skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I'm not going to pretend I understand the mechanics of what went on. What you say sounds like it's in line with the narratives I've heard from what seemed to me like the intelligent sources. But it doesn't really negate what I am saying:

The underlying assumption is that consumers will make bad decisions when given the chance. Banks can either measure their capacity to pay or the tendency to pay (credit score). Relying only on the latter seems to make the assumption (that seems like it should be reasonable) that apart from a problematic minority, lenders will take care not to bankrupt themselves themselves.

Then articles such as this one come along & explain that this is actually insane. Obviously consumers are trying to bankrupt themselves. The only remaining discussion is how to stop them: banks should, rating agencies should, governments should... I find this strange.

Your explanation, while not reassuring describes why institutions will make bad investment decisions.
Actually, Nate's article (first link) was a direct inspiration for Twitpay.
Startup legal questions FAQ
Great point, Pelle, Thanks.

I think that's exactly the problem, though.. Yes, I'm 100% that all of these problems can, and probably will, be fixed.

But even once they are, there will be two methods for doing everything, and that makes things more complex than they need to be.

It's one of the disadvantages of such a relatively unpredictable environment- Every tool has has to be able to work across a variety of platforms, which means that every tool has to assume the worst case. ;(

The Ruby devs can't assume packages are sane everywhere- Redhat packages, for instance, have been a world of hurt for years.. OS X and Windows don't even HAVE native packaging systems.

I entirely understand why it is the way that it is.. But I look forward to it getting better.

As another poster pointed out, in newer releases of Ubuntu, they DO package up the gems as individual .deb packages.

Essentially, the Ubuntu devs bypassed the gem manager, just as the gem manager itself bypassed Ubuntu.
How To: Get rid of the new YouTube search box
How to Setup a Dedicated Web Server
I don't know about most effective, but as for more effective recently, it was the code-base of Twisted. Not only did it have a lot of advanced libraries and what-not I had never encountered, but because it's been around forever I saw a sort if history of Python too.
Samsung Launched its new 256GB SSD
You have it right on the money. If people keep coming back because they love to use the site, you should experience continuous growth. They will also be likely to tell other people about it, giving you viral potential.

If you cannot get users to stick, no amount of front page Reddits and newspaper mentions will save you. Even though organic traffic is consistent, even that levels off after a while, is hard to obtain, and is dependent on having a massive number of pages with unique content.
Actually it took just a few days of work and we've considered it for months
I suspect that however this started, its familiarity now means it is popular network name among those either (1) genuinely offering free wifi, or (2) seeking to hijack info in transit.
I'm sure it wasn't. Knowing the tipjoy people, I'm sure they've been planning this feature for longer than 15 days. It's pretty obvious in their space.
SSID: "Free Internet if you Support Obama!"
Warner Music Pitches Music Tax To Universities: You Pay, We Stop Suing
Why trust money printed by the same government
that just looted your private pension?

What would you trust if you were in Argentina? You don't want to carry gold around - people aren't accustomed to trading in it and would be wary of it, and even a little bit of gold is a lot of money.

Key characteristic of something you can use as a currency of last resort is that it must be a liquid market - lots of people willing to trade in it.

Things that affect this:

- Whether or not the government can successfully enforces exchange controls (i.e. you accept that thus much gold is equivalent to thus many units of currency).

- Government mechanisms to outlaw rival forms of currency.

- Whether it is easy to determine the worthiness of an item of currency (gold is subject to the archimedes test)

- Whether you can deal in small items (you don't want to have to carry a fortunate around in your pocket, you want to be able to make small purchases).

The idea of redeemable value stores is something I have quirky ideas about from time to time. I first became aware of Gresham's Law (bad money chases good out of a marketplace) at school with marbles, when I accidentally debased the valuing system. I was rubbish at marbles and had lost all of mine but convinced a few people that there would be value in playing for marbles which were 'demented' in interesting ways (this was all I had left). It wasn't a grand plan - just something to allow me to keep playing. People tend to be protective of their marbles, but playing for demended marbles allowed them to have games with lower risk. But after a bit I actually saw a younger kid cripple a worthwhile marble in order that he could enter a game and remember a guilty feeling that I'd done something bad. The marble craze was dead within days. Maybe the craze was on its way out and the only reason the demented thing got traction was because people were already tiring of it. It was an interesting introduction to the idea of a store of value though.

Ideas: barrels of printer ink, ipv4 ip addresses (could you forge a currency from these? Probably not - I think they're site-bound and therefore not all that transferable or fungible), staples, bicycle tires, quality first aid kits. There's an interesting battle going on between free banking and governments at the moment. By bringing the banks further "into the family", eliminating havens like Swizerland and Luxemburg through strategic bailouts and undermining Lietchenstein with espionage, governments are delaying a separation between currencies and governments. Iceland may be a good place from which to launch such a scheme - they have the infrastructure, would be generally considered trustworthy and they are at odds with Britain. New Zealand could work as a base, also.
Is technology rewiring our brains?
"Free wifi by [YourDomain.com]" might be enough.
Why doesn't HN allow you to change your vote? Seems awfully arbitrary and heavy-handed.

So you don't vote arbitrarily, and avoid being heavy-handed.
It may be from the 3G software that the SSID name originally appeared. hpsetup and linksys are common names in this because there are many real AP's with these names by default and so the 'infection' would spread from multiple points.

It would be a miracle if there had only been a single "Free Public WiFi" AP that caused this 'outbreak' to originate and spread.
I lived in a communal house with about 15 other people for about a year, and this is more or less exactly what we did.

The process works very well for keeping multiple people with possibly different eating schedules fed, and minimizes the amount of crap that people shove down their throats - which in the above situation can lead to not having any food :(.
Top 100 Anthropology Blogs
Too many "pay words"! I don't know if that's the case but you should really check they aren't part of a casual tweet.

Eg.

"I'm not going to pay @joe $1000 for an old ipod!" or

"Everyone! Give @bob $10 to buy beer".
Check View -> Page Style if you're using Firefox.
New short film asks, "Why Copyright?"
I suppose you could start it yourself. :) If you feel so strongly that way, I bet there are others out there like you, too.
Errr.. Twitpay was developed over a WEEKEND at Atlanta Startup Weekend. I'd say it's pretty easy to copy this idea in 15 days. Heck, I'd have expected more features. Maybe the extra days were used to do more key words.
In bad economic times, try to make yourself irreplaceable, even if that means making your code difficult to use. If you feel the need to be unethical, you can hide time-delay bugs.

Wow.

What this sort of thing does to your soul is far worse than being laid off. Anyone who believes that they need a job more than they need integrity or self-respect has some work to do, and some fears to face. And making code obscure on purpose is unethical, and ethics that fluctuate with economic conditions aren't ethics to begin with.

Edit: For a different perspective, I ran this by a couple of guys where I'm working. One of them offered a more succinct response: "Maybe if you did a good job, they'd keep you, [expletive deleted]."
papa, this is off-topic, but your site's "ajax_updates_iframe" architecture needs some serious attention. As it stands now, each time it's updated (every few seconds) it creates a new entry in the browser's history (at least Firefox 3's... haven't tested others).

This totally mangles a user's history... after just a few minutes, every entry in my history was fanpop, which I was not at all happy about. I'm sure this upsets others too and there are ways around it (iframe within an iframe, for example, which doesn't affect history). Just FYI.
I code; we're in hardcore startup mode.
Get Government Out of Coin Manufacture
I don't think you want a page for every song played, but you might want to have a detail page about every song in your database, which links to profiles that have played it recently. That's basically the same thing, but not as spammy.

What about band bios, or something similar to increase the amount of unique content?
Great point, Locke, Thanks for replying.

I'll certainly admit that I don't know the gems packaging system as well as I know dpkg and aptitude, but I think that that criticism misses the larger issue.

You're certainly right that the gems system could be made to do everything that the Debian/Ubuntu system does, particularly if given time to mature.
But as I pointed out in my post, this wouldn't fix the problem.

Apache, for example, has hundreds of modules, each of which have complex dependencies..
They're released on their own schedule, and they're released across lots of platforms.
Firefox has it's own set of extensions, and updates- You see the same thing with CPAN, and Python modules.

But the more disparate systems you add, the more sets of configurations you need, the more repositories you need, and the more ways to update everything you need.

So for our servers, I could set up a Gems repo, an Apache repo, a System Software Repo, a Cpan repo.
I could have separate upgrade commands for every software package that comes along.

But the complexity is increased with each addition to this system-

* If I want to get a list of everything that's installed under this system, I need to run X commands.

* During installations, I can't chain everything together, I need to run X set of separate installations.

* I need to review X different release chains, to see if there are packages I need to test before deploying to multiple machine

* And yes, I need to learn X different systems for installing software, rather than one system for installing system wide.

There are a lot of good reasons to have the gems system, and I think it's a great tool for individual systems, but for anything that's going farm-wide, It's substantially easier to have everything go through one tool.
I am currently working for what could be considered a startup based in the UK (I am in the US). It's a fairly interesting problem, but not normal "startupish" stuff.

I have no formal education, no credentials (other than code).

I landed this job by doing what I had been doing for a while: going to the bottom-of-the-barrel freelance sites like rentacoder, and skimming through the job postings each day until I found things that didn't look painfully boring, weren't asking for way too much for way too little, and weren't "OMG FIX MY PHP CODEBASE" - because I had done a few of those, and they are far from fun. That's another story though.

I did (and still do) have an ace up my sleeve - I live really cheaply. This meant that I could grab up the interesting projects that got put there because the company doing the interesting stuff overloaded one guy, or because they couldn't afford a "consultant", do them for cheap, and do them well - which gained me repeat customers.

My current employment happened when after finishing one project, the client asked me to do another, very similar project. I inquired about what he was doing, and it turned out that he was doing a bunch of these really similar projects, that would be better implemented as one kinda loose project.

Wheee.

I guess I don't have much experience with the actual "job market" - but I can say that if you're a person like me, the jobs are there. You just have to be willing to work for cheap, at least for a bit (I'm not even close to rolling in the dough, but I have enough to pay my rent and bills and save some money for trying to attend college next year).

With the bottom-of-the-barrel freelance sites, just communicating well and not being a bot puts you in the top 95% of bidders for a job. It's really that ridiculous. If you don't have much official prior experience, you'll probably have to do some real crap work real cheap - but once you've got a few "this guy is good" bits of feedback, you pretty much have your pick of the lot.
Peter Schiff begins to discuss Federal Reserve responsible for crisis, CNN "loses" feed
Credibility of the anecdote, title is a bunk.
Spam Co seeks Web 2.96 Girl Guide.

Our cookies need distributing.
I imagine the Firefox thing is to make the initial setup of a machine faster (doing Firefox addons and other packages in one shot with apt-get), and possibly because the maintainer's didn't trust the security of Firefox's update mechanism. If you can rely on apt-get always being available, you tend to use it as a first resort.
neither am I - and I totally agree. I just don't think its marketing - its more fashion (I wouldn't really expect Steve to understand marketing, very few do).

Marketing is often what developers brush off as "the other stuff" without really understanding it.
Guess that just goes to show you what competition will do in a space. If it took a few days of work, why didn't you do it before since you considered it "for months"? Oh wait, you waited until someone else did it and then decided to try it out. Well, guess the competition will help create some innovation in the space. Good for everyone in the end since I'm hoping the Twitpay team out executes.
I'm not a lawyer, but how is this NOT extortion?
So what is the rampant installment rate of that greasemonkey script?
Survey your users.
Yes, you get my point. The graphics can take advantage of GPU, but the AI merely can.
What's really interesting about these coin shortages is that they are exactly what we should expect as governments have created monopolies over the manufacture of coinage. Central planning always leads to the systematic misallocation of resources, causing these nasty supply surprises which the government then proceeds to blame on other actors.

An unappreciated miracle of our world is how rare shortages are among truly free-market goods.

For a deeper background, read:

Get Government Out of Coin Manufacture

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=386392

Private Coinage

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=386409
And you wonder why you're losing traffic. As someone who browses the internet, if my computer starts playing music (in this case, loudly) without my consent, I go on safari to hunt and kill the infringing tab. I strongly recommend against this 'feature'. Display something that says "play now!" and even load the song if you want, but don't actually play it until I consent. Please.
Wow, I had no idea... nice smartarse link BTW.
Private Coinage
The assumption is crucial though. Anyway it's made in aggregate & in a theoretical perfect market where everyone knows everything.

The thing is with this market that it's damn near perfect. It's a big enough decision to make sure consumers research it, work it out on a piece of paper, hire consultants to help with the decision. There's plenty of legislation ensuring information availability & simplicity.

Still the actors are not on average rational.
Yes, 'tax' is quite a euphemism here isn't it.
I have found http://sales.alltop.com/ very usefull
In this particular case it's complicated by the fact that ruby gems isn't pre-packaged for Ubuntu 6.06, but in the general case, yes, that would make the installation component of it faster.

My frustration comes mainly in that Ubuntu makes nice, easy systems to keep everything consistent; Ruby gems make an end-run around these systems. No matter WHAT it might do on it's own, it bypasses the rules that the rest of the system lives by.
I joined and roamed around a bit, its really beautiful. I very much admire the minimalist style. But I think it is possible the very thing that makes the site such a joy is what makes it hard to gain traction, and that is the lack of content/information outside of the actual music. Users need to be getting a constant stream of info to hold their attention. If a site doesn't do this it sends a subliminal message to the user "nothing new here, I'm never coming back"- they may not even be aware of this and they may have nothing but great things to say about your site but they might not return either. I feel you may need more emotional branding of the artists to hold everyones attention, and more intimate connection to the music industry. In a perfect world you would not have to clutter up your site with any of the following suggestions but maybe there is a way to incorporate some new elements without sacrificing the gorgeousness of it all.

1)Video content never fails to resonate with users, it would be great for artists to embed their existing online video content somewhere on your site.
2) Do any of the artists have their own groups on Ning? Can you create a loop somehow?
3)Do the artists have flickr groups? Are they on tour, can you integrate their Dopplr profiles if they have them?
4)Geographical info mashup? Where is the music coming from? Where do the artists live? Can you figure out how to provide information regarding gigs?
5)Take the blog more seriously. Maybe don't hide it? Blog more often, mention music related links and stuff that may not directly concern the site. Maybe you should think of the blog as the marketing? (feedback loop again)

I could continue but I'm not sure if I'm on the right track here. I look at everything with a marketing/social engineering prospective, I don't write code. Let me know HackerNewsCommunity and I'll give it some more thought.
Collecting Old Versions of TrueCrypt - Need Help
Finally Waving The White Flag to Objective-C 2.0
This is absurd even more so on the universities part that for even considering it. Why would someone who doesn't want to own or download any music or even for that matter someone who actully pays for his music be subjected to this involuntary tax? Looks like the tution fees are not going to fall anytime soon.
that doesnt make any sense. there should be loads of stuff like this then. why only Free Wifi whatever
This stuff is as much better than the average advice post as this guy is more successful than the average investor.
Actually he borrowed a bunch of you money promising to pay it back in the future.
It's for real. I'm Argentinian and watching the onion is pretty much the same as watching a news channel. I opt to laugh, but I should be crying. No country is as little serious as Argentina... to name a few examples:

-VAT it's at 21%
-The government lies about the inflation index (they say it's 8%, the real number is 25%)... a total theft.
-Farmers have to pay a 30% tax on net incomes... and after that, a 35% tax on profit...
-The president is a woman (joking)
there was a report a few days ago that basically said that university education will be unaffordable for most people in a few years. This will only make it worse.
The universities should unite to defend themselves collectively. Combined they are surely more powerful than the music industry.

Or they could just get out of the business of supplying data connections. They don't run their own electric power plants anymore. Why do they have to supply Internet connectivity? They should just let students get it on the open market.
Someone else already did it. You shouldn't be so defensive
http://www.techcrunch.com/2008/07/02/tipit-lets-you-transfer...

Tipjoy is about more than payments in twitter. The main reason I'm excited about this is what it allows for services that use twitter, like http://www.stocktwits.com/
Thanks a lot for your post e1ven. Yours is actually constructive and makes sense, a far cry from the usual "RubyGems sucks and I won't tell you why, but if you use it then you're an idiot"-kind of FUD. I've replied to your points at http://stakeventures.com/articles/2008/12/04/rubygem-is-from... (search for "Actually, the Hackernews comments were surprisingly constructive"; the post might now show up yet because it's still in the moderation queue)

A lot of your criticisms have already been addressed in the latest RubyGems version.
We thought of this. They need to be in the first 3 tokens.

So this would indeed count, "Give @bob $10 to buy beer" but that is clearly a closer to a command.

More importantly, this is an opt-in option, so it would be hard to do it without knowing.
This is a post about tracking the increase of active blog readers. I think it can be taken as a broad parallel to active users.

http://www.kaushik.net/avinash/2007/11/blog-metrics-six-reco...

By measuring well you may find some insight that'll help.

The jist of the examples is that readers (apply to users) are acquired one at a time. Digg, stumble & such are not going to give you a massive spike in users. Nothing probably will. Its about momentum.

Anyway, maybe you will find some answers in analytics.
You tweet sometimes. They're usually pretty funny, so you should do it more. I'm pretty sure twitter will be closer to an ecosystem of tips, considering everyone is a "blogger" - though some with greater followings.
Pandora.com down? Seems so
..just noticed.
Cold this be an epic fail? "We seem to be made to suffer, it's our lot in life", //online music

The Team at Songnumbers.com
http://songnumbers.com
Tipjoy is all about super friendly fun time. Like at our poker nights. Come by if you're in the Boston area (and a startup hacker/foudner): http://www.meetup.com/Boston-Startup-Poker/
Maybe that's because the "security concerns" don't really explain what the actual concerns are, but only claim that they exist? If "RubyGems is a security hazard, I won't tell you why but it is so and if you disagree then you're an idiot" isn't FUD then what is?
Yes this is genius ^_^_^_^_^
Ask HN: Should you hide members-only features for non-members?
I'm working on a site and am deciding on some semi-important design issues.

The app revolves around one main page, which new visitors will see when they arrive to the site and which registered users will see once they've logged in. The main difference is that when someone is logged in, they'll have additional options (links) on that page.

Few usability/business questions:

1. Should I hide these links for people who are not logged in or do I include them, but direct them to the login/registration page? On one hand, it's slightly annoying for a new customer to be unexpectedly led to a registration page but on the other hand, it'll likely lead to more registrations since they'll get to see the features they'd have with an account. Another viable option would be to make the members only links a different color.

2. Probably a small detail, but: 'Sign in' or 'Log in'?

3. What do you think about letting customers log in on the main page (with a email/password input box) vs link them to a separate log in page? Most sites let people log in on the main page, but I'm leaning away from it to keep the main page simple and uncluttered. Thoughts?

4. Does anyone else use Firebug to edit the dimensions of this text box while typing a post? :)

Thanks in advance.
Database Thaw Reheated
Comments on and rebuttal of Martin Fowler's article "Database Thaw," and why XML+HTTP and application databases will not replace relational databases and SQL.