skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Dick is a prime example, yeah. I don't like many of his works, they seem far too paranoid, but I find it sad that his mind as so twisted. Do Androids Dream Of Electric Sheep is brilliant on multiple levels, and it's one of the best pieces of literature from the last century.

Creativity can't be pigeonholed, and it's silly to ever assume that it can be. I agree. The fact that it can't be neatly sorted is what makes it creativity. (A teacher once told my classmates and I that CollegeBoard approached his top class to give them a set of multiple-choice "creativity" tests. What a sickening idea. Luckily, the idea was wholly scrapped because all of the top kids gave radically different answers.)
This service is a great idea! It's simple and seems to be well implemented. I liked how you ate your own dog food, by using Mechanical Turk to decide if it's worthwhile putting up the service.
If you haven't researched this company already ....
http://www.rateitall.com/

Had a friend interning there this summer. The business model is essentially exactly what you guys are going after. I think it's a pretty smart model actually, but you'll have to work out how your product stands out from theirs.

On a side note, I think the "if you have a brain that is" comment is too condescending for me. I think HN users will understand that humor but you are going after commonfolk! Or maybe I'm just reading into it too much ..eh!
My admittedly limited understanding of the situation is:

Banks (and consumers!) made some dubious mortgages. Then financial services companies packaged up the mortgages into derivatives that were bought and sold on the market as investments. Suddenly, someone realized that the component mortgages were not as sure as they thought; word gets around, and everyone tries to sell off the derivatives at once. This ordinarily would not be a big problem -- investments are expected to fluctuate in value -- except a lot of banks were holding the derivatives as assets. Banks are only allowed to lend out a fraction of their assets, and the assets are valued based on the price they can be sold. When the derivative market crashed, suddenly these banks couldn't lend out any money at all.

At this point, the $700 billion plan made sense to me: they'd buy up the derivatives, propping up the market so that the banks could lend money again.

But now I don't know what's going on... It sounds like they're just giving the money directly to the banks. Which by some arguments might make more sense than giving it directly to consumers: banks make loans to businesses. If the money is given to consumers, it might eventually find its way to banks and businesses through consumer spending, but it would take a lot longer, and banks and businesses might fail in the meantime.

But it does feel like a big pie-grab, now.
I like the concept... kinda reminds me of PhrazIt.com
I agree that for a single developer, open sourcing a product can be very good. You get peer recognition and probably some job offers. But I bet those job offers come in from places that make closed source software.

For businesses, the risk associated with closed sourcing your app are finite and simple:

1) The people that want source code with their app won't buy it. As was said in the article "not that many people will even notice", so it's not a lot of people.

2) You lose out on _possibly_ getting some work done on your product for free.

It seems to me that there are more and larger risks associated with open sourcing your app:

1) Lower bar to entry for competitors.
2) Definitely losing sales to customers with IT departments that know how to compile source code.
3) Possibly losing control over your own creation.
4) Fragmentation - IMO Linux would be better and more popular if there weren't so many distributions.
That's also the secret to getting an interesting plot easily.

It comes up so often in fiction because it's interesting. And it's possible to get things more complex and keep it interesting, but it's much, much harder. Even Ulysses, which is famous for being about an ordinary person going about an ordinary day, has the main character a Jew in Ireland - which is rare - and adds Dedalus, who is too smart for his own good.

Difference equals interest. That's not masturbatory. That's fact.
If the software is behind the companies web server they can do what they wish (at least before gpl3).
It's eloquent, yes, but it ignores a lot of aspects about the book. And while I like that it's been posted, I agree that it's not a very factual response, and I'm exercising my right to disagree with it.
http://osx.iusethis.com/
http://www.versiontracker.com/
Heh. Sounds like newspapers!
>Now, assuming that my program runs correctly, how can the client prove that my program does not work, and hence deny me the payment?

He can put an offer in GetACoder asking for a program that proves that :-)
Bringing Smalltalk to Eclipse
That's very true, although AGPL does fix that now.
The opinion of bettors is not a simple aggregate though. They weight information based on what they believe to be most credible. A mildly credible source isn't worth putting at risk.
I lost what respect I had for Orson Scott Card when he wrote this article http://www.meridianmagazine.com/ideas/081017light.html back in October. I won't bother running through all of the blatantly false statements in there, but the most obvious would be:

"Even though President Bush and his administration never said that Iraq sponsored or was linked to 9/11, you could not stand the fact that Americans had that misapprehension - so you pounded us with the fact that there was no such link. (Along the way, you created the false impression that Bush had lied to them and said that there was a connection.) "

When a simple Google search turns up this direct quote from Bush himself given June 17, 2004:

"The reason I keep insisting that there was a relationship between Iraq and Saddam and al Qaeda: because there was a relationship between Iraq and al Qaeda."

I hate to see celebrity writers aiding and abetting Fox News and their ridiculous tactic of playing the ref by decrying media bias. Even though I thought Ender's game was decent, Ender's shadow mediocre, and couldn't get through the next, I still had some respect for the guy, which is now gone.
I have looked into it and found (along with other entrepreneurs here) that it caters for ventures that are in a slightly more developed stage than startups. It is more for companies with slightly more significant size (more than 5 or 10 i think) and patent portfolios (atleast 1). From memory I think revenues are must as well.

2/3 hackers from a garage (ok I am making it sound romantic now, apologies for that) are not catered by the comet grant. And also the environment is just not the same as YC!
> Or are you saying it's more likely to happen if the source is open, and therefore more of a potential headache?

Yes. Also it makes it easier to conceal the original source of the distribution if the source code is open.
About the faded in time thing, I always felt Ender's Game was surprisingly precise in predicting the rise of online discussion communities, and how their anonymous celebrities can influence a lot of people, while just being a bunch of kids in their bedrooms. The book's from 1985 after all.
Seems like the simple solution would be for Google to require authentication/SSL to create a filter.
it's our first week of reporting this many hires - we'll be reporting at least this many every week.
Perhaps phrasing your original comment differently would help clarify:

"That's because you don't have children"

You haven't actually proven me wrong in any sense, you've just presented an alternate reality where I would be wrong, which you've framed as an argument against what I initially said. This assumes I am wrong, otherwise you would have agreed with me because there's no logic in presenting a rebuttal to an argument based on nonexistent data (hence the "logical fallacy" part).

The phrase "If you had children..." is always either a case of Bulverism or simple platitude; irrelevant either way. And given the number of times I've heard it, we should probably all be glad I don't have children ;)
I hate to see celebrity writers aiding and abetting Fox News and their ridiculous tactic of playing the ref by decrying media bias

Media bias is decried everywhere. Read any Howard Kurtz lately? Watch CNN's "Reliable Sources?" It's called media commentary. It's all about identifying and commenting on media bias, tactics, business models, etc. Work at the meta-level.

Personally I don't have respect or lack of respect for Card. I read his books and found them, well, mundane but better than the average sci-fi. His political opinions don't come into the discussion -- unless we're judging the man instead of his work. I believe the thread is about the work. If it were along the lines of "Orson Scott Card: Moron or not?" it should be flagged.

Ideas are not people. Bad people can have good ideas, and vice-versa.
I definitely do know a lot about a lot of things now. I do often fear becoming a jack of all trades, master of none though.
Just to look at one of your points..

> Definitely losing sales to customers with IT departments that know how to compile source code.

Quite possible, but I can say that I've gotten some of my best and most valuable feedback from these sorts of "customers". They don't pay me a cent, but they provide me with really good feature requests and bug reports.

Now you might argue that if the source was closed, I could get the feedback and the sale. Perhaps. But perhaps the savvy IT departments only install open source or freely available software.
Don't fear Pegman: New Google Maps Street View is a winner
Yes, I want the probability estimate, because I want the best information available in that sort of situation. And the word for someone who ignores the odds is not "optimistic" but "foolish", unless the answer makes no difference to your behaviour. (Which is pretty unlikely in the case of cancer.)
That's the beauty of virtualization: You just find a layer to slice at below everything else, cut there, and everything above it should work. Hopefully, reguardless of language or framework if you make your cut at the right place.
I have to disagree. The idea that we're going to wake up one day and something is going to happen that's going to make us better or more important than everyone else is pretty much the dictionary definition of masturbatory.
My friend works at Cisco and told me about this last week. They are indeed taking the days out of their employees' vacation days. If they don't have any vacation days, they will be on unpaid leave for the week.

This type of thing has also happened to other friends of mine. It's a cost-saving maneuver and also helps lower the companies' liabilities due to having so many vacation days on the books (since the company has to pay you money for each vacation day you have once you leave).
I don't know what "Kaizen" is, but I smell a strained metaphor. Going from "no inventory" to "don't buy excessive hardware", no matter how the latter may or may not be a good idea, seems like a stretch. Are you sure "no inventory" doesn't actually translate to "don't keep excess code around"? (Multiple plausible translations implies none of them are particularly solid.)
"I think the article is valid discussion point. Getting rid of things you disagree with, or you feel are wrong is like burning books because they do not agree with your ideology."

I'm sure that an eloquent, thoughtful critique of Ender's Game worthy of discussion can be written.

This is not it.
He's reviewing Ender's Game; he has evaluated its message and merits on its own. It'd be better to disagree with his opinions than to complain he doesn't cover material he hasn't set out to review.

Anyway, why would you expect the reviewer to read the sequels if he so dislikes Ender's Game?
I am utterly disappointed that Hacker News has collectively up-modded this close to the top of the front page (as I write this). I thought this community was better than this.

Yeah, I thought the same thing. I considered killing it, but it didn't seem quite deliberately dishonest enough.

I just took "it's porn" out of the title. I suspect that's why this got so much attention.
Really cool product/tech!

Have you looked at Softricity and their product SoftGrid? SoftGrid was a similar app virtualization platform. It was quite mature and complete. They were acquired by Microsoft a few years ago. I think some of their tech is being used in Windows 7 with the pending Application Binary Interface break.
That's so ignorant that I would downmod it if I could. People with a lot of money buy stuff all the time, they're very desirable to advertisers for that reason. That's why LinkedIn gets CPM rates that are over 100x Facebook's.

Advertising isn't just targeted at dumb people.
We have looked at rateitall.com and it seems like they are doing some things really well. My feeling is that they're much more product/service focused than MakeFive is at this time, but that may change. We have talked about the notion of encouraging users to post their thoughts on some of these topics as well. At this time though, it seems that the dialogue on MakeFive is often more centered on pop-culture and such.

I think one big differentiator on MakeFive (at least I hope) is design and the general experience. We're really putting a lot of effort into making the site as intuitive and responsive as possible. In fact, after going live with the most recent rebuild a week ago, we're already reworking some of the primary pages to make them easier to use.

Your comment about the "if you have a brain" is certainly one we've considered carefully as well. Some likely won't understand or appreciate our particular sense of humor, but, we sort of think it's good to have a little fun with the whole thing. That being said, your point is well taken. :-)

Thanks for your feedback!
He designed the site using sleep.

http://sleep.dashnine.org/

* is a multi-paradigm scripting language for the Java Platform
* easy to learn with Perl and Objective-C inspired syntax
* executes scripts fast with a small package size (~250KB)
* excels at data manipulation, component integration, and distributed communication
* seamlessly uses Java objects and 3rd party libraries
Good call on the RateItAll comparison apsurd. I think MakeFive is off to a nice start, and they are doing some smart things around avoiding duplicates and running contests. A few other list building sites that either haven't quite made it or are still trying are: Listible (gone, but they were cool), OnMyList (getting buried in spam now but also cool), and Amazon Unspun (failed).
It’s Official: MTV Exec Courtney Holt Leaves To Run MySpace Music
Top N lists get submitted to digg and reddit all the time. The comments for those are always filled with people hating on top N lists, but they wouldn't get to the front page without people enjoying them. I think a site like this could go far in terms of popularity. But the lists I always found MOST interesting had a lot of text supporting each item. I'd make sure that this is possible for people to really get what they want out of a top N list, more than needing to click on an item to get a description.

Also, maybe something about the ordering of the lists. All the lists I've seen so far go 1,2,3,4,5, and then runners up. What about 5,4,3,2,1? Kind of builds up the suspense. :) I might just not have looked enough about this one, though.
Update on the AOL-Yahoo Deal: “Like Trying to Catch a Falling Knife”
The Open Source Force Behind the Obama Campaign
A few years ago I read that around 50% of all medicine prescribed in the US is providing zero or less net benefit to the patient. Granted by prescribing something doctors get you out of the office and in a few days most things get better on their own. But a lot was simple misunderstanding on the part of doctors about how helpful a given drug actually was.
Sure. I've been cutting code for 22 years. I've been an academic, an entrepreneur and the coffee boy. I don't remember ever seeing it before, but a technology novice I am not.
Economic Meltdown Fringe Benefit: Cheap Apple Products?
It's sad that we get so excited when our justice system works; it should be a matter of course.
Tech-Savvy Secrets to Getting the Best Black Friday Deals
Well, you can go into the flash settings (right click on a flash object) and turn them off...

For those who don't know what he's talking about this site http://vlaurie.com/computers2/Articles/pie.htm has a fairly straight forward writeup.

And although they are a bit obscure, they are basically cookies. Turning off flash, or using noscript will take care of them.
Personally, I don't understand the need for this. If I want feedback on a website, I can simply ask friends, family or Hacker News. Friends and family usually provide honest answers while HN tends to be very critical, both useful feedback. The best part: it's all free.

If it's a product that already has a bit of traffic, I could just use a service such as UserVoice to take care of feedback/suggestions by using their little Feedback tab script. Posting about the site in a blog or a forum can also help in the search for getting feedback.

Basically what I'm getting at is.. why would I pay $7 for Feedback Army when there are so many free alternatives?
I was surprised to see Unspun turned-off. It always seemed like a good tie in to something like Amazon, even if it was under-developed. (I suppose they had bigger fish to fry.)
Apparently the rater who down-modded me gets sarcasm and faux-ad hominem.
Does that really turn them off? I have mine turned off, and I still had these files in my directory.
Let this serve as a reminder to us all not to be haters. Because every time you take a long, refreshing draught of haterade, you become a little more like this guy.

Yes, even when you're right.
I'd upmod you a hundred times if I could, even spending my karma to do so.

You might be interested in the concept of Monomyth:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Monomyth

Further, the writings of Jung (and his intellectual descendants) on Archetypes might interest you. A further offshoot on this front is the Masculine Psychology movement of the latter half of the 20th century.

If we view psychology as the study of a set of stories and the way that people relate to stories, it is much more useful than dismissing it because of its (often) poor or nonexistant scientific rigor.
This really sucks. e-gold is a great service and this judgement will only mean that competitors that do not have operations in the USA will take over.
Peter?
The rest of the books in the Enderverse flush them out nicely.
While Google have an interest in talking about the message that Gmail is secure, from a security perspective it's kind of naive to say "Gmail is secure".

All web mail (or any other system) is just a step away from the next exploit. The difference in my mind between web mail and regular mail is there another dangerous attack vector (XSS) which is only fixable by a single vendor.

The standard mail servers companies use are often vetted patched from many sources and can be hidden behind some pretty well tested encryption protocols.

Trusting mission critical things like domain name registrations to web mail seems like an unacceptably big risk to me. While XSS wasn't the issue this time, it clearly has been in the past.
This is of a piece with the WebGuild's recent "Google layoffs may affect 10,000." Hyping negative news. Cisco had shutdowns over the holidays for years. The cost savings come from reducing deferred vacation pay (most people will take vacation days to avoid going without pay) and cutting expenses related to keeping buildings open. It also sends a message to employees to become more cost conscious.
$200k this December, max flight time of 19 minutes, travel distance of 27 miles @83 mph: http://uk.cars.ign.com/articles/817/817351p1.html
The initial customers of Feedback Army seem to be folks with niche websites. The kind of stuff HN would probably flag if it were posted here. Also some folks aren't as plugged into an online community and may be uncomfortable posting there. I know I'm this way. I don't blog publicly and HN is the only board I interact on. So I'd use something like Feedback Army over risking my standing on a forum such as this for something off topic. That said, the feedback is paid for and there is nothing stopping someone from going back for multiple rounds in a few days on the same site. I think the free feedback givers might burn out a little quicker.
I fear they may be too late... Google Maps is already the de-facto mapping tech for 'mash-ups' everywhere.
I would hope so. Then you don't have to work on the project anymore and you can move on to something else. OR you could take their source code and modify it and make it even better!
I think it's great he's quickly turned around a site that lowers the barrier to a specific problem. I'd just worry about the demographic makeup of the respondents.

While Turkers aren't all geeks getting good sensible feedback is a skill in itself. I would worry that most Turkers a) aren't you customers b) aren't demographically vetted.

That said getting independent opinions is surely great food for thought and that's a powerful tool.
> why would I pay $7 for Feedback Army when there are so many free alternatives?

Just like you would pay someone for surveys. If you pay, you are gauranteed to get feedback.
You have flash turned off and it's still dropping files in your #SharedObjects directory?
Agreed. I think it's something to do with the definitive seeming nature of lists, coupled with the need to keep them succinct that's appealing to many. (That being said, I'm of the generation that was excited to watch the top 20 countdown on MTV in the eighties.) We too would like to see more content on the pages, in part to add to how much readers can get from a topic; additionally, it would be great to get the density up for SEO.

The challenge for us is to find a way to collect this content, while appreciating the fact that many users don't want to do much more than click a single button. (I still appreciate what the folks at “Hot or Not” did by reducing the entire site to a one click navigation system.)

As such, our first approach was to reduce the barriers to entry, by cutting things out. In fact, our first iterations of the site had relatively exhaustive voting and content options. We found that most people avoided voting altogether as a result, or skipped adding the content. As such, we kept removing things and refining them until we found that people felt it was easy to click on something. (It seems that once the user now partakes in even a single list, they find that it relatively easy and as such start to get involved in others.)

We're now looking at how to include extended content, and our approach is to center this on the individual. They can list their thoughts on selections, and then maintain an area for themselves alone. As such, they can make relatively personal explanations for their selections, while still being able to include the community in their list. (We're hoping to roll this out early next week.)

We're looking at retooling our points system in tandem with this roll-out. In our minds, it would seem appropriate to reward those who add more content and thoughtful reviews of things. In the meanwhile, this leads us to eventually adding local components that would allow for more in-depth reviews of restaurants and the like.

So much to do!
First-ever decline in online retail spending: comScore