

But certainly demographics have failed to predict the future in the past, and personally, I'm amazed at what's happened to my income in the past 5 years or so (I'm in my 40s and saving like mad - though all in cash right now).
That's a good point. I feel the same way, I just assumed everyone else enjoyed sitting around and doing nothing and there was something wrong for me. Glad I am not unusual. I have a lot of non-programming tasks lately, yet I find myself finding a small problem to hack around as "procrastination".
Great post - and I would find him to be on the mark here.

Interestingly enough, Cramer (who is not really well liked in this community) was trying to be a whistleblower a year ago on this very issue.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=I1eSlYtXiro

I liked the 'I wish I could go tell people to buy Wa-mu' part...check out the one year on that.

http://finance.google.com/finance?chdnp=1&chdd=1&chd...
it's brilliant for rickrolling and other nefarious activities finally I know hom many I got.

But the site design is quite horribly, just remove every element you specifically designed then it's going to be fine.

Remove:
http://cli.gs/images/home-page-message.jpg
http://cli.gs/images/cligs-logo-black.jpg
http://cli.gs/images/home-page-register.jpg

But you could be succesful even if you don't remove those, design is not really a success criterium online.
Thanks for the feedback. I'll definitely look into fixing the design given your comments and the comments elswhere, perhaps using crowdspring as suggested.

Not validating is not bad. It's not essential either. Take google.com for example. And the delicious tags are not "stolen" but are the delicious.com badge.

Closing accounts: didn't think of that, but easy enough to add.

Editing and deleting cligs is coming.

Skip to content link is for mobile users. A proper mobile-optimized layout is coming that will be automatically used if a mobile UA is detected and this is a temporary measure. As a mobile net user, I find such links very helpful.

But I think you're missing something important here. You say "Right now your solution is not only replicating them on some level, but it does so in an inferior way." Tinyurl and is.gd do not offer anywhere near the service Cligs does in terms of analytics. I don't want to belittle them but they don't have top contend with user accounts and layout out a ton of data in a sensible way. So the current design of Cligs doesn't work but that's because it needs to do a lot more.

Thanks again.
So when its all ending, there is kind of a release...

It's not just that, but also the unemployment compensation. I have some friends in the industry who can't wait to be laid off - even low-ranking positions get 3 months of severance pay from the company (+ more from the state if you don't find a job by then) amounts to a nice vacation if you're smart enough to not be worried about finding a new job.
Thanks for reminding me crowdspring. Interesting option!
Jonathan Blow: The (3 year development) Path to Braid (XBox 360 Indy Game)
I've debated this through-out the development process. Obviously the unique feature here is the private analytics data, and making some cligs public might confuse things.

It's something definitely on my mind but not sure how to deal with it.
Fantasy Sports Business Opportunity
Thanks for the feedback. The skip link is for mobile users as I explained in another comment.

The images and whole design will be looked into from scratch.

Thanks again!
Good religion? As distinct from what? The other guys nonsense?
Creativity is key as you say. I really like the plugin and extra features ideas. I'll see what about implementing them in a sensible way.

Thanks!
Are you trolling? I stopped reading this after "Nothing in scientific method contradicts Christian teaching." Evidently, he isn't familiar with the part of the scientific method that insists on testability.
Dropbox is easy. It can be used by people that will never use the words 'my' & 'server' in a sentence.

If you need to download it & install it on your own personal webserver, the tool is no longer dropbox-like.

I'm not saying that what you are asking for is unreasonable, it just has very little to do with this.
Thinking Strategically is one of my favorites. It spends each chapter analyzing techniques of competition, trend, and innovation. It reads quite easily and offers outside examples ranging from sports, large corporations, and world wars.

While you may find it challenging to read straight through, it works well, too, as something to pick up every so often or to read alongside other reading material. Even for those of you without a peaking interest in business, the advice presented in the book is undeniable logic that will definitely appeal to programmers and entrepreneurs alike.

http://www.amazon.com/Thinking-Strategically-Competitive-Bus...
The country mapping is coming along with a lot of other analysis features.

It's V1 as you say and I wanted to get the ball rolling to get some data into the database so I can start working off that - real data is better than hypothetical data :)
Interesting. Drop me a message at http://blog.cli.gs/contact and let's talk.

I love HN because of meetups like these!
this smashingmag post is a neat aggregate of all the resources I've tapped in the past though. nicely done on their part.

this is sort of useful, though generally my method for templating is to simply make my design in valid xhtml/css and then port it by plugging in CSS and PHP where applicable. Not much to it.
What I wouldn't give for a Bloomie.
Bill Gross and PIMCO
Good question. If the scoring system works as intended, they will either lead to enough interesting discussion to merit upvoting (as with this one) or fade away.

Personally, I'm happy to see more science history stuff on the main page, rather than just tech/programming and startup/business stuff. (I was a history student, though, and I'm particularly interested in the history of science and medicine.)

Go the extra mile, though! There are much, much better sources for everything than Wikipedia.
I was one of those using Plurk when it reach popularity at the end of June, and did indeed enjoy it as it growed in popularity as some web celebs joined it to play around.

However, familiarizing myself with the site, they kept promising an eventual public API, but they haven't done so even to date. There were some functions available to the user, but there was always something missing. People wanted apps, and app developers wanted to create them. It just wasn't to be.

Twitter has the API, has the app support by now, and has the friends you want to follow. No one wants to be the first one on sites like FaceBook or Myspace. They want to join for the people.
I would love to be around your job right now as a mortgage bond trader. Interesting times we live in.

I'd like to hear some more of your views... if you wish, you can contact me [see profile].

N.B.: Long SKF.
Introduction to Economic Analysis [free micro economics text book]
True, my comment was a bit quick off the block. I didn't mean to imply that the average HN user and the average web-forum-programmer were anything similar.

Except, perhaps, aesthetically. Maybe I'm wrong here too, but a failed visual design for HN readers is probably a failed design for the average web-forum-programmer, too.
What's the giveaway message from the khaki guy? He has one leg curved? He is on the side?

What am I missing? Doesn't this assume there is no other guy dressed in the -- unobvious -- black pants taking a similar pose?
Even so, I wouldn't use FriendFeed. So thanks
In the past, many notable thinkers worked in several fields at once. Pascal worked in math, philosophy, and theology; Descartes in math, philosophy, and the scientific method; Newton in physics, math, and theology. Leonardo da Vinci, of course, in engineering, art, mathematics, and music. Aristotle in medicine, mathematics, and philosophy. Narrow specialization is a fairly recent, and rather sad phenomenon.
Cuban's call for more regulations displays some naivete about how Washington works. Lobbyists from big companies have no problem twisting regulations to serve their own interest at the expense of the public. For example, read about how easily Fannie Mae pushed the right buttons in Congress to manipulate regulations in their favor: http://billburnham.blogs.com/burnhamsbeat/2008/07/fannie-mae.... This happens again and again, thanks to the actual mechanisms by which Congress works. Government's End by Jonathan Rauch and The Triumph of Conservatism by Gabriel Kolko are great treatments of the subject.

The real solution is that we need someone like Mark Cuban to start a competing stock market. He could create listing requirements that would include mandatory rules such as 1) requiring that companies only pay dividends (instead of doing stock buybacks 2) CEO's must get paid based on how the company does for the decade after they leave 3) all shareholders must either vote for the board members or hire a proxy voting firm, etc. etc.

I don't know what the exact rules would be, but I'm sure someone could design a set of rules that would be both less obtrusive and more effective than our current regulations. If the rules are designed well, this new well managed market will give investors higher returns. That will force the existing markets to shape up or lose their investors.
I'm not going to say that I don't find some of Ayn Rand's ideas interesting, but some of the comments attributed to Yaron Brook in that article are just plain scary.

"It seems to me that he's misrepresented what Ayn Rand believes and her ideals beyond objectivism," he said. "He's setting it up to fail. He believes , based on what I've read, that any system that is absolutist is ultimately going to lead to disastrous effect. Any system of black and white, any system of ultimate morality."

I'm sure a system of "ultimate morality" would work just fine for me... if I was defining the "ultimate morality".

"I think its flawed logic in the sense that he thinks that people have to be flawed"

"I think there are great people and perfect people and I think we all should strive to be great and perfect."

To strive for perfection is a worthy endeavour, to assume that I or anyone else has achieved it, is naive, limiting and possibly dangerous. I'd like to know who Yaron Brook's puts in this category of great and perfect. Ayn Rand, I suppose would be one.
are you looking for business textbooks, books written by business leaders or Startup business books?
For high-tech start-ups:

- Innovators Dilemma

- Finding Fertile Ground

- Myths of Entrepreneurship

- Blue Ocean Strategy

- Made to Stick
Which is also funny, because I like OCaml as a compromise between Haskell and Lisp. Different priorities, I guess. :)
You can tell the difference between reddit and hacker news just by reading the comments when the subject is related to "Islam".
Only a little related, but everyone needs to remember good ol' Mr. Market.

http://www.sandmansplace.com/Mr_Market.html
I was actually talking about computers that have that kind of design flare, macs in particular. While I would like to have one for development, I suspect many people buy them simply to be chic. No evidence, just gut feeling. Like Prada bags. Things I don't notice, but notice.
I found the apology in the last paragraph to be an important shift in approach
For startups,

-Art of the Start by Guy Kawasaki
-Blue Ocean Strategy
-High Tech Startup by John Nesheim
-The Power of Unfair Advantage by John Nesheim
-Crossing the Chasm

These are all helpful for startups.
Information Rules (Varian and Shapiro)

Economics of network industries (Shy)

Extraordinary Popular Delusions and the Madness of Crowds (Mackay)

The information Rules book belongs on your bookshelf if you want to understand how information goods are priced and how competition works in information driven industries.
(Varian is now google's chief economist.)

The second one goes deep on the math of price-setting and standards wars.

And Mackay's work is a classic study of financial bubbles and panics.
OK. So your point of differentiation is Analytics. Good. Would it be possible to still make the creation of new 'Cligs' more streamlined, with the option to sign up later to retrieve/view stats? Just a thought.

API still important, if not critical, in my eyes.

If you havent already, I would do a benchmark of Google Analytics and other free analytics companies and try to see what are the important metrics. "Hits" doesnt really cut it if your differentiation is analytics.

Anywho, Good luck. I think if you clean up the design some, that itself will make the service a lot more attractive/usable and you will see increased activity. Once you get some traction you'll be able to really drive home the rest.
I think there is a lot of truth to this. From the early 80's to the present, individuals, pension funds, and endowments moved savings from bonds and savings accounts into the stock market. I believe this reallocation caused a one time run up in stock prices. In the process, people grew so used to price appreciation that dividends disappeared. Since, traditionally most of the value of owning stock comes from dividends, I expect stocks to under perform until dividends return.
It is possible with the addition of back tracking capabilities (the most crude of which would be to just be able to look backwards in the regex). But at that point the implementation will be complex and the implementers should wonder why they did not implement a compile phase for the regex string. A compile phase also gives a chance for optimizations of the regex.
I think he would totally agree with you. Try to read Fooled by Randomness to see what I mean. I gave up after the first few chapters because I couldn't stand his unstructured - almost incomprehensible at times - arrogant, self-referential prose. Perhaps he has a lot to say, I just wish he could write too.
Clever non-computer-related hack
Check out teamrankings.com for statistics. Check out Ultimatefootballnetwork.com for fantasy sports. UFN just had some coverage from the TC50.

I am also aware of a new site coming out that will allow trading of sports figures.
Compare Hacker News - http://i493.photobucket.com/albums/rr292/stackoverflow1/Pict...

With Stack Overflow - http://i493.photobucket.com/albums/rr292/stackoverflow1/Pict...

In Tufte-speak, Stack Overflow clearly has a much lower data/ink ratio and way too much chart junk.
Ah, but just because you can't accurately predict events doesn't mean you can't convince people you can accurately predict events.
"One common criticism is that the approach amounts to throwing a handful of ideas at the wall to see what sticks. More important, no top-tier startups on the order of a YouTube Inc. or Facebook have emerged from accelerators."

Is that really a criticism? Isn't that pretty much the definition of VC.
10 Vertical Twitters With Potential To Win TC50
-Art of the Start

-How to win friends and influence people [this title pains me]

-Tipping point

-Design of every day things [not business..but product]
I certainly agree with you about how Washington works, but I'm not sure it means that Mark is naive. Saying "Congress should pass a law that does X" is different from saying "I expect Congress to pass a law that does X". Only the latter is potentially naive.
No question PHP is weak in some areas, although trying to compare languages is sometimes like trying to compare cats and dogs.

Also, second slowest? Compared to what? And in what scope, and trying to solve what problem? Last I checked, there were more than 25 languages, and only a few of the ones listed there are suitable for the web.
> If you think your numeric type everywhere may change down the road

If programmers were always that foresightful, programming in general would be a whole lot easier.

> Or, change it once, and let the compiler show you everywhere else it needs to be fixed.

I find this downright perverse. If a compiler is smart enough to know what needs to be fixed then it should just go ahead and fix it instead of fobbing the job off onto the programmer.
As Finance Jobs Fall, Engineering May Rise Again
HP to cut 24,600 jobs worldwide