skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
"... I never understood what the reason was for the recent spike in food prices ..."

Increases in population, the inability to feed it's own population and the drop in global rice production has caused increased rice prices in Philippines. The Philippines is now totally dependent on rice imports. Increased grain prices are certainly the result of complex combination of increased demand for wheat, the price of oil, introduction of competing bio-fuels ~ http://web.worldbank.org/WBSITE/EXTERNAL/COUNTRIES/AFRICAEXT...

"... Does anyone here know of a good study that explains this? ..."

The world bank has a good set of reports ~ http://econ.worldbank.org/WBSITE/EXTERNAL/EXTDEC/0,,print:Y~...
there is also a wikipedia link ~ http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Food_crisis
Actually stocks might not be the way to go. I'd hand myself a sports almanac and start betting. As long as Biff doesn't get his hands on it.
I really think there's something to that - broken "windows" in online communities. A wakeup for me was how trolls are dealt with here and comments on other sites. Different communities appear to take on the conditions of their founding and then that DNA spreads as it replicates. However, any mutations along the way left unchecked become cancerous.
I guess as long it was as needed almanac I'd be OK. If I was auto-infused with all sports predictions & knowledge I don't know if I could do it.
Haven't the classifieds collapsed as a viable revenue stream? Probably have to make that up elsewhere.
Christ why are submissions going through tiny url services?
You'd be insane to ask for email conformation as part of your sales process. Go to any web store, none of them do it.

Your customer has little motivation to supply a false email address, as they may need support by email at a later date. There aren't any security implications of not confirming the email address in this case.
I think this idea is ridiculous. Why deny the site to people because some others may be using it as a time-sink? What about time zones? What about other people's schedules? PG you don't have to fix other people's poor habits for them.

You already have unique views on procrastination but please don't force this on others, even though you can do whatever you please with your product.

I would personally become irritated by the site not being available and I'd end up visiting here less often.
Fixing your brain is feature creep, but keeping a high signal-to-noise ratio is well within the design goal of HN. If intermittently turning off the site can help accomplish that (not saying it will, just that it might), it seems worth trying.
I have a friend with whom I've enjoyed discussing this very topic.

One interesting remark he made: the way people consume "news" will likely change in a fundamental way. Traditionally, the unit of news has been the article. This approach worked well for print and has been widely adopted online as well. Perhaps the future of journalism will be the abandonment of the article, focusing instead on a more concise approach that delivers rapid-fire, credible, news.
I think the reward will still be there.
Here's a nice one:
http://www.navone.org/Media/Movies/ZoetropeLoop3.mov
Hyperlocal is exactly the way to go. On-line communities are a small fraction of real world communities. Why not set up a platform that includes basic email, calendar, and events info. The hard part is getting folks on the ground to contribute - both content and their email addresses. You could support a few full-time editors and canvass the neighborhoods. The technology would seem to be straightforward but the hard part is those personal connections.

Here in New Hampshire I'm shocked we still get these weekly advertising booklets of local businesses. They're completely free of content - 100% ads. And yet we get one every week in the mail. Someone has to have a viable business to keep churning those out. Yet, the advertisers have no estimate of ROI and costs would seem to be pretty high to make and distribute.
You just described the Adrian Holovaty thesis. http://holovaty.com/

He's the Django co-creator, gypsy guitar-playing developer of Everyblock.com

His big idea is that reporters have been gathering all this data for years.....and organizing it in the worst, least helpful format ever, the "text blob." What he's doing with Everyblock is the same thing Google's been doing since day 1, converting text blobs into useful, actionable, structured data that you can reassemble into graphs, maps, interactive features, or articles if need be.

He's certainly onto something. My question is whether that's going to completely blot out narrative journalism. My guess is that people who like narrative journalism are going to keep liking it while the many many people who never cared and who just read the headlines anyway will flock to Google News, sites like this and anything else that gives them something "worse" than narrative journalism but "good enough" to attract their eyeballs.

Note: I did not comment on my own comment. For some reason user jaydub deleted his comment as I was responding to it.
"... litter-precursors (the things that most often get dropped, like cans and cigarette filters) might need to be banned or somehow forced into low-litter forms ..."

It seems more beneficial to keep arbitrary restrictions to a minimum. It's more efficient in the long run to achieve that goal by changing culture, not by introducing legislation.
Oy Vey.

You know why netflix didn't happen before everyone had DVD players? Because VHS tapes are bulky and heavy. They cost more to send, and don't fit through many letter boxes. I can't imagine how you can possibly do this with any reasonable profit margin, and it isn't any more convenient than simply buying the books.
You have to be a logged-in user to rearrange results, and (at least initially/officially) only you see your own rearrangements. As a logged-in user, Google can view your entire activity to judge your trustworthiness before propagating your judgements to others.

Compared to link spam or click spam (on ads or via toolbars), that's easier to evaluate.
On the news-stands that I've checked, the more "high-end" a woman's magazine is, the greater the percentage of ad content.
The guy just complaining, but has nothing to propose. As a hard-core C/C++ programmer I'm sure he knows nothing about development process. He's just an end-user who wants to receive all-perfect device/software with version 1.0 for no money, no delivery delay and which never fails. Naive dreamer. It takes years if not decades for every piece of technoloty to get polished and turned into product, but no consumer nor marketers can wait. Another thing is, you cannot make product perfect just by lab-testing it, you have to put it into user's hands to find out all lurking issues. You cannot guess all possible features user might want see in your product without receiving feedbacks. It's all about cycles, AKA evolution.
"... "create strong passwords (by reversing them)": I'm not sure it's that strong ..."

Good point. It's all one and zeros to computers.
A similar thing was covered in Randy Pausch's lecture on time management.
First time poster - didn't realize it was a big deal. Noted for future posts. Thanks.
That's why Hamming invented filters.
I know that when I pay for something online, I want the merchant to know my email address -- I'm expecting a receipt, shipping confirmation, etc.

You may consider using help text to indicate that they'll receive an order confirmation at the email address they provide, just in case they may not immediately realize why your asking for it.
I don't see it at /experimental/, so it looks like it's been put on ice to work out some kinks that turned up with the big launch.

Some guesses at what might have happened:

() failure to provide an easy way to turn it off drove user satisfaction down; workaround of logging-out is against Google's tracking interests

() some part of the system behaved poorly under full load

() futzing with the natural results distracted people from clicking on ads putting a noticeable dent in revenues

() something about the commenting system brought in embarrassing content (hate speech, etc.) faster than they could control

I suspect a slower rollout to follow after some adjustments.
To ask this is missing the point; essentials are not about efficiency, they are about consistency. As I have said before, the article addresses this point. Did you read it?

"The problem is that, while this system is undeniably more efficient, it’s also much more fragile."
ReCAPTCHA: simultaneously protecting against bots and digitizing books
I've been telling people for years that libraries should do this for extra money. I'll be really curious to see how they do.
Because essentials always need to be available to people, even at the cost of efficiency. The article addresses why essentials are a special case.

"If the just-in-time system for producing cars runs into a hitch and the supply of cars shrinks for a while, people can easily adapt. When the same happens with food, people go hungry or even starve."
I liked that talk -- but I've read that infant mortality rates are a misleading indicator and I really want to know what Mr. Rosling think about the subject. The U.S. brings far more at risk kids into the world and so the statistic is deflated. Because those at risk kids are way more likely to die in the first year (instead of in the womb).
I'd guess because they're assuming/hoping most people are slower to read books so there'll be less back and forth?

Does seem like a big problem though. Local distrib centres might help once they were sufficiently "big".
People can stockpile too.

However, they won't if they think that govt will seize their savings.
Why do so many people rent movies from Blockbuster instead of checking them out from the library?

One advantage of Blockbuster is that they usually have many copies of new releases in stock, as soon as they are released. A lot of libraries do not get movies until several days or weeks after the DVD has been released (if ever). And, they tend to have very few copies. The library lets you check out new releases for longer than Blockbuster allows you to rent them. Plus, Blockbuster's rental fee discourages many people from renting, whereas the library's cost-free nature encourages gluttonous movie consumption. All of this means that it is unlikely that you will get the movie you want when you show up at the library, but you will probably get it at Blockbuster.

Are book rentals analogous to movie rentals? I think nobody can say for sure, until we've seen what happens with these book-rental outfits.

For a long time, I've wanted to try to set up premium library services. Imagine that somebody pays a membership fee to a library, say $25.00 a month. In return for that fee, they get to keep books three times as long as non-premium members. In addition, they get online checkout with delivery services (by mail or in person).

Plus, they can direct 25% or so of their membership fees towards the purchase of specific books. For example, if I was a member for a year, I would have 12x$25*(25%)=$75 of purchasing power. I could order $75 of books through the library's website. The library could purchase the books and have them delivered directly to me, but I would have to return them to the library at the end of the (extended) check-out period.

Or, if I don't want to return a book (one that I forced the library to order, or one they already have), I could buy the copy I already have checked-out from the library. The library could use this money to purchase a new copy of the book, or it could use the money to purchase a different book instead.
And yet, only half of 18-29 year olds receive their news from the internet, if you consider the election a reliable guide. Of 50-64 year olds, only 36% get their news on-line.

http://www.pewinternet.org/pdfs/PIP_2008_election.pdf

The problem would seem to be that we're still in the middle of a generational shift. For instance, I grew up reading newspapers and so I still value the NY Times. It could be another ten or twenty years before they're facing anything like death until the majority of their prime demographics have shifted away to other outlets.
> Govts have no more inherent ability to be consistent than markets.

Not so. Being consistent requires a redundant system. A redundant system is not the most efficient one.

> Since markets create far fewer human rights violations than govts, markets are better here as well.

I will venture a guess and say that just as many human rights violations have been committed in the name of the free market than any government. Sweatshops anyone? But my point with that comment was not to argue semantics. It was to point out that you were arguing apples and oranges.
I added about 6 things to search wiki, 3 related to sites that I own, 3 that were generally helpful.

Google can figure out that I own the sites because of google analytics.

When searchwiki disapeared I thought it was because I was flagged for abuse. Apparently not.
> Feel free to cite anything about which you have complete information.

You are proving my point valid; pure free market theory doesn't work because you never have complete information.
That is quite possibly the best domain name ever.
Give me a "move email up/down" feature and you solve half of my problems.
it is easy to prevent SEO abuse and SPAM: Don't let people's rankings affect the search results for anybody except them.

That isn't to say that they have to ignore all the feedback they get. They can still analyze the feedback and use statistical analysis to help find places where their ranking algorithms are doing poorly. Once they discover problems, they can fix the ranking algorithms.

Eventually, they might be able to spam-proof this feedback system to an extent where they could incorporate it directly into the ranking function. However, this isn't happening now.

As far as I've heard, this is exactly the plan they have.
I was really glad this article didn't focus on how we need to allow more immigration. I think immigration is good, and helpful for our economy, but it isn't the primary driving factor for making us an innovative nation.

We should look at what in our nation is different from less innovative nations, and work to protect or extend those differences.
A person's SearchWiki input doesn't change the rankings that other people get.
These things are not "stupid" ideas. They defy intuition to be sure (selling plastic wishbones online, who would of thought?) but most of the ideas simply exploited hidden market niches, which is actually smart.

There is one exception: million dollar homepage. That site was launched at just the right time and it was the first of its kind. People were willing to take a chance on it for those two reasons. There will probably never be another million dollar homepage so I think we can reasonably conclude that he got lucky...but it still was not a stupid idea. It was a very well executed plan and the creator capitalized (intentionally) on the originality of the idea, the fact that he could offer a cheap creative ad space (everybody jumps on that), and the low overhead cost. It was a "this probably won't work but what the hell" idea.

I don't think any business idea that makes you one million dollars is stupid (unless you plan on buying lottery tickets everyday).
>One strange thing I noticed was that Google Analytics showed less traffic from facebook.com than Facebook reported in clicks. The difference was about 10 clicks per day.

Seriously? That sounds rather suspicious. Anyone inside facebook here that can comment as to why this is so?
A tale from an usability consultant I know. They were running usability tests on a web app by a big corporation using normal end users.

The user stopped and asked "What does 'Beta' mean?".

"What do you think it means?", asked the consultant.

"Well, does it mean they think they're 'better' than everyone else?"

Unfortunately, as the article points out, it actually means it's more buggy than the rivals products
Amazon Mechanical Turk: boon for the bored or virtual sweatshop?
Indeed. Its far easier to criticise then create.
The businesses & founders are not stupid. The people who buy products from _some_ of these businesses...that's debatable.
And the truly desperate would use proxies. :)
I wonder how long it's going to be before I start seeing ads in World of Warcraft or Eve... Never I hope...
I think the comments are a horrible idea and could really ruin the Google brand. You can use Youtube as a case study. They have an active community and a flagging system but there are still several- ahem - questionable comments on that site. Attaching use generated content to search results just seems like a bad idea all around. The ability to switch the feature on and off is good but maybe the comments should be left out altogether unless they have a great moderation system- which they do not.
"... So instead of asking "How do you fix the NYT?" I'd ask "How would you kill the NYT?" ..."

One model I've noticed is Dave Winer.

A while ago he signed up for official "Press accreditation" ~ http://www.google.com.au/search?q=dave+winer+accreditation then drove around attending newsworthy events for the recent US elections. Write-ups, taking photos ~ http://flickr.com/photos/scriptingnews/2796517333/ and occasionally posting stories to unconventional methods (twitter & http://politics.newsjunk.com/ ) and finally traditional outlets ~ http://www.huffingtonpost.com/dave-winer/first-video-of-joe-...

So the idea of online writers & thinkers (bloggers) becoming Press accredited, interviewing and recording news stories (twitter, blog, flickr and mp3) and finally to commercial news sources using various technologies is already happening. Totally side stepping the NYT in the process. The only problem is it just doesn't scale yet. And I don't see a recognised "authoritative" outlet.
Should Newspaper Companies Get Out Of The Newspaper Business?
This is a really good point.

I was assuming that the sort was actually a partial sort - returning the top "x" (admittedly - even then isn't linear). However, I was also assuming (n << x), which would almost certainly be the case with a large data set. It's a fairly common approach, but not sure why I automatically assumed it.

If the sort is complete, then yeah, that changes things.
Strong agree. Case in point: the politics and automaker bailout stuff that has had more of a pass since the election. Even in the weeks leading up to the election the articles were policed more heavily than now.

Not sure it doesn't beat another half dozen articles on BS ruby infighting, though.
I'm a big believer in the broken windows theory. I was living in NYC when Giuliani took over. I was also a Reddit user when it was overrun by trolls. It was clear there was a correlation between trolling and other types of badness. That's why News.YC not only bans trolls, but also does things that seem unrelated, like fixing spelling mistakes and typographical abuses in story titles.
"... As I said in another thread, I'm here in Chicago trying to figure out how to kill off the local papers. ..."

A good description of http://www.everyblock.com/
I saw the translation first-hand over a number of years. There used to be a forum community I was a part of (it was regarded by some as a spin-off of the Something Awful forums, but that's another story). Many moons ago (roughly 4-5 years or so) it was a great community full of intelligent, witty, fun people. There was almost never a thread that wasn't worth reading in any number of forums there and the moderators took their jobs quite seriously. Basically, good people and good content were everywhere.

Then, as time went on, things started going down hill. It's impossible to attribute this to a single event, but a series of circumstances changed that caused the site to lose its quality, both in members and content. There was some serious alienation of Moderators caused by the site owner, the board started becoming more popular via Google and drew many, for lack of a better term, "Publics," etc. Due to these and other events, the best moderators jumped ship or just stopped caring (likely influenced by the owner's lack of involvement, too). The members who contributed the most worthwhile content started leaving as they noticed the boards being overrun with worthless posts.

And so it went, until a few months ago when the original owner sold off the site to somebody new who promptly shut the whole place down (after saying he had no plans to change things, or so I heard). It started as a place to make friends, share ideas, create witty banter, etc. Hell, it even lead to a few in-person meet-ups (if you've never attended a party held in another state by some random person you've never met in real life, I highly recommend it). It eventually degraded into "just another forum community" where the few people who still worked to make it a place worth coming to were drowned out by the masses of peasants clamoring "LOL!"

There's a 5-year experiment for you ;)
How does he pay the bills? I see him online all over the place. He's everywhere. This approach is really not so different from being a magazine writer. You write for whoever wants your stuff and get paid per peice. The only difference here is that Winer's not getting paid, unless he's running ads that go with his articles across all these outlets.

A personal ad network. That's kind of interesting. So someone would pay to get an ad that runs alongside anything Winer writes across the HuffPo, newsjunk and anywhere else, latching onto his brand explicitly.
Hey, shut up! My dog looks cooler than ever.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brute_force_attack

128 bit AES is rather out of anyone's reach
Mentioned below!
I wouldn't be surprised if 10 out of 543 people had JavaScript off, or Google Analytics failed to load in time.
Leslie Lamport is hilarious (and also a genius). If you're ever bored and want to try to decipher how to implement PAXOS based on a prose description of Greek society, check his original PAXOS paper, "The Part-Time Parliament": http://research.microsoft.com/users/lamport/pubs/pubs.html#l...
Kind of makes me wonder what they're doing with that 15¢ per message many people end up paying... those bytes must be more volatile than I gave them credit for.
Google Relies On Akamai To Stream YouTube Live; 700,000 Concurrent Viewers
The tipping point seems to be when low-value comments get more attention than thoughtful posts, because that's when the valuable contributors leave. At least on K5 that's what happened, all the smart contributors left because every time they'd submit an article the response would always be "-1, faggery" or whatever. So I guess my theory is that trolls are toxic not (only) because they pollute the signal to noise ratio, but because they cause thoughtful contributors to feel less valued.
You don't. There are plenty of disadvantaged children in your country who really need your help, will use it more wisely, and will gain from it than you will ever find in Africa.

Dumping money into Africa is a huge waste since it will not save anything or anybody. Never has, never will.
So "essentials" -- which, of course, are defined as things that are essential -- must be controlled by the horribly inefficient and incompetent government, instead of being provided by people with a vested interest in their provision. And this is true, because essentials "always need to be available". Yours is an argumentative wheel of Swiss cheese: completely circular, yet full of holes.
Ummm... does meat really depend on corn?
And if they make it out of edible parts, the starving kids can eat it, or they could make it out of Kevlar so it can be a bullet-proof vest!

OLPC is another dump of stupid money.
Correction: 128-bit AES is out of the reach of a brute force attack.

The NSA doesn't do brute force.
Publisher of Maxim and Blender has violated debt covenants
As long as they're donating time (e.g. doing some small number of data entry tasks for a fundraiser) rather than money.
NYTCo Stock Hits New Low On Ad Worries
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