skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Paul Graham's response is two things... disappointing and misleading.

What makes his response disappointing is that this is a great, old debate. Cloudant is developing potentially breakthrough technology ("Our founders first devised our open-source platform BigCouch while at MIT, working on Large Hadron Collider experiments generating millions of data points per second from the collision of atomic particles") to perform complex tasks ("the analysis & identification of new traits & genomic combinations in agricultural crops"). When have important technologies been developed for less than warm and fuzzy purposes? Without the Manhattan Project and the development of the atomic bomb, we wouldn't have modern forms of cancer treatment. GPS was developed to give more precision to submarine-launched ballistic missiles. There are other examples of equal importance. Is it right? Is it worth it? Whatever the answer - it deserves a thoughtful response.

What makes his response misleading is that he conflates the levels of involvement in the client/customer's work.

Apple computers, Chevy cars and Clorox cleaning supplies - are all mass produced goods. They are not custom products for specific clients for a specific purpose. It appears Cloudant is doing this for Monsanto... therefore, the purpose matters. The press release states that Cloudant has been "working with" Monsanto "for a few weeks" on "the partnership". Furthermore, Cloudant's custom work is mission-critical to Monsanto's business: "We’re not powering the CMS of some administrative division or a minor part of their website. Cloudant’s BigCouch will be the core, for both storage and analysis of a new, company-wide platform powering a fundamental aspect of a Fortune 500 business: the analysis & identification of new traits & genomic combinations in agricultural crops". This isn't the same company/customer relationship as buying Clorox. The purpose of developing genetically modified agricultural crops and hormones is central to the relationship between Cloudant and Monsanto. Again, the purpose matters.

Paul Graham says: "If the rule is, if x sells something to Monsanto, fuck x, then what you’re saying is fuck the entire corporate world". Maybe that's right. When the American people decided they didn't agree with the Apartheid regime of the South African government, the Congress and Republican-controlled Senate passed the Comprehensive Anti-Apartheid Act of 1986 and they stopped selling to them. I'm not saying what Monsanto is doing is apartheid - I'm saying that if you disagree with somebody, not selling to them has been an effective responsive.

Unfortunately for those that disagree with the development of genetically modified agricultural crops and hormones, there's not much that can really be done beyond not buying these goods unless there's government action that limits interactions with these companies. But if you disagree, then you can do as Paul Graham suggests in his essay "The Patent Pledge": "Now there's something any individual can do about this problem, without waiting for the government: ask companies where they stand."
Its always the same some trie to stop it others embrace it. Examples:

-Radio people start podcasting

-Jurnalist start bloging

-Muscians putting up there stuff for free.

-Programmers started doing opensource

-Sientists move away from publishing in journals

More will follow.

The field of education is way behind. But its started allready in the lower levels Khanacademy and in the higher levels universitys like stanford and mit.

Nice future.
One of the ironic suggestions I got

The following cacheable resources have a short freshness lifetime.
Specify an expiration at least one week in the future for the
following resources:

http://maps.googleapis.com/maps/api/js?sensor=false (30 minutes)
Why Bother With Cucumber Testing? | Jack Kinsella - Rails Developer London
I find it hard to believe that any significant number of people use things made using Facebook Platform. Vast majority of people simply use the product itself.
Magnetic Sponsoring Review
That only means that gamification is not implemented correctly on HN.

If weight of every voter's vote is evaluated by you (1), then the resulting weight would be tuned up for you.

(1) You don't have to manually evaluate every voter. You just vote yourself, and if voter's votes correlate with your votes, then that voter's rank goes up (from the point of view of your personal rating system).
It's virtually impossible to live in modern society

It's virtually impossible to survive as a start-up. When you get an opportunity to better your shots, you take it way more often than not.
Poll: Do You Deal with Depression?
It seems from a number of posts over the years that many here may struggle with depression. It's also something of a common belief that creativity and depression are often linked. If nothing else, it could show those with it that they are not alone here.
Constant, to the point of suicide
Constant, debilitating but not suicidal
Constant, not so bad
Infrequent, but to the point of suicide
Infrequent, debilitating but not suicidal
Infrequent, not so bad
No issues with it
The term "ultrabook" was invented by Intel as a label for the MacBook Air knockoffs they wanted to entice other companies to make, so obviously the first generation will be pretty similar to the MBA.

All the differences so far seem to be minor:

- The 13" Asus has a wider screen than the 13" MBA

- The MBA supports 802.11a and 5Ghz for 802.11n

- The Asus has USB3.0, the MBA has Thunderbolt

- at 13", the Asus is a bit lighter, but at 11" the MBA is a bit lighter

- The MBA claims much higher standby times (30 vs 10 days)

- At certain price points, the Asus offers more RAM or SSD space, and the option of a slightly faster processor.

- The trackpads might have significant differences

- The Asus screens are specced to be brighter (450 nits) than the MBA screens have been measured at (350-380 nits), but specified brightness can't be directly compared against real-world measurements, and viewing angles are more important for small portable devices.
The JVM is fast, and the Java language is usually the fastest language on the JVM when code is written with speed in mind. The fact that people often do slow things with Java because it's hard to write extensible Java any other way (or because they just like overengineering) doesn't mean the language isn't fast.

Personally, I think using Clojure is a great way to get speed in practice. Inner loops can be as fast as they are in Java (with ugly optimizations), and extensible idiomatic code is a light lighter weight.
What's the motivation for building Google+? What problem does Google think it is solving? What does it think it is contributing to the world with Google+?
They could've been in talks with Akamai; the rumor was that a deal was imminent and that's apparently not true, but that doesn't mean a deal couldn't be at some stage of progress.
Well, when you mix that rumor with a half-baked analysis based on a few baseline public statistics, it's "mostly" a rumor and "partly" bullshit.
Remember Google acquired ITA Software-- it was used by all the sites like Kayak/Bing and the others (American Airlines, Southwest Airlines, United Airlines, Continental Airlines, Orbitz) who buy traffic from Google. Google bought Picnik because Flickr used it. Google bought Global IP Solutions used by Yahoo, AOL, WebEx and Lotus.

It seems like these are clearly anti-competitive moves meant to put their competitors at their mercy.
You, I really had high hopes for this product. I signed up for the updates, waited patiently for my invite, and held out this could be a really good product. After several months of little or no updates or an invite, I lost track.

The one thing this project failed to do was capitalise on their new found popularity. Instead of seeing dollar signs, they should have holed up and did as many 24 hour hackfests as they could to get this puppy up in a few weeks - ready or not for prime time and tinker on it after that.

Instead, they ran out of money, their support has dried up, and their window to get this released, closed long ago. Not to mention, they've let a bunch more competitors into their space, namely Google.
You should vest founders too.
This reminds me of playing around with Dr. Sbaitso when I was a kid. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dr._Sbaitso
I don't disagree. I certainly didn't throw them any money. But after that code release, even the most desperate facebook-hater knew Diaspora was nothing but well-intentioned vapor.
PUL Fabrics
haters gonna hate.
I've heard of a lot of people switching from emacs to vim these past couple years, and very little the other way around. I made the switch last month, and I'm pretty happy with it.
I had the same thought. In fact, I explicitly programmed 911 into my current iPhone as a contact specifically so that I could use it with voice dialing. Maybe the same trick will work on the 4S.
I think it's much more important to highlight the technologies and the position itself than the location.
I think a large part of it is that traditionally companies that are back working environments also produce crap for products.

But yet Amazon, product-wise, is fast-moving, innovative, and often right on the money when it comes to what customers want. It's a lot like Apple in that regard.

So it becomes difficult to grok how this seemingly innovative company that has its finger on the pulse of retail (and beyond) can become such a doggish place to work.

It's the ultimate siren call isn't it. It took me two years before I decided throwing myself at that brick wall every day wasn't worth it, cool products or otherwise.
Re: the abusive relationship, that's exactly how a lot of bad employment situations work. The parallels are pretty much perfect. This post really opened my eyes about how this kind of situation is set up: http://issendai.livejournal.com/572510.html
I just looked at the Alioth benchmarks and found that Lua (not JIT) is around three times faster than Python 3. I remember the differences being larger with Python 2.x, but I'm not going to take the time to look for those benchmarks. On one benchmark, Lua was much slower.

I barely know Python, though I've found it fairly easy to pick up and use when I've needed to. I know Ruby pretty well though, and I find Lua about as easy to use as Ruby.
I'm so confused about posterous' new UI. 
I thought their old UI was so much better because you can find everything right when you log in. Now you actually have to play detective and click on stuff. and remember where things are so that you could click there next time.

Doesn't anyone out there think so too?
I never tried it this extensively, but it would tell jokes and such, certainly. I once tried "how much wood would a woodchuck chuck if a woodchuck could chuck wood?" and it gave me a list of local lumberyards.
"pg hinted also hinted at this by saying that Cloudant is held to a different standard than all the other companies that deal with Monsanto."

Doesn't there seem to be hypocrisy? So YC companies have their values rise and more recognition because of the name and affirmation from the YC core but if users expect them to abide by a higher set of standards, it's all... "hold on a second, we're like any other company and shouldn't be held to a different standard?"

For the record, I don't think I would've care as much about this had the company not released such an enthusiastic PR post.
I like this. As someone said, normalizing locations like the 3 variations of Boston would be a plus.

Also, The locations could be refined. I see a lot of them being listed under the header "Boston" when they really happen "King of Prussia, PA", Burlington MA, or "West Newburry, MA". Those locations are not Boston. They're close, but not quite (and in the case of the PA one not even close). There's some value to the grouping things under Boston but I would prefer granularity in location headers.

Definitely see this as being very helpful though.
It's different when you're choosing whether or not to directly be a customer of a company.
tl;dr Friends don't let friends work at Amazon
Terrific! Kudos to Twilio for being so reponsive. Guys just make certain that both the original blog author and the folks at nad.org know about it to give the pubicity it deserves to their members.
Econtalk is part of econlib. Its a nice podcast that talks about this problem alot. Here are some nice ones that are relevant. There are many more that talk about public choice.

Public Choice:

http://www.econtalk.org/archives/2010/03/don_boudreaux_o_3.h...

Teachers:

http://www.econtalk.org/archives/2011/08/hanushek_on_tea.htm...
How To Find People That Will Buy Your Product Idea
Wow, hacker news whats up? This is a cool project that despite all the "what do they have to show for it" comments, has a real product. I know because I signed up on this pod: https://diasp.org/ have any of you tried it? Seems like it works like other social networking sites, but unlike fb/g+, is open source and trying to be privacy aware.

If you don't want to give them money because you think they wasted 200K that's fine, don't do it. Really though there is a product and it seems to be working fine. Lets help them gain traction instead of bad mouthing innovators. I feel like hacker news should really support this type of product, but for some reason everyone here loves to hate it.

If you have technical concerns, that's fine, but lets help them not hinder the community with negativity. An open source facebook is exactly what the world needs now.
How Jurgen Klinsmann Coaches the U.S. Men's Soccer Team
It really threw me off when they referenced "International Business Machines Corp." instead of IBM...I can't name another instance where someone decided to use the full name of IBM
I have run into two reasons why this happens unexpectedly:

1. rvm-related. You installed a gemset for 1.9.2, and then either manually switched to another ruby version, or never set that version as your default. So the next time you come into the project, your ruby version is different and the gemset isn't there.

2. bundler-related: because of other gemsets and your bundler/rvm versions, you need to run commands with the 'bundle exec' prefix (e.g. 'bundle exec rails s') in order to use the context of the current bundle.
We do mean well, and for the most part when people say we're arrogant it's because we didn't hire them, or they're unhappy with our policies, or something along those lines. They're inferring arrogance because it makes them feel better.

I LOL'd when I read this. How ironically arrogant.
Even when you place the Nexus S on a flat surface, its speaker becomes almost inaudible.

i just put my nexus s on my desk and the speaker worked just fine. the whole reason why there's a little bump over the center of the speaker is to raise it off of a flat surface and let the audio get out.

putting the iphone in a dock probably muffles the audio coming from its bottom speaker (though maybe apple's dock accounts for this, maybe 3rd party ones don't).

there's probably not a perfect way to solve this for every user. if you know the speaker is on the back, don't rest it on a blanket. if it's on the bottom, don't use it in a dock.
It /would/ make sense for Google. Think about how many customers Akamai has and the business they're in -- Google probably really wants a part of that.

Also, how would it make sense for Apple or Facebook to acquire Akamai? Apple's in the computer and mobile devices business (and has its own datacentre for iCloud to worry about), and Facebook has no use for Akamai outside of the services it currently receives as a customer. It would be stupid for either company to consider buying it at this point.

Just my opinion.
Unless you are a doctor and have full access to said info you can't really make that sort of call -- and Jobs was very private so we may never get the full story (which isn't a bad thing). Honestly we're all lucky that he got the extra time that he did get — and we may also want to think about the many people in this nation who don't have access to health care or who have to wait on organ donor lists.
The phone has its place.

Generally it's buried somewhere far from me under a pillow.

I'm a non-deaf, high-functioning normal. I hate phone calls for all the reasons iterated here (intrusive, annoying, inconsiderate, lossy, non-searchable, difficult (or illegal) to record, etc.). I'll just include reemrevnivek's post by reference, it's excellent: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3104873

I might check voicemail once a week (sorry, Mom).

My voicemail message basically says "don't leave a voicemail".

My biggest present gripe: recruiters who call at all hours of the day. Actually, thanks to them I found a call-blocking app for my phone, such that only known numbers will ring.

Even with blocking, phone calls interrupt current activity on the phone (not so hot when you're buried deep in a technical problem and it's the only link out to technical resources which might help).

What I'd like to see is the ability to classify contacts by who is or isn't allowed to actually ring through to the handset.

And that null-voicemail feature others have suggested.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Space-based_solar_power
For the money. It keeps me focused and since money is what I use to buy food for my family, pay rent, my children's education etc I am morally comfortable with money as my goal in starting a company.
And at a little startup.
Hah, same. It's like seeing someone spell out Advanced Micro Devices (AMD) or Minnesota Mining and Manufacturing Company (3M). Just kinda weird.
e-mail me @ cme5871@gmail.com. I'll help you in getting a programming job.
Please don't ignore my post, I'll help you out.
Phone Call Tracking in Google Analytics
Quitting on stage was a misunderstanding.

He didn't retract his rant's meaning, he basically changed the privacy settings back to what he meant them for.

So no retractions at all.
Down rating :( ??
It is useful to use the worlds most popular smart phone to compare other phones against. More people reading those articles will be familiar with the iPhone then any other smart phone.
Orange Calories and its health benefits
Power button above the backspace button? WTF?
Very informative and well-written post, thank you. Nice evolution of the MLK quote.

What I'm wondering next is, What is the practical take-away for startups and relatively small efforts that are looking to scale? Regardless of tools-stack, what should a forward-thinking developer do? Is the answer to design around a RESTful API specification right from the beginning, then building layers of server-side and client-side code exclusively using that API? etc. etc.
Haskell actually goes all the way up to zip7. A generalised zipn function is quite complicated to write in Haskell, due to the type system. Here's a blog post about it: http://paczesiowa.blogspot.com/2010/03/generalized-zipwithn....
As a hearing person who has communicated with deaf people over relay service, let me tell you it sucks just as much being on the other end of a relay call. It seems to have all the disadvantages of email and phone rolled into one, with just enough added latency over a straight phone call to be annoying.

I wish I had an alternative to suggest, but whether anybody likes it or not, every so often, hearing-impaired people are going to need to communicate with people over the phone, and those of us who can hear need to just suck it up.
That way they could enter a real phone number of forms that insisted on one.

In my (non-hearing impaired) world, that's what pay phones are for. If your site insists on a phone number, then you get to talk to somebody who has, presumably out of sheer boredom, picked up the phone in front of the 7-11 at the corner of NE 42nd and Pine.
label for the MacBook Air knockoffs they wanted to entice other companies to make

I guess that's why I'm wondering why this laptop is HN front page news. Which is not to say that I think it shouldn't be, it's just that I'm not sure why its generating upvotey excitement.
Interview With Diaspora
10 Most Legendary Political Prisoners of All Time
Of the languages I mentioned, only Haskell is functional, though I'll concede that Common Lisp isn't very likely to become mainstream either.

Lua, on the other hand is a relatively procedural scripting language. It can support functional programming if you want (it has closures and tail-call elimination), but that isn't the default. It doesn't even have map/reduce/filter in the standard library (I think it should).

I also dispute your claim fundamentally. Research-oriented languages like Haskell probably won't go mainstream, but a mostly-functional paradigm is very natural for web development. A GET request is naturally a pure function (it takes an HTTP request and returns a page). A POST can often be purely functional except for the bit at the end where it creates, updates or deletes a value. Languages and frameworks that encourage that style of thinking make it much easier to avoid creating a complex monstrosity.
Now I don't really know how well it works in practice but the european model for VAT (the rough equivalent of sales tax) is basically this: if you're a small business, you don't have to collect VAT for the place you're sending the goods; but if you don't, you have to collect it for your own location (rather than collecting nothing). And over a certain business size, you do have to collect it for the destination.

The EU has fairly uniform VAT rates (around 20%), so then there isn't a huge difference to where you charge the tax, and so end consumer prices don't vary by a huge amount.

Maybe the much more variable rates in the US plus what seems to be more easier ability to move jurisdictions would lead to sales tax jurisdiction shopping a more than in europe.
I'm not advocating that anyone should be buying it, only that it makes more sense for someone who doesn't already have their own massive CDN. Apple and Facebook are just the first two major Akamai customers that came to mind.
I feel old school because of my 3G. Be proud, brotha!
Do you have a link handy?

I think you are right, I recall reading something similar that we were going to get huge power gains (like 30% improvement) for equivalent performance. That being said I expected Intel to fill up the high end with an appropriately overlocked CPU with the typical 95/130 TDP heat payload.

If AMD doesn't push them to do it though, I suppose they have absolutely no reason to out-do themselves.
this is not my forte, but i don't think apple is simply a hardware business. they are becoming a media fixture.
Regardless of why Asus released this laptop, it's still pretty much the first direct competition for the MacBook Air, which is significant. It means that other companies are starting to agree with Apple that mobility is important, but that netbooks suck.