skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
It's a pendulum cycle. Boom & bust cycles always are.

What happens is a couple people strike it rich, then a bunch of followers try to do the same thing, it may work for a little while but not for long, and when the stupidest, most inefficient people have got in on the act, there's no money left for them AND they do things that end up looking terribly ridiculous. After all that, even the smart players have thrown in lots of money and/or time, they look at how much they spent and go "hmmmm, that's a lot, better calm down." Then there's a bust.

By "smart" and "dumb" I am referring to: investors, buyers, and founders. The labels apply to them all. VCs don't have infinite money. The two or three companies who do the most acquisitions also do not have an unlimited appetite or money, and they also tend to shut down or wreck most of what they buy.

So at that critical point, everybody lays low for a little while. Then they forget, and start all over again.

Nobody remembers that this is exactly what happened the last time.
Programming Languages: What tool is right for which job?
I submitted an article from 2004 that gives some context to the start of the latest boom: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3282354
Did he really read only those 2 books? I'm not a chess player, but still I find that incredible. Surely he didn't learn all his openings only by playing and reading one collection of games?
You said above: "The anarchy part is a consequence, not a cause." I suppose you meant "a consequence of economical growth", because the article and other comment said something similar to "anarchy is the cause for growth" and you seemed to bring a counter point to the discussion.

Then, maybe you can explain why and how anarchy could be a consequence of economic growth.
Your belief is a self-fulfilling prophecy. You won't change because you think it's not even worth trying.

And it works both ways - if you believe you can change in a meaningful way, you will.

See my post elsewhere in this discussion with two books on optimism and self-theories.
How do "GET YOUTUBE VIEW" services work
How do Services like http://topupviews.com/ and http://buyyoutubesubscribers.com Do it? And are they real people or is it some kind of hi tech Bot System? And how can they Guarantee you a certan amount of views when if for example (you purchase 50,000 views) the law of averages States that ur only going to get 40% at best if you send 50,000 or whatever number so this in itself says that they can’t be sending you real people right?
I've never installed an ad blocker, nor have I even thought of doing so.

While I don't agree that using an ad blocker is stealing, I have similar feelings towards their use and find it mostly pretentious of people that use a free web and then complain of ads as if they deserve a web free of them.

I don't mind advertising, and often find it useful, especially as someone making software and looking for new ways to increase sales.
Test Your Aptitude for Business Internet Jargon
Not really.

It is not necessarily relative absence of government that is creating some negative fallout. The same sort of things you mentioned do happen all over China, even in Beijing and Shanghai where government police presence is substantially larger.

Keep in mind that westernization of China over last 30 years should be considered as a brand new phenomenon in historical context. China is still learning. Experimenting with market capitalism ensured China that it would grow at a tremendous pace, but it also resulted in a huge environmental, social and legal errors along the way. But what else would you expect from a country that is just starting to wake up from monarchical and communist despotism for several millennial?

All I can say for now is, give it more time.
This sounds like too complicated a logistical problem to work properly. By the time something like this was ready to roll out, after doing initial experiments and then enough pilot projects to make sure it was sound, there would almost certainly be a better way to recycle all of that heat.

For example, you could convert it to electricity using sun free photovoltaics (http://web.mit.edu/newsoffice/2011/sun-free-photovoltaics-07...), and then store it in solid state batteries (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Solid-state_battery) for distribution.

Cloud computing is about out-sourcing the pain of managing a server farm - Data Furnaces seems like an idea going in the opposite direction.
While the headline is also true, the significance of this study (as the article explains) is showing that supplementation can reduce mortality. It was previously known that low blood levels of Vitamin D were linked to negative outcomes, but it was much less well agreed whether supplementing with Vitamin D would improve outcomes.

It's an obvious hypothesis, of course (low X associated with negative outcomes, so increasing X will improve outcomes), but not necessarily guaranteed: the low Vitamin D levels could've been symptoms of a different problem that isn't fixed by just supplementing with Vitamin D; or the supplements might've failed in various ways to be taken up or activate the right mechanisms.
Does DuckDuckGo pay for the Bing engine? And what happens if Microsoft tries to stop them from using it, or they put some limitations on it for 3rd parties?
Another thing to consider are the built-to-flips. We never had that in the .com era. Where companies where built with the expectation that they would be bought out by a larger player. That eco-system is enjoyed by all parties in it. The large players are actively encouraging this form of company and are purchasing the ones that rise to the top. This means that public exits do not have to be the only strategy for a company and creates a secondary market of purchases therefore offloading some of the risk that a company in the end must become profitable or be able to exit via public funds. The dynamics of the market have changed and many that are claiming a bubble look at the market with the same dynamics that the .com bust had. It's hard not to do, given that it was pretty traumatic for everyone involved but there are different forces at work today and the market has become more resilient. I think it will eventually bubble, but I personally think there is runway left. I am more concerned about the capital flight from the Euro and it trying to find a place to nest than I am with any of the news out of the Vally.
Blog Massachusetts
Your #1 source for everything you want and need to know about Boston Massachusetts Apartments.
I had a relative that once worked in "government security" for the U.S. government. What that meant, we weren't permitted to know. Personally, I think he was full of crap and here's why: in his Professional Opinion, any encryption algorithm implemented in software was doomed to failure because "it could be hacked" - he was completely unaware that any hardware circuit can be emulated in software.

Point: it tends to be these very gov't lackeys that think just because the signal is in the air that it can be intercepted, decoded, decrypted and its plaintext content recorded.
Some kind of service pack to update the software would be nice. But if Wordpress is automatic when you choose to update, you are not obliged to update, there is nothing against free software here!
Probably automation in the physical world. Watch for the gold rush when the first commercial self-driving cars roll off the assembly line.
Not sure if this matters for a "gold standard" question, but google answers it correctly:

http://www.google.com/search?q=What+is+four+plus+fve%3F
Far more than security. Most of society is built on the honor system.

In half-full bar at an hour when there isn't a bouncer (usually before 9pm in NYC), the only thing keeping twenty or thirty people from pouring their own booze for free is a large slab of wood and a person behind it. The name tags and maybe a counter do the same thing at a retail store with one or two checkout people.

Society is almost entirely built on a simple trust system and the fear we've built into ourselves of the repercussions for going against societal norms.
"Java: Concurrency in Practice" is a superb primer to sane, concurrent programming in imperative languages. The first few chapters made me realize how much I had to learn.
Yeah agree, just quickly drafted that message with no exterior feedback. Changing that. Thanks! :)
Solution looking for problem?
This is a really neat hack but How does the script know whether or not the solution was correct? Have they shared a real solution that solves this problem completley algorithmically, without human involvement? I could not find it.
There's no average, dumb Java Joe
I agree about all those other sectors.

It's just I'm tired of seeing all those "social" startup stories, and the thousands of posts in the intertubes typically from some aforementioned startup employee/founder using all the half-baked or ill-suited technologies du jour, and posting something better suited for Comp Sci 101 as a huge discovery.

That's what I deserve for scouting all over for some relevant Python/Ruby/Web dev etc articles, I guess.

(disclosure: I work in a startup, but one developing, gasp an actual product (!), sold to the customer etc, employing several PHD guys to code in good ole C and implement new hardcore algorithms for our class of problems.).
No, I'm complaining because I'd like themto take my money and it is not possible for me to do so.

And no the site does not work at all on any of the computers (linux, mac and windows) and browsers (opera firefox, iron, rekonq, safari) combination I tried. Didn't work on ipad or smartphone either.

The cause of the problem: it requires adobe flash plugin I dont have and fails to make any mention of it or to provide a fallback alternative.

Not that it would be difficult to provide an alternative way to play those mp3 for which you can find the direct link in the source of the page.

When someone wants to give you money and your website or process prevent them from doing so, the only conclusion is that it is badly thought and designed.
But only offering support through flash is plain stupid, how can anyone get in touch to tell them about a problem with the flash plugin when this very plugin is required to get support ? Suddenly email and web form are not good enough ?
Hotmail Accounts
Jut wondering if anyone can help me get into a hotmail account withou any of the password reset hotmail options?? URGENT
Mark Jason Dominus on giving fish
Is there a First Amendment Right to beat your MMA opponent senseless?
Seriously.. that is the best question you have?

You disgust me.
I believe "read good code" is already standard advice for improving your coding skills. However, I think there are many differences compared to studying chess by analysing games.

One way that it works for programming is doing small exercises and then checking the answers. For instance, the 99 Problems in Prolog (or its translations to Lisp, Haskell, etc):

http://www.ic.unicamp.br/~meidanis/courses/mc336/2006s2/func...

But as you say, for larger problems it's harder to find good "answers". Even for something relatively small like unix utilities. Say you want to write cat or echo. You get source code from BSD and GNU and Solaris and they're quite different from each other (I recall seeing a comparison somewhere, mainly putting the GNU code in bad light, perhaps unfairly. Anyone has the link?).
If you can't build the blog, you can't build the business
What other options for backend besides Bing are there if one would like to do make a new search engine?
Also check out http://gitforked.com/

I made it earlier this year, but didn't get the HN love :)
http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2279450
"""All this cash floating around also seems to lead to startups sucking up all the best talent. Do coding geniuses really need to be working on photo-sharing apps, as opposed to, say, rocket programming?"""

Good point. But for all the "how to hire the best" articles moving around related to startups, I don't see many "coding geniuses" there, and have yet to see a significant contribution to OSS or CompSci coming from a "social" startup.

Mostly fresh-out-of-college, no-real-world-experience, lets-use-what's-shiny types...

Someone like Brad Fitzpatrick runs circles around these guys.
Seo Florida || The new Launch Pad invading the Earth
Download everything
Robot-iPad
"""Folks have been predicting this throughout 2010 as well as 2011. The arguments are generally devoid of data, i.e., "based on what we see"."""

Actually, "what we see" is the very definition of EMPIRICAL DATA.

What you probably wanted to say was "devoid of any theory" etc. But no theory has yet untangled the economic prediction thing --too many parameters.

A little manual pruning of the empirical data by someone with experience in the trenches is better than some vague theory or a bunch of stats.
The first thing I thought of when I read this article was: "Boy, that customer got off easy!"

Anyone remember this story from a couple years back?
http://consumerist.com/2009/02/direct-express-auto-transport...

It deals with the same transportreviews.com site, but different transport company. The Consumerist reports: "We write often about companies' sleazy approaches to online reviews. Some companies bribe users for positive feedback. Others sue over negative reviews. Direct Express Auto Transport, however, is the first company we've seen that responds to bad reviews by sharing users' personal information."

And here is one of the counter-reviews noted:
http://www.transportreviews.com/review/00031016.asp

It appears they've since taken out the customer's full name, but their rebuttal in part:

>Our outstanding record speaks for itself. Customer April would not release her car to our 1st driver on Dec 29 in Arizona, which inconvenienced him greatly...Her choice of words in which to express herself should tell you plenty, which fortunately is now captured on the internet with her full name and town. Because we ship thousands of cars monthly, it is inevitable that we encounter individuals such as this.
Lower-hanging fruit along the same lines is figuring out a way to harness energy created by exercise equipment (treadmills, ellipticals, etc). I've often thought how dumb it is that all that energy is just burned off as friction. Seems like this would be a lot less complex to implement.
what about the massive amount of duplicate content indexed via this domain: hackerne.ws ?
I'm probably just an egotist, but I really think that any drying up of the venture capital is really just going to hurt venture capitalists.

An engineer -- here's the egotism coming -- is a money machine. She may be more effective working together with other force multipliers (marketeers, venture capitalists, a good CEO), but fundamentally a good engineer creates value all by herself. If the VC isn't along for the ride, less value may be created less quickly, but the engineer is still going to get hers and the VC not.

I can think of one example of an engineer who just didn't seek funding and created a whole bunch of value (notch); does anyone know of a good example of a startup which was forced to bootstrap without significant funding (on account of a burst VC bubble) and survived to stick it to 'em?
Code sober, get things done drunk
Corollary: If you can't blogspam the Hacker News, you can't build the blog.
«Фобос-Грунт» причины неудачи
I've read the paperback version and came away slightly disappointed. The book is essentially a distillation of papers the author found interesting and applicable. The separate chapters felt completely disconnected from each other. There were a number of interesting points, but no cohesion.

As for Kindle, the book design was sufficiently plain that I would have no concerns.
I think the reason for the difference is this one was so simple. From the title, I knew what it was going to be. With yours it was a little over complicated. From the title of HN post, to the website
The Perfect Domain Name
How to Build Your Personal Brand through RSS Feeds
День выборов президента РФ
I really wish github would develop a web intents api like Twitter. Then one can watch repos and follow other users much like the follow bottons for twitter.
My god, it's yet another piece of software called Mint. Stop the branding madness!

Also frustrating is the fact that I couldn't spot the link from the official Linux Mint blog to the "please tell me what Linux Mint is" page. I ultimately resorted to Google. A conversion funnel tragedy.
As far as I know, it's real people. I have never personally used these services, though I know someone who used similar firms and he was quite pleased with the results.
Facebook Upgrade Video Chatting Powered By Skype
In the summer 2011, Facebook launched an application called video appeal called Skype video and Group Chat, allowing its users to connect virtually face to face in real time. The application is free and easy to download on your Facebook account. The call sign refers to the icon of the appeal which appears in the menu of the cat friend and is made by downloading the application
Connect to your Facebook account.
Until the general public is willing to get past "Free" and pay for some things like a review site or an article from a blog, the companies paying the bills will be the ones deciding what kind of service the public gets.

Even if you get micropayments figured out, and people start clicking the litte $$/££ button on your site, how do you motivate someone to leave positive reviews? It's similar to being in IT, or in the tech side of stage production: if you're doing your job correctly, no one notices and they're unlikely to be motivated to comment positively.

The only method that comes to mind that solves this kind of problem is an escrow company. You hire for services via the escrow, pay them for service, they withhold payment until you are satisfied or until you don't reply, and once payment is delivered, you can no longer leave negative feedback. Written contracts managed by the escrow party would also be a must.
No, reality is both. The problem with China is that whatever you say about it is true and false at the same time. As Pascal said earlier: "La Chine obscurcit" (China darkens).

The mafias and anarchist dystopia described by GP exists in China. In my nearly 9 years here I have received some reflections of this (random pick: I have spent a night near a children factory near Hong-Kong).

But saying that China, or even Wenzhou is an anarchist dystopia is wrong. It is similar to describing New-York with a picture from the Bronx during a "bad day".

On the opposite, saying that Wenzhou and other places are economic paradise where anyone can do whatever they want without the central government even being aware of this is false. These coastal regions have been set up as an experiment on economic opening by Deng Xiaoping, and Jiang Zemin and Hu Jintao have been in fact "chosen" by him, in order to continue in the same tracks. You can count on the current government to care about these places, and to be ready to do whatever is needed if it goes too far.

What is happening in China right now is impressive, and such a fast mutation is probably unseen in the world history at this scale.

It will have a great impact on the world. Will it be for the best or for the worst? I can't be sure, but what I know is that knowing better each other, increasing exchanges between West and East, is the best and only way we have to push a little, just a little bit, away from the worst case scenario.
It appears you use the word "Corollary" in a different way than I understand it Perhaps I simply don't understand what you mean.

Could you perhaps elaborate and make a complete and cogent argument?

Thanks.

Added in edit: Not sure why I got the downvote. This is a genuine query - I don't understand how the statement

"If you can't blogspam the Hacker News, you can't build the blog."

follows as a corollary from the statement

"If you can't build the blog, you can't build the business."

It just doesn't, at least, not to me. That's why I'd like a better explanation, and not just a quick, throw-away sentence.
However a quick back-of-the-envelope calculation would rapidly show that muscle energy is dwarfed by possible savings on ordinary energy uses. A human being on a treadmill can't generate much more than 100W of usable energy, burning 2000 Kcal/hour doing this.
It's not about perfect support, it's about something that just works.

Don't you know that piracy happens mostly because there is no other convenient way to get the content. I'd be happy to give them my money, but there is no way for me to do so.

Turns out all the samples are actually mp3 files (direct links are to be found in the source). These mp3 play fine in my browser, it's only the required use of the flash plugin that prevent me to do so.

Yes I'm part of the estimated 10% of web users that don't have flash installed. Maybe you think that it's good business practice to tell 10% of the potential customer to go fuck themselves, I don't.

I'm not sorry about having ethics and refusing to use paypal or for not wanting google to track me more than they already do by not using their online payment services, it's simply good privacy practice.

Actually they do offer flac which is among why I'm interested in this in the first place, I don't mind paying the extra to get the flac version as my whole music collection is flac only. I simply don't buy mp3.
You comment is a very, very important one and I hate that people don't see the difference between jobs for jobs sake and productive jobs.

I mean if all we wanted was jobs we could just outlaw gasoline, electricity and non-human powered generators. That would create jobs for untold millions.

It would also be utterly destructive for our standard of life/health/happiness/etc.
Exponen Arte y Pol�tica - Noticias - SanDiegoRed
Funny how people don't understand that criticism is feedback and downvote my comment.
A little known secret of time management?
"Homeopathic therapy was found to be useful in relieving menopausal distressing symptoms such as hot flashes, night sweats, anxiety, palpitation, depression, insomnia, and so on. This study proves the usefulness of homeopathic medicines in relieving DDCY."

http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/22087613

"A simple description is provided of the process of potentization in homeopathic dilutions. With the exception of minor details, this simple model replicates the results previously obtained from a more complex model. While excited states are short lived in isolated molecules, they become long lived in nanodomains that form coherent cooperative aggregates controlled by the geomagnetic field. These domains either slowly emit biophotons or perform specific biochemical work at their target."
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/22073975

"Though often criticised, many experiments with remedies diluted beyond Avogadro's number demonstrate specific effects."
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/22073975

WOW - seems to be a lot of evidence to support homeopathy, too bad it's not well known (or rather denied/suppressed through fear!)

http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/21962203

http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/21962202

http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed?term=homeopathy
"Sorry, Hoodsup is not optimized for your browser yet. We're working hard to make it work soon. In the meantime, please use Chrome or Safari"

in the meantime, ctrl+W. bye.
As the project creator I agree. It will never supplant the Internet, but localized networks can play a huge role in how the web works however, and I see establishing these as the real goal of the project.
In that sense, HN is just a glorified forum. Actual value comes from the context. This is best available thing for now.
I also use adblock to blacklist everything facebook. I don't have an account, and was often waiting for some fb.com stuff loading on pages.
I've whitelisted ads on a handful of sites that explicitly and politely asked their users to do so (reddit, osnews,but NOT arstechnica).
I think you mean billion, not million.
Reasons Why You Need to Start a Startup
Why The Supreme Court's 'Grokster' Decision Led To More P2P Filesharing