skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
You didn't understand. The point was that the same person would pay $X for good A, but will only sell good A for $B, where $B >> $A..

Let's pretend that if I want a widget I am willing to pay $1 (but not $2) for it. That means I would prefer to have the widget over $1, but prefer to have $2 over the widget. However, if I have a widget I'm willing to sell it for $3 (but not for $2). That implies that I am would rather have the widget than $2, which is clearly a contradiction with the previous conclusion. This is irrational. (And it violates several of the key assumptions underlying classical economics).
Agreed. And often it's in the games from which you least expect it. One of those examples for me is BioShock. The facade of the horror shooter-rpg is only skin deep. The main emotions it played on weren't fear and confusion but a wistful sadness and regret.

Of course, the history of videogames is littered with perfectly excellent games which wouldn't be considered "high art", and I suppose the fact that games don't have to be artistic to be good bothers some people. In fact there are plenty of awful artistically brilliant games, as the main metric against which games are measured is still how engaging and fun they are.

You can tolerate sitting through the ~100 minutes of a movie that doesn't quite grip you, but the interactivity of games sets the bar much higher: you don't progress unless you do stuff, and if that stuff is tedious, then you'll probably give up. The artistic depth can help to make the game engaging, but I don't think it can do this on its own: the mechanics are still crucial.

As a result, game designers have to watch out so much that their game is fun, that injecting deeper meaning and emotion will often burst the budget, or it's overlooked altogether. And I do commend anyone who manages to combine artistic brilliance in an engaging game.
Sorry for replying so late.

As long as the tax revenue isn't spent on directly contradictory pursuits (tax breaks for SUVs or something) the increase in costs will do its job no matter how stupidly the government spends money.

I think we should just blow it all on a space elevator personally but that's why I'm not in office I suppose.
Some more hints:
http://events.ccc.de/2008/12/30/the-cat-is-out-of-the-bag/
CodeClimber: Insertion Sort
H-M doesn't necessitate an object system, but that will work in OCaml's, specifically. See the Duck Typing section here: http://enfranchisedmind.com/blog/2008/04/14/useful-things-ab...
Second Life monetizing at 5x higher than other casual MMOGs
The Intern's Picks: December 30th
Emacs can be very visual if you use ECB (check http://emacsonrails.drozdov.net screencast for an example):

a) A directory tree b) a list of source files in the current directory c) a list of functions/classes/methods/… in the current file, (ECB uses the Semantic Bovinator, or Imenu, or etags, for getting this list so all languages supported by any of these tools are automatically supported by ECB too) d) a history of recently visited files, e) the Speedbar (directory hierarchy) and f) output from compilation (the “compilation” window) and other modes like help, grep etc. or whatever a user defines to be displayed in this window.
People tend to make simple things too complicated, and also completely misunderstand the market. Netbooks are selling for two reasons:

1. They are small
2. They are cheap

That's it. People want small laptops so they can take them to school, and those same people are the people who don't have money.

The people don't want linux on their laptops. People just want things to work the way they are used to, and that would be either Mac OS or Windows.

I can barely write with a pen anymore. I sure as hell don't want to use a table PC, which is as slow as hell.

The last paragraph however has something interesting - android could very well be the new OS for small PCs, if an app store comes up there, and the google does not control this store too tightly.
Gedit and Erlang.
OpenID Needs to Start Getting Real
Verlet is a very nice simple way to add some basic dynamic behaviour to your world. I've spent many hours playing with it.
Where do those height adjustable desks come from? I'd love to be able to work standing sometimes
New Release : Linux Kernel 2.6.28
So it's the decline of nation-states in favor of even bigger political units. That's opposite the direction I said sounded like wish-fulfillment. :)

Thanks for the pointers!
My basic rule of thumb is that anything you have ever seen sold makes $100,000+ for someone because otherwise it couldn't justify having multiple people devoted to it. Consider bingo cards, for example: Scholastic, a Real Company (TM) which has Real Capital Expenditures (TM) and pays Real Salaries (TM) publishes on-dead-tree bingo cards through stores which habitually do 100% markups over wholesale. So for Scholastic to expend their corporate efforts to author, print, and stock that, it must sell tens of thousands of units per year.

Bingo Card Creator is strictly superior to about half of their bingo products (can't do pictures), costs less at the quantities my teachers use, and has such an astoundingly better cost structure (what, you mean I don't leak 50% of the MSRP to the retailer?) that I'm essentially guaranteed to make money on sales.

After that, it is only a matter of marketing. (He says with a twinkle in his eye.)

Incidentally, I found a niche because someone came up to me and said "Oh bugger I would pay if this problem would go away." When is the last time you talked to someone who wasn't a techy but had money and problems?
You can watch Kahneman's nobel prize lecture online here: http://nobelprize.org/nobel_prizes/economics/laureates/2002/...

It explains the dynamics behind behavioral economics welll and is definitely worth 45 minutes.
I went from Emacs to Textmate and back again: Textmate showed much promise as a modern programmable editor, but as it turns out I work several times faster in Emacs. Time is money and all that.
I stole your karma on stackoverflow :P
http://stackoverflow.com/questions/400299/is-there-an-easy-w...
I found that Coda was incredibly useful for PHP and flat HTML/CSS and hardly useful for anything else.
Smultron (on OS X) for GUI editing, where I typically want a bunch of files open and their names visible at all times, and vim on the command line. On the Mac, one nice thing is that most editors and (S)FTP clients support the ODB Editor Suite, which means that such an editor and transfer agent can work together seamlessly as though they're part of an IDE.
How Buildings Learn and How It Relates to Software
Number 4 is great advice for web startups. Just because it's easier to take shortcuts in programming than it is in construction, doesn't mean it's any less sacrosanct.
Your guide to the best mobile devices
Windows 7 takes shape and a better Vista is in store
I'll fix your computer, but don't have to be nice about it
Does someone know what they are referring to about "commodity x86 servers"? Does this mean Core2 or Opterons? as opposed to Dunnington, Tigertons, or Itaniums?
The endowment effect is causing very serious problems right now.

This is probably the reason why people are unwilling to sell houses at below-bubble prices, even though they would be unwilling to buy at current prices.

If someone figures out how to arbitrage this, they will be rich.
Hottest Windows Downloads of 2008
There were several stand out new applications and softwares which were really useful for windows, and here are some of them which I think are the best ones. They range from traditional Web browsers and browser hybrids to communication tools and utilities that should help you work faster and help to maintain your system. Check out the list below and all of them are freeware.
emacs http://github.com/ki/my-dot-emacs/tree/master/dot-emacs.txt

vim when necessary
I relied on a visual debugger (in Visual Studio) for much of my undergrad. In grad school (including now), I rely on gdb and printf/cout statements to debug my code.

I find printing the value of variables, and saving the record to a file, a valuable means of debugging. Instead of only knowing the current state, I can construct a picture of the entire execution of my program. Gdb also lets me do most of the things I did in Visual Studio. Most importantly, it tells me the line where the program crashed, and if I need to, it can tell me the state of variables.

Notice this has nothing to do with the editor I use (although I use vi). Visual Studio is an Integrated Development Environment - IDE. Once you learn enough Unix tools, Unix itself becomes your IDE.
5 ways to Repair & Recover Damaged CD’s Or DVD’s
http://www.technobuzz.net/repair-recover-damaged-cd's-or-dvd's/

Ever been in situation where you need to install softwares from an old CD-ROM, or perhaps retrieve backups of your works? It must be a frustrating experience when you found out that your data couldn’t be retrieved because the CDs has been scratched. There are so many Softwares are available on the net which will help you to Repair & Recover Damaged CD’s Or DVD’s. Here are some of them for you guys.
Direct from the streets of Gaza - Demotix is the UGC picture agency
Creating a rogue CA certificate with MD5 hash collisions
Today’s Links That Just Make Me Want to Be Better: 12/30/08
Are there people who actually worry about such things? Do they worry about the HVAC systems in their 3500 sq ft houses?
New Twitter Personal Organizer
Advertisers brace for dirt-cheap inventory. Break out the party hats!

spent $6,000 on AdWords in 2008
I'm a huge fan of Coda, have been using it religiously for the past 2 months.
I've read a lot of Steven Pinker's books, and they were all enjoyable. The ones I've read include:
The Language Instinct
How the Mind Works
The Blank Slate
The Stuff of Thought
Yeah I got that. There's a number of possible resolutions, eg selling the widget might be an unnecessary hassle. The problem is we're starting with different sets of premises. As I see it, a rational person considers many factors in the decision to sell good A for $X. The amount he'd pay for it is just one factor & probably the least important one.
I used Komodo Edit on and off. It does have code completion in some languages (my experience is with Javascript). It also does code folding, among other things.

I found it to be generally useful, and the mixed mode syntax highlighting work well (actually, for my situation, it handled it better than any other editor). It isn't as fast as other editors, though. The project explorer can be particularly slow.
Interesting. I work about a block away from that office; I take the 4/5 to Bowling Green every morning and usually walk past 55 B'way once or twice a week.

Knowing that Fog Creek is so close is tempting me to send in my resume... :)
People work way too hard on these analyses, just compare the price. The cheaper one is better for the environment.

Edit, sorry should have added this before: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=346912 explains my statement (so I don't have to retype it).
Brighkite Integrates with Facebook
Great point! Except that the study of human behavior is used to manipulate humans, such that these successful instincts are actually not optimal or do not benefit the person in many situations. That in itself is part of social evolution, which in itself is studied, which itself is part of social evolution...
I do a lot of day job programming in ColdFusion (no, really), and CFEclipse does the best job with handling ColdFusion code, Javascript, HTML, and CSS in a single file (Komodo Edit, using PHP mode, does a pretty good job, too, but it's a bit slow). Initially, I didn't want to switch because many of the keybindings I was used to weren't there, but after spending some time configuring the IDE, I use it for everything (including editing SQL scripts).
"30 minutes spent reordering your queue in a well-lit, climate-controlled room with the computer running"

They're assuming a lot to come to that conclusion. What about 15 minutes spent (because that's all it takes) on Netflix on my laptop in my CF light bulb lit room that isn't climate controlled?
At the moment, the laptop market is dominated by two kinds of machines: a bunch of cheap netbooks that don't do much, and a bunch of expensive Apple notebooks that do a lot and do it very well.

Huh? Oh, okay:

(Seven of the top 25 best-selling laptops on Amazon are MacBooks.)

Word to the wise, Slate: Serious people don't buy laptops on Amazon.com. newegg's bestsellers consists of computers of roughly equal or greater power of MacBooks:

http://www.newegg.com/Product/ProductList.aspx?Submit=ENE...
By your (hopefully sarcastic/tongue-in-cheek) logic, oil is a green fuel as it's cheaper (currently) than solar/wind/geo-thermal.
steelcase :)
He brought up every "doom and gloom" scenario except the feared and scarce-mentioned-aloud "man-bear-pig".

Neither the Pakistan-India nor the Israel-Palestine situation is beyond hope of being solved.

The planet is resilient, and with proper policy making, the Arctic ice will return.

The economy is in recession to be sure, but recessions have happened before, and a good Keynesian approach to it should work - as Nixon said, "we are all Keynesians now".

So while Mr. Ebert continues to warn us about the perils of man-bear-pig and the like, I think the rest of us should think about good, practical solutions, to real, solvable problems. Hysteria doesn't get us anywhere. Smart policy does, and frankly I think the President-elect is on the right track so far.
It's good to see a great idea with a solid business strategy.
What are the chances that HN will avoid creating many threads about this conflict? It's really off-topic here (if it happens).

As for as this "new" tech goes. You are going to get a massive number of doctored photos - so many that the value of the site is basically zero.

The "idea" of paying them for the photos is useless - they don't really care, all they want is for the world to see, and for that there already is flicker.

So this site is nothing new, and with the problems they will have with forgery, it's DOA.
This looks pretty cool/handy. I signed up to test it out (twitter=NotoriousBRK)

I created something similar for personal use a long while back that I could access from my Palm VII to keep track of all the stuff I can't seem to keep track of :)
I couldn't care less whether the small fish get media coverage or not. What buoyed my spirits is that there are market players that make a comfortable living from web app development - which means there's a chance for the rest of us too ;)
No not sarcastic. Except for pollution the cheaper one really is better for the environment. Please read my post I just linked.

Building a windmill, or solar panels (not sure about geo-thermal) costs a tremendous amount of resources, and energy. So yes, except for CO2 emissions oil actually can be better for the environment. Do please remember that there is more to the environment than CO2. It takes at least 10-15 years for a windmill to pay back it's environmental costs. And for solar panels it's something like 30 years (infinity actually since they don't last that long).
@goodkarma, you might try Rightscale management platform. It will give you access to a number of public AMIs with that stack.
Seriously?

When the depression hits, the one benefit is that crap like this will go on the back burner.
Fellow blogger Allen Stern shares some of the same concerns about OpenID. “It’s more likely that the average Internet user will understand the Facebook Connect process than the OpenID process. This is why OpenID must focus on marketing and usability more than technical standards at this time,” he writes.

Yeah, all OpenID needs is some Ronco Spray-On Usability!

http://daringfireball.net/2004/04/spray_on_usability
Customers give Amazon.com, Netflix top ratings
"When is the last time you talked to someone who wasn't a techy but had money and problems?"

This should be bold, highlighted and underscored - talk, talk, talk to non tech people with problems and money - problems are everywhere.
Not only that, but you being in a climate-controlled room and the computer running is a sunk cost. You'd be doing something else anyway.

On the other hand, a typical blockbuster store, well-lit, climate-controlled is not.
It works for me, pretty cool. Suggest you find some way to let one person be the photographer and the other the subject. Let the person with the webcam just sit there and the other person click when to take the picture and add effects. Maybe add basic paint functionality so they can add horns / moustache. Then share. Have to make it web 2.0 after all ;-)
Developer: You can't force things on the market
I guess one obvious great feature of CSSEdit is that it's immediately apparent that you can use it to... dynamically edit CSS. It's in the name and everything!

Whereas I'm not sure I'd have realized that you can edit the CSS in a Firebug document if I hadn't clicked on the right-hand panel accidentally one day. Or maybe that's one of the things I picked up from watching John Resig demo something. They should ship a copy of John Resig along with Firebug.

If I remember right, CSSEdit also has a generally clearer UI than Firebug, and of course it actually saves your experiments rather than requiring you to switch to emacs to make them permanent, which might actually be a bigger workflow improvement than I imagine. Maybe I'll try it out some more.
FOSS community mourns the loss of Thiemo Seufer [Debian, binutils, MIPS-Linux, and QEMU]
Off topic, but that's a sweet sweet bike.
When I was packing up my college dorm room at the end of senior year, I found a typed short story and started reading. It was the most peculiar sensation, because it read like I had written it, but I didn't remember writing it. Then I realized (i.e., noticed the heading and saw) that it was my brother's story. Three years apart, we'd picked the same kind of IB senior English project and attempted to write in the style of the same author, and our writing (though in very different stories) was very, very similar.
Did anyone else parse this story as "Why hasn't anyone offered us $500 billion yet?"
Klok - Personal Time Tracking Made Easy
Open Source Monitoring App.: Pandora FMS
Second best offices I've seen.

At Bowdoin College the CS professors have offices with an awesome view and a shower and bathroom in each office.
Get an ipod touch and use your wifi
Digg and Facebook both have pretty good revenue. They just have stupidly high costs.
I recently switched to emacs from textmate/vim. I still use vim for small configuration files.

There is a recent peepcode on emacs and rails. http://peepcode.com
I say that naive, brute force methods on modest datasets will generate huge memory and CPU requirements. The solution is either: waste some programmer time coding a better solution, or get better hardware/operating system. There's a tradeoff. Modern programming is super wasteful by the standards of 30 years ago. We traded computer ressources for programming convenience. There's still a lot of that to be done before we have all the convenience we want.

Computers will be fast enough when I can do arithmetic with Church numerals.
Ideally, price would completely capture that information. Of course, in reality, pollution imposes a cost on others, but it's hard to calculate the external cost, because, like crime, the cost isn't paid by the decision-maker, and unlike crime, the actual cost is very small (individually).

In any case, there's no way to actually avoid all costs being imposed on others from your actions (waste heat, if nothing else), so it's unclear to me what's to be done about it.
Don’t Listen to Me
OpenID Foundation Board Election Results Announced
I'm guessing this is an app to help fill the hole left by I Want Sandy?

Izak30, I think the site is broken right now. I never received a message from the tweetnote bot when I signed up. I logged backed in and it looked like my account was working.

I tried sending a direct message, which caused a flood of failure messages to be sent to my twitter account. I also tried submitting a message to the contact us page, and got an error.
I see this as just a logical result of combining interest and understanding of the subconscious, which was first seen roughly a century ago, with capitalism from a consumer's perspective.

I agree with the "Predictably" part of "Predictably Irrational". Of course people are irrational while they desperately maintain a proud veneer of rationality, we've known for quite awhile now. Their conclusions are pretty predictable, but I do appreciate that they've done these studies and tested it in a variety of situations.

A strong will is increasingly becoming a human being's best tool for improving their daily lives. It seems like more and more pitfalls are being deliberately engineered in society that encourage us to abandon our self-control.
A thousand thank yous for having a .emacs file that has been commented so well and is so easily understandable.
Without wanting to sound negative, you've assumed that family names represent families.

This might have been true 50 or 100 years ago, but now many families are non-nuclear. It isn't unusual for a family to include three different last names. By overlooking this, you're alienating your potentials.
so techruch is 50% off ? :)
Gears Of War Creator On Gaming's Future
Good point about putting up with crap. I've definitely made that mistake.

And it is worth confirming that you shouldn't start your own company just because the coffee at your current jobs is crap.

But I have to disagree on clean code. I've seen Uncle Bob speak, he is very convincing but 90% of the time he's preaching to the choir.

As hard as it is to believe there are plenty of places that will actively prevent you from turning out anything other then crap. It's hard to image if you have not worked in it yourself, but it definitely exists.

And obviously ditch digging isn't the only option, you could teach programming at a local community college or whatever.

But coding 8+ hrs at work and then coding some more at home is something I've never been able to do.
In the real world there are transaction costs - but for most people in the example given (college students selling event tickets) they don't come anywhere near $1000.
Ah! Thanks..I'm not seeing what caused you not to get the message, I ran over my API limit though.

I reworked the contact page and the direct message thing, so you don't get a million messages if there is a mistake.
Textmate had competition long before it existed. Try ViM and Emacs.
His book "The Knack" which is basically a chapter devoted to each of these topics is a great read.
I suppose you're right...

Although it does seem weird. Cuil has always seemed to be far more of a flip company than Powerset ever was. It seems mighty difficult to sell a customer on "Our search is just like Google's, but we have fewer servers!" The Google name has way too much power for a geek-appeal like that to work.

Calling a flip company successful when it hasn't flipped at all seems weird to me.
The psychiatrist Hannibal Lecter had a particular gripe with people who were rude. The empitomy of gentility and politeness himself, he did not tolerate rudeness. Life has enough problems, and petty people who don't respect their fellow human beings only add to these problems. Frankly I'm with Dr. Lecter on this one.
In my experience, I've never seen outright examples of corruption. Even fairly powerful folks like Arrington were always very fair with us so long as we were fair with them. Heck, even the mean uncov guys didn't have many mean things to say, so they didn't say much at all.

I think that the list we're discussing here is more of an example of Gross Incompetence. I think we can all agree we've seen examples of that. :)
We use Fogbugz too and like it (though Pivotal Tracker is calling our names...). In my anecdotal experience, many of the people who think it's ugly and unusable got this impression from earlier versions. It's improved a bit over the last few years. Not to say that it doesn't have room to go, but it's not that bad anymore.