skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
The lead-in to the article (and real meat) was a bit long and tough to read through. Neat stuff overall however, can't wait to see the follow up studies.
For anyone who uses Visual Studio, here's an accompanying vsdoc for jquery-1.3:
http://blogs.ipona.com/james/archive/2009/01/14/jquery-1.3-a...
I think it was a combination of things. If I remember correctly, AIM was an AOL subscription exclusive in the beginning so only the dopes on there were using it. The cool kids were on ICQ and I think there were very few AOL users willing or able to use a separate chat client.

Anyway, AOL eventually opened up AIM to everyone and people started using it. It was easier. AIM used screennames. ICQ was cool because you could use any name you wanted but the actual user id was an 8 or 9 digit number (mine was 36915037- not sure why I remember that). It was a total pain in the ass when you wanted to add people to your friend list. Plus, on ICQ you had to receive approval from a user to add them to your buddy list and on AIM you could just add people. Sometimes, you'd sit there in pending approval purgatory wondering if you added the right person with those crazy user id's. AIM was just plain easier.

ICQ had more features and more users, but it was just easier for a lot of them to use AIM so they could chat with their dopey friends who were still using AOL. Meanwhile, AIM was updated with new features frequently and marketed heavily. ICQ still remained relatively popular, but they really sat on their asses over there. After a while AIM caught up and even experimented with video and voice chat while ICQ stayed the same for years.

Eventually, AOL purchased ICQ and basically put it out to pasture. Still, it managed to stick around for a long time. I'm not sure they were expecting that. It's the technology that just won't die.
The reseller price for the Intel X-25M solid state disk seemed to be in line with what Newegg was charging, and there is a huge difference in write performance between the Intel MLC disks and everything else on the market right now. Some of the other MLC disks have such latency problems with random writes that they can cause your OS to panic.

You are right that there is going to be a big price drop, though. Samsung will have an Intel competitor with larger capacity on the market soon, and that's just the beginning.
You assume that nationalizing health insurance will lower the cost without having too large a negative effect on quality. Or, like most people who advocate nationalized things, you assume that people above you on the income scale will be subsidizing your consumption.

Not all of these things are necessarily true.
Read Robert D. Austin's book Measuring and Managing Performance in Organizations (http://www.dorsethouse.com/books/mmpo.html) for an absolutely devastating analysis of this problem.
Web site design affects how children process information
My best friend came up with a system that saves the company he worked for around $100,000 a year. His boss took notice and gave him two free tickets to a movie theater. He quit that afternoon. He told me a sincere thank you would have been ok. He was getting paid to work there already after all. The token bonus was taken as an insult, as if that was the value of his contribution. If you give a bonus make sure it matches the value of the action. If you can't measure the contribution in dollars, find some reward that isn't in dollars.
Good points for those building (or thinking of building) web apps focusing on educational content for children.

Although these points probably apply to adults, as well.
I've got a great secret trick for the astute kindle owner - read it on paper!
DC power poised to bring savings to datacenters
I've found that for people with an analytical mindset like me, there are a few different stages of how to approach people who respond to feelings rather than reasoning.

1. Ignorance: I was in this stage for a long time, which meant that I considered other people to be stupid when they reacted in a way that seemed illogical or unreasonable to the situation.

2. Changing the other person: I'm still in this stage quite frequently, especially with my girlfriend; I realise that she responds to thing differently than I do, but I perceive my intrepretation of issues as the correct one and attempt to change her view by arguing with her. Usually to no avail.

3. Humility and compassion: Once in a while, I realise that everyone (including me) has got some emotional baggage, childhood experiences etc. that almost nobody can hold a "correct" or "logical" view of things, and the only way I can respond effectively to them is to actually listen to what they have to say and try to express the emotions that I feel when interacting with the other person.

The third one is hard, because I have grown up perceiving emotional people as weak, considering reasoning and an analysis to be superior to "feelinsg", but I've come to learn that if you really want to get to know other people, you have be open and flexible with your own emotions.
In other news, Youtube-clone video sites suddenly rise in popularity.

Youtube doesn't have anything in particular that makes it unique--they're competing in a market among many video sites that are equal if not far superior to them from a technical perspective and they have already lost in many parts of the world.

See Nico Nico Douga in Japan, for example, which outcompeted Youtube with a unique interface, better attention to their specific target audience, and a more effective revenue model. They're breaking even--something not even Youtube can say yet.

Changes like this, even if one can justify them by saying they are "forced by the record companies," will simply accelerate Youtube towards irrelevance in more and more markets. Youtube isn't like, say, World of Warcraft--anyone using the site can literally just pick up all their uploaded videos and leave at a cost of nothing to themselves. This is what makes changes like that described in this article so dangerous.

No, Youtube isn't about to go away, or even lose significant popularity, but huge sites like Youtube don't die overnight--they lose niche audiences one by one.
How the World Works: Poison solar
apply for YC!
There is definitely a demand for those "fluff" skills that many engineers like myself cannot fulfill. There are many great careers out there that don't require math beyond the high school level. Don't look down upon them just because they have passions in other areas.
apparently he doesn't know how to REALLY learn in college yet (but it's fairly tricky nowadays you have to admit)
The big question for me that I haven't seen discussed is whether or not I can update to 1.3 on an existing site using 1.2.6 without something breaking. Does any core functionality change that requires rewriting code
Any pointers as to why suddenly there has been such an improvement in water simulation effects? Is it just that computers have become faster, or have some nifty algorithm ideas emerged in recent times? Even the iBeer stuff impressed me.
As a undergraduate bonus, one might learn an additional verb/adjective/noun to use when expressing one's dissatisfaction.
Dumb materials that do smart things
Ask HN: Software for running a school newspaper?
I've found myself the web editor of the school paper at my college. It's being resurrected from a long slumber, and I'm building both a web edition of the publication and something that can be used as a backend for submitting articles and having them pass from writers to copy editors to general editors to the layout people.

Money for software isn't a concern, but I have a preference for OSS. Right now, we're leaning toward a Wordpress-based front and and a private MediaWiki to manage articles and so on. Something more elaborate (hey, what's Django for, right?) and customized is not out of the question too. What do you think about this? What would you use if it were your project?
You know, when I wrote that comment I actually wrote out a list of who thinks that education equals job training: government, industry, educators (so-called), media... then I thought "this is crazy" and just put in "our society". I don't see how anyone can argue that there isn't a massive consensus around this. Your own story confirms it.

Certainly it's possible to deviate from the consensus, at least up to a point, and I'm all in favor of doing so.
Yes. $80k spread over your life after college is 2k a year at most. So what? Fluctuations in taxes based on who is in power are going to effect your personal bottom line a lot more than that.

Especially when you don't have to pay $80k much less $160k. I paid $10,000 over 4 years. I worked hard enough in high school that every college I applied to wanted to let me come for free, and all I had to do was pay for food and my car. If you are really hard working, don't apply to MIT or the Ivy's and put yourself in debt, just go to a good state school for free.
Google's Real Fight in China
Nay, according to his linkedIn profile, he's already left google.
When you have to define "fools" as "almost everyone in the world", I'm not sure you have a workable definition.
Great! I thought that MSN being shipped with Windows was really the big problem for ICQ.

By the way, I know 1 or 2 people that still remember their ICQ number... that's odd but it proves how deep ICQ was in their heart.
Especially when you consider the opportunity cost of your five year CD and what played out in other asset classes during that five years.

What other zero-risk asset classes were we comparing against?
Thinkpad T42p 14" with ubuntu 8.10 + 24" LCD with USB hub + keyboard + wireless logitech mouse, + 2 GB RAM

Laptops are like cars - they depreciate the most in the first year or two. Go for a corporate laptop just off the refresh cycle.

- IBM build quality
- fast enough as a decent backup to a desktop
- runs windows in vmware for testing, .net apps
- Ubuntu just works
- good size, weight
- Costs approximately laptop: $350 + LCD $300

Alternately I bought my daughter an MSI Wind with Suse (switched to Ubuntu) and I find myself using it quite frequently. Very light, great build quality + great screen.(Also Mac Compatibility now with the Realtek 8187SE drivers).
Absolutely. I didn't go to university for the big bucks career, I went because I wanted to learn more Physics.
Error Messages in Web Applications & Customers Perceptions
Just some thoughts about customers perceptions of error messages in web applications. The first in a short series on designing Tactful Error Messages for better client conversations.
he created $15B of net worth for his investors, not value. It was a wealth transfer, no net creation.
I would watch it that's for sure, I totally want to know what the deal with the grand canyon is.
You are an idiot if you believe that and will probably always be a CS guy. What does the best programmer make at your company? $200,000? $300,000? So what. Thats pocket change compared to c-level executive pay. The CEO at my company is making $500,000 and he graduated with a communications degree from a college that doesn't even exist any more it was so crappy. What he did do was work his ass off after that for 28 years at the place working from being a salesman, all the way up.

You know what would really impeede you from doing that? Telling everyone else in the company you work with that their degree is inferior to yours.

Especially when we are talking CS, which I don't think anyone can claim is a difficult degree. Physics, Chemistry, real engineering, those are hard. But just because you call yourself a software engineer and you have a BS in CS, doesn't make you an engineer, so get off the high horse.
Right now it is, since many of the competitors to the Kindle (including Sony Reader) do not have any search capability.
Nope! Reread that. Now he's an associate project manager.
But a lot of people make a lot of money off their people skills, and math doesn't matter one bit. Negotiating a big contract takes a lot of skill you may not see, but little math apart from arithmetic.
The company I work for does this sort of practice as well, but in a less direct manner. When the company does really well, eg, a great sales year of new products, all employees receive generous contributions to their 401k based on relative salaries. Probably the best reward I can think of, because it benefits your future; a generous contribution now, especially for the younger employees, can turn into a huge contribution by the time of retirement.
Drupal.

http://drupal.org/nyobserver (though it doesn't have to be this elaborate)
I doubt he is right, but I bet he will be right soon :-/
cool. i'd think that all other issues would be case-by-case instead of general.
The Internet will double in size every 5.32 years
World's Longest Palindrome? 17,826 words (2002)
Why do you think it's so common? I mean, as a lisp/forth guy I can certainly buy the idea that everyone does a stupid thing for a long time, so I could understand if there wasn't a reason, but surely some kinds of high-level optimization are easier if your code has a tree structure, no?
The end of paper
A non-exclusive cheaper alternative:

* Travel.
* Read a *lot* (borrow books, use libraries, read online.)
* Write some.
* Make something happen be it for money or just to help someone else.
There's a classical study from Harvard business review that basically states that incentive and reward schemes don't work. The study found that employees simply focus their effort on the measure of reward instead of trying to do what's best for the company.

If the incentive is measured in turnover sales people will sell at a loss to get their bonus, LOC as an incentive for coders will produce long and crappy code, etc. Whatever the incentive was it turned out that people would game the system and the end result for the company was that compared to a baseline (no compensation besides pay) the results were negative.

http://apj.sagepub.com/cgi/content/abstract/33/2/20 (exec. summary)

A related study (that I can't find the source for right now) found that when asked employees wanted recognition for their work more than anything else. A simple thank you or wow that's awesome works much better than a monetary reward.

So in answer to Joel's question - the fact that he wrote the article and thereby gave lots and lots of public praise is as good a reward as any.
BTW, as the author I can say this without offending myself: lisp deserves a better article. I wrote this fast, a long time ago. Although I think the equality thing is a really big deal, I have different and better reasons now. (article forthcoming).
All of that is detailed in the release notes:
http://docs.jquery.com/Release:jQuery_1.3#Changes

So far most people have had no problems upgrading.
Network analysis of the credit crisis spread
http://arxiv.org/pdf/0901.1392v1
FYI, if you ever find yourself in the situation depicted in the comic:
osascript -e "set volume output volume 100"
You seriously believe that 98% of the NYT expenses are consumed by movie reviews, the crossword guy, and David Brooks? Anyway, the fact is, Seth pulled that number out of his ass, and that is irresponsibly sloppy at best. (And, ironically, an excellent example of the kind of thing editors and fact-checkers are for...)
Autonomous Game Controllers: Playing Katamari with a Random Path Algorithm
However, I think it's more likely that someone in the possession of whistle blower information would contact a prominent blogger than some hot shot Pulitzer-prize winning investigative journalist at NY Times.

Also if there are a lot of bloggers out there, chances are greater that "someone" would feel that they have so little to to lose and lots to win from breaking a controversial story, even though some company would sue them.
I've used Drupal before (for a local political campaign) and it served me well, but we don't have a designer that can get something really nice up layout-wise, while Wordpress has more newspaper- and magazine-type themes than you can count on your fingers and toes. If there were something really nifty that built on Drupal (something similar to Plone's publication control) then I'd seriously consider using it, but for now, Wordpress is the favorite.
Awesome. Thanks john.
Bartz: "Tell Me Why I Shouldn't Fire The Whole Lot Of You"
Flowcharting the trolls
Open source for water and sanitation
What's so wrong with simple profit sharing? The only place I've worked at (or even heard of, for that matter) that implemented a form of true profit sharing was Outback Steakhouse. Servers got tips, so are exempt, but hosts, cooks, and bussing staff got cold hard cash on their next work day that came straight from the profits of the entire restaurant from their previous work day. Simple, effective, and gloriously rewarding.

For an IT shop, each worker's salary/wage sets their base pay and is confidential, while a biweekly or monthly "bonus" check could be the profit sharing reward. In that environment, everyone knows when business is going well and everyone knows when it isn't. Profit sharing can (and should) be open for discussion among all employees.

So, take Joel's example: Noah helps make an additional $1 million in a year for Fog Creek. What's that going to translate into for each employee's profit sharing check? I'll assume that Joel's generous, and that the ads are wonderfully profitable, so let's say an additional $400/mo/employee (average) while the ads are active. Holy shit, Noah, thanks! So, Noah get's more. Noah gets recognitions. Noah's coworkers get more. The company makes more. Hell, even Joel gets to make more. It's win/win/win/win.

And don't get me started on company stock. Stock is fine in many cases, but that's not what successful organizations make. They make money! Share it with the employees. They deserve it. 'Cause here's the thing: If your take-home wage isn't tied to your performance or the performance of the company as a whole, what exactly is everyone's motivation? Oh, sure, some people are going to do a great job no matter what, but that's not what really makes a company great, now is it?
I know why you remember that. Because you have a "eight" digit ICQ number. People at that time used to think that shorter ICQ ID was cooler.
Welcome to HN, where the spam (and unpopular opinion) get down-voted. It's a completely legitimate comment, and one that I also agree with based on his other post substantiating it.

Otherwise, I've noticed the bandwagon downvoting comes once the comment reaches -3 or lower. There's no turning back after that.

It's really no surprise or different from any other social network. People naturally shun the unpopular and form groups.
Bittersweet Trading Losses and Freedom At Last
Open source trading platform could be a win for Wall Street
Yeah, but "the truth" only goes so far before some level of anger, if not cynicism, begins seeping in. Once you get used to this idea that you'll be punished for doing the right thing, either you start deciding that the right thing isn't really right (which I find despicable, but which happens pretty often), or you decide that the system itself is flawed in some way, which is what happened to me.

It's tough to keep yourself an idealist when your parents tell you it's not worth it to get in trouble for things - I suppose they might have had a point, especially since if they did I'd still be too stubborn to cave in to somebody that was wrong - and when you get scolded across the board for what you do. I spent 3 years mainly under the radar at the school, then in my senior year was threatened with suspension three times: once for making a rude gesture at a teacher who over-the-top ranted at me for not standing during the pledge of allegiance, once for telling the teacher in charge of the literary magazine that I was the editor of that the magazine was bad and that he was refusing to fix things, and the last time for posting on Facebook about my dislike of the yearbook magazine (on a private note, of course).

I left still trying to do the right thing, but the result is a profound dislike for that school, despite the excellent handful of teachers that actually shaped me as a person. That's really sad, when you think about it.

Anyway, the point is that unlike most systems - unlike, say, the world of entrepreneurdom, where all that matters is idea and execution and getting ahead - some systems are designed intentionally to cripple the people within it. The school system is the worst, because a, focusing on the best students would hurt most other students and that would be unfair in a manner of speaking, and b, it's much easier for the teachers when they can create a bland routine, force everybody into it, and have everybody come out unharmed if not much wiser. The teachers who didn't do that at my school were incredible, but there were always unspoken hints at how difficult the administration was making things.

I entered school wanting to be a teacher. I left it realizing that it simply wasn't worth the sheer cost fighting the system would be worth.
Nancy Pelosi RickRolls YouTube Viewers
The numbers.
I don't think dwelling is a good solution. But neither is ignoring it if it genuinely upsets you.
Imagine if the Kindle or other e-reader allowed plugins. Perhaps you could write a greasemonkey like script that automatically alters the reading experience for you.

The reader could write a simple script to replace "heart in his mouth" with whatever metaphor he wanted.
guy adds $1 million to bottom line.

guy gets stock options, but only if he agrees to work there full-time?!?

does anyone else see the ridiculousness in joel's proposal? no wonder the dude walked - that is a horrible deal. anyone in that position could now assume that any future huge contributions to the company would be rewarded in an equally miserly way. joel should have given him the shares outright - otherwise they're not a reward.

and joel should be freakin embarrassed to even be telling this story - what a crook.
Techcrunch got the facts wrong (again). It's 10 million Danish kroner (DKK), not krona, which is equivalent to 1.76 million USD at the current exchange rate. He promised he would give 10 million to the former CEO and the former chairman of Nyhedsavisen, the newspaper he invested in, if the newspaper closed. They sued him because he didn't pay up, and then was declared bankrupt.

According to an article in Børsen (http://borsen.dk/executive/nyhed/140074/) he said he personally invested 105 million DKK (not 10 million) in Nyhedsavisen. Money that he had loaned.
Mine was 299961. I still remember it despite having forgotten the password several lifetimes ago.
It's not "their" music. It's not a middleman's music. Most artists I know personally love YouTube. They love remixing. They want everyone who would like their stuff to be able to get to it easily. They certainly want to get paid, but an unauthorized video != not buying an album. In fact it is the opposite: watching a video leads to buying an album.

This move is dumb on both the RIAA's part, and YouTube's. They added the link to buy mp3s, which I thought was brilliant. I might actually use that. But now I'm not going to go to YouTube for videos. I'm not going to bother.

Who does that benefit? I certainly didn't give more money to the artist. In fact, I probably took money away by decreased notoriety. I won't share that link or post the video to my blog.
His ownership of these companies is included in the bankruptcy proceedings, and will be sold off to compensate his personal creditors.
Gmail Grew 43 Percent Last Year. AOL Mail And Hotmail Need To Start Worrying.
While this article and discussion is about bonuses, it should really be about what produced the value of the job board. It wasn't the software he built, it was Joel's large following and years of brand building. The idea to capitalize on it was good, but not all that valuable on its own.
1170403 - no idea why I remember that, haven't used ICQ since the days of Quake Team Fortress.
Plug-in cars in Detroit