skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
"Years ago, I went to the AOL partner's conference. I'm no runner (unless someone is chasing me) yet I signed up for the early morning run because I knew Steve Case, CEO of AOL, would be running. I ran with him for twenty minutes, almost killed myself".
Seth Godin the Movie has light comedy potential. A shaven headed Jim Carey for the lead?
"this also works out well for those who prefer using the keyboard to navigate links in a page. ( yup, vi/emacs does that to ppl ! )"

I am a keyboard junkie and I have no problem with Hacker News. I just use the amazing Vimperator extension which adds vim keybindings to Firefox. So to open a link in a new tab I just press "F" to activate quickhints, which displays a number beside each link, then I type the number of the link I want. (Or I can type some text that is contained in the <a> tag). http://vimperator.org

Ultimately this is a browser UI issue, not a Hacker News issue.
I dont think its niche, it seems like the core use case is opening the site and reading through a pick of the front page articles, in that case opening in a new window saves either half the clicks, or having to press back all the time (as long as the article isnt interesting enough to click through further)
It doesn't matter to me whether they needed the equivalent of a netbook to drive the thing; it matters whether it delivers $250 worth of value. I'm not sure. At that price point, there are too many substitutes to consider.

I'll say this: if the iPhone came in this form factor, there'd be a $3.99 app that would log the contents of your pantry, submit Peapod/Urbangrocer orders, and aggregate/display all viable recipes from Cooks Illustrated. Tapulous would make $2,000,000 off it in their first year. And I'd buy a Picwing to get it.

Not there yet, unless I'm missing something.
just curious, why?

I mean this isnt 5 years ago and sites are opening obtrusive windows that fill up the taskbar and ruin your history
"I couldn't represent the behavior or thought process of a computer-illiterate in code."

That's what the job of a computer scientist is, translate from real world process to computer program. Maybe it isn't a one to one correspondence like spoken to written English but if someone tells you they need a program to track employee time and they need to sign in and sign out you can write that right?
Well it's hard to discuss this topic in rational terms. I'm quite sure the trolls were watching.
Sure, and I appreciate the advice, but it's not rocket science.

I already have http://www.mibbit.com/networks/ (Work in progress) which is a complete browsable list of networks and channels, with topic info etc etc. As well as being hugely useful for users, it's obviously useful for ranking on searches.
For example, if someone searches for "freenode", mibbit has some good results there.

A solid example: Search google for "freenode javascript". Mibbit is result number 3. I'm happy with that...

I repeat. SEO is not rocket science, it's simple best practices for end users.
hey, thanks for the tip...
It's just annoying. If I want to open a new window, I'll do that myself by cmd-clicking or some variant of that.
In firefox, middle-click will open a new tab.
1. Ctrl-Click or the equivalent for your browser.

2. http://userscripts.org/scripts/show/36606 There are other Greasemonkey scripts like this.

3. https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/379 There are other extensions like this.

4. Write your own ff extension or gm script.

5. Just use backspace or Alt-LeftArrow.
"after studying philosophy I centered on a pragmatic philosophy."

That sounds as if studying philosophy convinced you that philosophy is useless ;-) But I admit that I don't have any idea what "pragmatic philosophy" is.
I'm not sure whether the limited gov support for entrepreneurs / making computer languages for education harder analogy quite works. Namely, the latter is a taught course, therefore it needs outside quality control, whereas enterprise is more of a journey - thus posing the question of can entrepreneurialism be regulated at all. I agree with the serial entrepreneur, but for a different reason - I don't believe governments should be involved in the enterprise space in general. Governments should concentrate on keeping the general infrastructure working -transport, energy, education - and then entrepreneurs will make things happen. In the UK, our prime minister Gordan Brown is heavily involved in promoting enterprise, but I wish he would focus less on having his picture taken with successful entrepreneurs and concentrate on tackling our public transport problems which can make me late for meetings with potential clients unless I budget in 2-hours safety time.
Actually, I find C-w more annoying in web browsers. In emacs, I have it bound to backward-kill-word, and use it almost as much as backspace.

In firefox, the results are not too good. The tab dies, taking the entire textbox with it. Annoying.

The moral of the story is to not use software other than emacs. I use Gnus for mail and w3m for light web browsing, eliminating any problem with keybinding emulation. It is emacs, so it acts like emacs.

For heavier web browsing, I use conkeror. It is almost like emacs, but not quite. Better than anything else, though.
I use ctrl+click, works for me and firefox :P
FogBugz rocks. I've been using it for almost three years - the last year using the Fog Creek hosted version - and I couldn't be happier.

As mentioned, you can give it POP access to your support account and it will auto-respond to your customers (optionally) and also create a new "case" for you to track the issue. It makes it dead simple to follow a thread all the way through until it's resolved.

You can also see the history of previous cases opened by the same person which can be very helpful. FogBugz also includes a wiki to help share information internally, the same forum software that runs the BoS forums over on Joel's site, and some pretty cool project mgmt features that I personally don't use, but could see the value in if I had a bigger team.

I know not everyone drinks the Joel Kool-aid, but FogBugz is pretty slick. I'd say it's worth checking out, especially if you quality for their free plan for students/startups. http://www.fogcreek.com/FogBugz/StudentAndStartup.html
I find it amusing that OS X has the best GNU-style keybinding support of any of the major OSes. I tried using emacs-style keybindings in Gtk+, but it just doesn't work as well as Apple's implementation.

That's OK, though, because I don't leave emacs very often ;)
I would like to really sink my teeth into OCaml or Haskell.
Hey, don't downmod me, downmod the OP. He's the one who posted up a closed question that can be answered with a 2 to 3 letters... :-)
Middle click FTW!
So does anyone feel like explaining why my opinion that this was a good write up was worth voting out?
On Windows you can use control+click and on a Macintosh you can use command+click.
Some of the people contributing to this discussion are clearly not trolls, judging from the leaderboard.

Look, I agree: this wasn't Hacker News. Not my point. There should be a "mechanical_fish" rule: if you can't kill not-Hacker-News before mechanical_fish comments, you live with the topic on Hacker News.
A few years ago, would they have responded to "smart frame"? Why be limited in a name (if they can use it) by the poor technologies of others?

Life frame? Live frame? Living frame?
I have... Commission Junction, LinkShare, Share-a-sale. They work well - but it's very important to create a good offer, 30-45% is good.

Also, good banners are important.

Each network has a different reach & size. Shareasale is small and Linkshare is extra large while Commission Junction is right in the middle - but has the highest quality members (in my opinion).

All in all - Affiliate Programs are only as effective as you make them, I suggest you spend money on landing page optimization, retargeting & click tracking in conjunction with Affiliate Marketing.
No no, it's much more interesting to read about what color shirt the guy wears. I mean, that's pretty important, and is clearly the key to Amazon's success.
Your best bet would be to partner with an existing affiliate network who already have thousands of affiliates ready to promote your product. This is a better approach because if you create an in-house affiliate program, you are going to have to market that too.

Message me (AIM: ofchowdhury) and I can point you in the right direction.
Not sure I get it. 2,000 units at $50k doesn't seem like a model "for the masses". This model should start by building a car like the cheap Tata Nano car.
This one is even better:

Raise your hand if you have iTunes ...

Raise your hand if you have a FireWire port ...

Raise your hand if you have both ...

Raise your hand if you have $400 to spend on a cute Apple device ...

There is Apple's market. Pretty slim, eh? I don't see many sales in the future of iPod.
I'm a big fan of what they've done. Those MySociety People are really making some neat stuff.
All hail the QuickDrag Firefox extension. Just grab the link and throw it; no keyboarding involved, or trying to press down on the scroll wheel.
The real gain is that I can find interesting things without wading through the crap on Reddit, and read comments from the news.YC community.

I think this article was fine.
Yep, high affiliate payout is smart. Some affiliate marketers are really cheap. Who wants to push a $20 product for a 10% commission? Not me, but kick it up to 50% and now we can have a conversation.
Another good one from Seth. I'd add that one of the best ways to meet the kind of people who want to help you is to be helpful yourself. It's the whole "giver's gain" thing. The more you put yourself out there and try to help folks, the more they'll want to help you too.
A Ponzi scheme is only doomed if you can't continually find more new investors. As long as you can continually find people to put money in, you have no problem and can continue infinitely. They aren't inherently mathematically doomed.

For example, the Social Security system in the US is nothing more than a Ponzi scheme. We all pay for the previous generation(s). In fact, the original beneficiaries didn't have to pay in at all. It isn't a system where the government takes money we pay in at 25 and saves it in an interest bearing account for when we retire. No, they use our money at 25 to pay for the retirement of someone who is currently retired.

Of course, this has also shown cracks - as we moved past the baby boomer generation, there are fewer people paying in and more people taking out which has gotten us into our current mess. That's where a Ponzi scheme breaks. In fact, that's why the US government will have to do something (either charging young people more money or reducing benefits to old people) because the Ponzi nature of it doesn't work with the reduction of inflows and increase of outflows that we're seeing.

Likewise, a similar scheme was instituted by many of the auto manufacturers. They took on obligations with the assumption that future workers/sales could pay for it as their market share ever increased and they would have ever increasing profits. It works, unless the ever increasingness stops.

Heck, if you wanted to successfully run an investment scheme, make it a retirement scheme. The problem with a Ponzi scheme is that people can withdraw. Offer a retirement scheme to people 30 and under and you can just pocket the money for long enough to get away.

Heck, stick the money in a few index funds which average 10% per year and charge a 1-2% management fee each year on the total account value. Oh, wait. That's legal and widely done.
I am also impressed with Amazon's other offerings, like the order fulfillment service. As a programmer, it bugs me to see people solving the same simple problem again and again; in this case filling a warehouse with packages, and paying someone to stick a mailing label on it. With Amazon, that problem is solved -- they store your stuff and send it out, freeing you up to do something that's never been done before.

The "cloud" services are the same. Instead embarking on a year-long project to build Yet Another Data Center, you can just bust out your credit card and start uploading your files.

Very meta, and very efficient.
Seems kind of like "The Homer":

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oh_Brother,_Where_Art_Thou%3F#T...
More emphasis on training, and less on education per ce, would be more helpful for economic growth. So, instead of various loans and so on to help people get a four year degree in say, ancient Sumerian languages, offer loans for people to get tech certifications in things like networking and so on, things, in other words, that actually benefit the economy. If the United States wants to compete in technology and engineering, a greater emphasis on tech training and certifications is needed. Higher education still applies as a need in things like chemistry, medicine, and physics, and so on, but in the engineering fields, tech certifications could fill a void.

We have two problems: a lack of prowess in sciences and maths, and a lack of prowess in engineering. More opportunities for tech training by way of trade schools, certification programs and the like, can fill a void in engineering. However quality degree programs are still needed to fill the gap in producing people skilled at the maths and sciences. Basically, the chief scientist of your company still benefits I would say from having a Ph.D, but your average Joe-hacker probably only needs a few training courses in whatever language he is working on. So there is some truth to the "faking it" idea, but not complete truth I think.
It has it's own e-mail address?

Great - what happens when a prankster starts mailing Goatse to my living room?
Try clicking both of your mousekeys on your laptop at the same time (put your finger in the middle). With some drivers, this simulates a middle-key-click (opens in a new tab)
Disrupting Class and Playing Games
Ah. That would have been the easy way. I figured it out because xlnt stopped commenting on the same day that qqq started.

Edit: Besides, there can't be that many people who go on about Godwin, Burke, and Feynman.
This post may be of your interest:

http://dot-me.of-cour.se/2008/12/15/lately-etc/
Someone quick! Find a phone and call captain obvious.
Why not just write a GreaseMonkey script to do this? Simple enough...
My position is the government should make things neither easier nor harder for startups. Let natural selection do its thing. Startups that have marketable memes will raise the capital they need. Startups without such memes will not. The extremes of dishing out tax payer money on grants to questionable startups often just wastes money the government could otherwise use for things like paying down the deficit. The extremes of "squelching" business works in a negative direction as well, because it hurts the GNP. I think the government should neither give hand-outs to startups, nor should they work against business, such as in the anti-trust suit against Microsoft. The government should live and let live when it comes to startups and software companies in general, and let natural selection do its thing.
SIRIUS S50 Executive Leather Case SPECK 
Magnetic front closure doubles as a docking flap No need to remove the case when you dock at home or in the car Black leather case comes with a removable swivel belt clip. SIRIUS S50
stupid/passionate (who will probably need to put in extra time)

I think this view ignored the correlation between "put in lots of time" and "smart". All of the smart people I know have usually put in an extraordinary amount of time studying whatever they are good at.
I think the bug is that finding the right answers is considered important. There is no such thing as a "right answer" unless you can prove it's right. If you don't understand the concepts, you can't know that you got the right answer.

(Then, in "real life", you are really on your own. If you are doing something new and original, you won't know if you are right immediately. You have to convince yourself by applying what you've learned. The answers to test questions, in this case, are completely meaningless. I don't think enough people realize that.)
Err, first sentence was supposed to end "... and still, the students fail".
Totally agree, I'm not sure how the price figures were calculated. It seems like it would take millions of dollars just to go through the testing to make a car street legal. This is one of the nice barriers to entry the major automakers have. I'm guessing this kind of stuff will end up being more for rich enthusiasts, racing and private track cars.
Take something like day trading, where a company is out of all positions at/after the close each day. Every transaction they engage in is zero-sum. No wealth is being created, but tons of people are wasting time on it (destroying potential wealth).

I don't think the case of day trading is covered by the baseball player analogy.
Great idea! Is there a Safari version planned?
If the newspapers were the sort of organizations who would pick up on a breakthrough idea that came from a lowly programmer employee, they probably wouldn't be on death's door in the first place. What we're talking about is much more likely to come from informal cross-pollination between communities. I looked at the website you linked to but didn't see anything like this.
Haha, I want a horn, here, here, and here! It seems like one of the big issues with crowd sourced design is filtering out the garbage. Go to a site like Zazzle and look at the galleries and there is a ton of amateurish design. Car design is an interesting field cause there is such a grass roots enthusiast community that have really spectacular skills. The signal to noise ratio in this gallery is really high.
We tried. COMPLETE WASTE OF TIME. Biggest waste of time in Fog Creek history. All that time would have been better spent adding features to make our products better to get more customers.
Dotcoma, which one? Open Source? I tend to agree, so many things get labeled OS that it starts to lost a bit of its meaning. Code is code, but when you start getting into atoms things change. Sure, I can take plans, but supplier relationships, manufacturing, logistics all change the game with physical products.
You do realize that sentence was a joke, right?
"Unlike other Lisps (and Schemes) you may have encountered before, Clojure comes with some interesting additions: [...]
Many pre-built data structures, like Vectors, Maps, Sets, Collections, …"

Here I stopped reading.
rrhyne, they are allowing people to set up accounts and requiring it for people to vote. It may not be the most polished site, but I don't think its a parody.
Why not just do it with an object of letter -> width key/pairs? then...

fontWidth(word) {
return sum(map(word.split(''), function (l) letterWidth[l]));
}

I bet it would be faster in firefox.
I disagree about starting students on assembly. Assembly exposes all the implementation details on how we got computers to work efficiently, and exposes none of the theoretical basis for computation. Obviously you need to know both eventually, but to get started, I think it's a better idea to build on the mathematics students already know.

Say you want to print 2+2. In assembly, you have to put a two in two certain registers, then call add, then call a routine to convert the number 4 to the string "4\0", then find a file descriptor, then signal the OS that you want to make a system call (fwrite), ...

That is not a good way of teaching how computation works. The details in this case are arbitrary and irrelevant; there is no reason a computer has to distinguish between the string "4" and the result of adding 2 and 2.
People keep calling social security a ponzi scheme, but it's not. For the simple reason that it's not trying to make a profit - it's trying to give back to people the same amount of money they put in.

It's more of a forced investment than anything else, with the variation of having the money skip a generation.

The difference is that if all you do is give people the exact same amount of money they put in, you can run forever. All you need is a buffer of some kind.
I think this project is especially exciting given the state of the US auto industry. We are a long way from seeing anything valuable come out of this, but some innovation in this space is greatly in need. An Ubuntu flavored station wagon would be a nice change of pace in this rigid industry.
My main guess: people feel that commenting "this is good" is redundant to an upvote. Why use 14 words -- including puffery like "worthy of anyone's reading eyes regardless of generation" -- when you've already expressed your recommendation through a one-click upvote?

Or possibly: Since there's no article downvote, the easiest way to express a strong opinion that the article is awful is to downvote comments praising it as 'great'.
It would be hard to find a 10-year stretch post Great Depression with less regulation on banks. Here's a video that was on CSPAN of the former CEO of Wells Fargo, with a detailed breakdown of every regulation that was lifted since he started (with Citigroup, if I remember from when I saw this on TV) in the 70's:

http://fora.tv/2008/10/21/Richard_Kovacevich_Evolution_of_th...
Trailer for "first" crowdsourced movie
Sorry if this comes across as spam, but I'm psyched that our little website hit one of its major goals.

When we launched Massify two years ago, our goal was to make a movie through the website - from picking the story to casting the film to the film's poster - everything happened and was decided on-line, through the site.

Well, we've done it and the film is finally coming out :) The trailer is here:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5P-2rXS5LS4

Will be in theaters Jan 9th-15th and then straight to DVD after that.

Big shout out to all the peeps in #startups :)
The site is here: http://massify.com/
Why? It's a nice adition to the language and makes using it a much better experience.

My first big project in LISP was making a Sudoku solver for a school project. Could only use basic instructions and lambdas. It was not pleasant trip :P
Microsoft Gives Windows XP Its 17,326nd New Lease on Life
How can you possibly refute his argument intellectually without working towards a solution in some way? Knowing that it's not true now is an improvement to what was known then. By philosophizing against it, you gain a more concrete understanding of the problem and are, subsequently, closer to providing a solution.
I'm curious if anyone has any experience with Io (http://iolanguage.com/). The description sounds like an appealing combination:

Its unusual, minimalist and yet elegant and powerful syntax reminds of Smalltalk, but the language goes far beyond that. Io is an object-oriented, prototype-based, message-based and fully-reflective programming language. This means that you use messages like in Smalltalk, you create objects like in Javascript and every bit of your code can be inspected and passed around as you see fit.
Correct. Best practices are that you do not force your users into any particular browsing habit. Keep it consistent and do not open things in _blank that do not absolutely require it.

There are a million tools for users to control their browsing experience ... in the browser. Do not force it in your application.
Why not just convert it to a PDF?

http://www.msi.umn.edu/software/tex/help/pdf.html