skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Your statement is narrowly true, but if you mean to imply that would-be novel writers wouldn’t benefit from internalizing Strunk & White, or that they need not worry about clarity or economy, then I disagree.

Eliezer’s point that careful word choice is essential to good writing applies just as much to novels as any other format.
The only word that comes to mind is "suicidal"... not because they're trying to take on the NYT, but because it's an ad-supported site turning away relevant traffic. I don't get it.
The example pictured on this page shows tabbing within the flash gadget. Thought that was pretty cool.
Reading the S1 that they filed, they (obviously) are trying to offset the debt they have through liquidation of their common stock. I can sum up the report as "we are making lots of money, have fairly significant debt, we need to move our shares now". AFF seems to be profitable and I see no reason why they shouldn't go public. While they are generating pretty impressive revenues they can also function as an umbrella in which adult oriented startups can fold into. Possibly providing further value to their shareholders. This is actually a pretty unique IPO , especially in the web sector.

I also think it will be entertaining to see AdultFriendFinder ring the NYSE bell.
interesting but not in the way you intend. once people watch a "sure thing" like aff flounder from its first trading day, it will indeed be a bullet-proof confirmation that this is a nuclear-winter economy...not like you need aff to confirm that. look at the previous big "sure thing" ipo, private equity group blackstone:

http://finance.yahoo.com/q/bc?s=BX&t=2y&l=on&z=m...
whats the surprise? in good markets, excess risk makes you rich. in bad markets. it kills you. the able manager knows when to realign the portfolio
I wonder how they managed to rack up $500 million in debt?
There is a book about the man (published prior to his arrest several months ago) which goes further into detail about his trafficking operation: http://www.amazon.com/Merchant-Death-Money-Planes-Possible/d...
It's an worthwhile read if you're interested in learning about the business of arms smuggling.

Another worthy link is this list of the world's largest arms exporters: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arms_dealer#World.27s_largest_a...
The Mystery of Consciousness
Basically, it doesn't matter what direction you're going when you try to climb the hill; it just matters that you're building momentum. Once you've got that, anyone (a VC, for instance) can point you in the right direction, and you'll be an instant success; without it, even the best idea will get slogged in a Sisyphean cycle of bad implementations.
The implictions of this case would be enormous, if they were to prevail against the NYT. It would mean that scraping, mashups, "meta" sites would also come under review.

I just don't see a court turning back the tide of technology in favor of this small company - especially given the fact that the NYT subsid (boston.com) included the name of the source next to all of the links - and only one or two sentences of text from the articles.

How different is this from what Google does when you run a search - in the search results they also serve up one or two lines of descriptive text scraped from each site. Google News too.

I just don't see this happening. I think your choice of the word suicidal is appropriate.
I'd be really skeptical of this without knowing what they controlled for. States with strong gun laws tend to be more urban, with higher incomes. Income correlates with crime, and particularly homicide rates. So without seeing their controls, we don't know whether this is a case of

1.) strong gun control laws causing reduced crime

2.) higher income causing urbanization, strong gun control laws, and reduced crime

3.) higher education levels causing higher income and reduced crime along with a more liberal political bias and stronger gun control laws
Sure, it's annoying. But I didn't say it was nice, I said it was a good incentive for the developer to create software that was snappy.

Those suggesting the use of a separate slow test environment are, I submit, being unrealistic about real-world practices in testing.
You get a quarter of a million uniques per month. Holy crap.

Uh, right, my turn . . .

Let me get back to you on that.
If programming languages were bowls of clam chowder, what types of clams would be used for your favorite language?

These things are so stupid.
Penthouse bought AFF from the founding company for ~400mm -- if you glance at the S1:

Long-term debt classified as current due to events of default, net of unamortized discount(3)
411,019 (in thousands)

"In their report dated December 22, 2008, which is also included in this prospectus, our independent registered public accounting firm stated that events of default have occurred under certain of our debt agreements allowing noteholders to demand payment of our 2005 Notes and 2006 Notes and our subsidiary’s First Lien Senior Secured Notes, Second Lien Subordinated Secured Notes and Subordinated Convertible Notes (each as defined herein) and that these conditions raise substantial doubt about our ability to continue as a going concern."
> US will continue to decline relative to other nations. If the latter happens, commodities may regain value much faster than US stocks.

Somewhat paradoxically, U.S. stocks are likely to do better if the U.S. declines relative to other nations. Very few U.S. stocks make the bulk of money in the U.S. Instead, they tend to make most of their revenues abroad (usually from 30-70% for most S&P 500 companies) and pay most of their expenses in the U.S. If the U.S. dollar declines, their expenses drop, their revenues increase, and so their earnings (and hence stock price) go way up. If the U.S. worker declines and can't bargain for the same standard of living they used to have, their wage costs go down, their revenues remain constant, and their stock price goes up.

The nightmare scenario for U.S. stocks would be if international trade goes kaput and war breaks out. Then they'd see the bulk of their market instantly disappear, with a resulting drop in earnings and stock price. But in this case, you should be worrying about how not to get killed, and not where to put your money.
An interviewer should assess a candidate for.

1. Can Do

2. Will Do

A good interviewer should filter a "Can Do" candidate by seeing his CV and should interview whether the candidate "Will Do".

Otherwise the interviewer is absolutely clueless about the job you are being interviewed.
AFF has been around for a while and had been one of the first personals sites (recently they were sold to Penthouse who planned to take them to IPO).

When they were privately (and before being sold to Penthouse) they were still very profitable and paid generous bonuses to employees (although they had a fairly high churn rate due to the nature of their business). AFF, by the way, is a big Perl shop.

I believe most of their income comes from pornographic portions that they offer / affiliate programs (but I'd imagine the "adult personals" portion is what draws its audience).

A friend worked at AFF and has a curious story about it:

Once in the early day's, my friend's manager (the company's founder) had been asked by a former classmate if he could host a site for his start-up in exchange for stock options. The manager refused. That classmate's name was... Jerry Yang.
Sorry dcurtis, but the day Paul Graham makes danhau a moderator is the day hell freezes over.
Try http://buenosaires.en.craigslist.org/jjj/
Here's the audiobook version (courtesy of RapidShare):

http://rapidshare.com/files/106778954/HIGH_PERFORMANCE_MIND....
http://rapidshare.com/files/106839635/HIGH_PERFORMANCE_MIND....
Currently facing a massive challenge, and I have no idea of how to deal with it; to put it simply (but still very accurately), if you put me in jail for a few years with a computer and full internet access, it'd be pretty much the same as it is for me now.

The only reason I'm still sane is the internet, but that can't help xmas being very, very lonely. I dream of the day I get my life back. :)
I once had a roommate who worked atadultfriendfinder.com. He was kind of weird. One of the types who never left his room, etc.
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Recently... I'd have to say its passing my PhD qualifying exam :)
AFF is part of an umbrella organization called FriendFinderNetworks, which you will find at http://ffn.com/

Over there, you will see that the same company runs a number of age/gender/ethnicity specific networks (GayFF, AsianFF) and even a Christian dating site called "BigChurch.com" Also, the nerve.com personals section is run by fastcupid.com, which is also owned by FFN.

I think that perhaps a large part of the "ew" factor in this (and many other) threads come from the idea that enough money to warrant an IPO can come from such 'seedy' business as facilitating one-night stands, but in my mind it is quite questionable whether the vast majority of the income comes from the one-night-stand part of their business.

In fact, I am willing to bet that it is not. It seems plausible to me that the number of people who simply are not meeting a partner that meets their criteria is on par with the number of people who require one night stands.
Its about time that the American auto industry started catching up to what the foreign companies have been doing. I still don't plan on buying an American car, but it is a step in the right direction.
XBMC is also good and available for Mac, Win and Linux: http://xbmc.org/
This quote in particular reaffirms something I noticed since I was 12.

I was once giving some lectures on longevity and immortality. I noticed that people didn't like the idea much, so I actually took a poll of a couple of audiences. I asked how many of you would like to live for 200 years. Almost no one raised their hand. They said because you'd be so crippled and arthritic and amnesiac that it would be no fun. So I changed the question. How would you like to live 200 or 500 years in the same physical condition that you were at half your age. Guess what, almost nobody raised their hand. But when I tried the same question with a technical audience, scientific people, they all raised their hand. So I did ask both groups. The ordinary people, if you'll pardon the stereotype, generally said that they thought human lifetime was just fine. They'd done most of the things they wanted to do. Maybe they wanted to visit the Buddhist statues in Afghanistan, but they could live without that. And surely another 100 years would be terribly boring.
Off topic pet peeve: Can the internet try and avoid using the phrase "that said" from now on? It is really overused and unnecessary. There have been at least three articles linked to on HN in the last week that use it multiple times and it sounds really bad. Delete this if you like.
Why downvote this?
Essar scraps Jamnagar SEZ plan
http://www.npr.org/news/specials/gmvstoyota/

In 2005 GM sold about 4.5m cars in the US. At $2k per car, that's $9 billion in extra revenue. That flips them from a $4b loss to a $5b profit.

QED.
If, heaven forbid, Merb's best doesn't make it to Rails and it falls fallow, I have a hunch Merb takes root again. There are too many SCM clones and forks for it to disappear. Granted, time and energy is lost. Yet along the way, there'll be another Merb. Sometimes a spoon is a better fork.
Even if the plan was to throw all existing Rails code in the trash and have the Rails core team switch to Merb, they would still call the result "Rails". Throwing away the Rails brand would be insane, and diluting it by calling it "Rails/Merb" or "Mails" or something would likewise be insane.

I completely agree. It should keep the Rails name. That is not my point though. They will have to rewrite most of the core and probably use large portions of Merb, that is not merging Merb into Rails. It could be a merger of the two projects, or even rebranding Merb as Rails, but it's not that.
marl. alternating letters from merb and rails
PG should keep track of votes and see if there are statistically significant differences depending on the color of numbers. It'd be quite interesting if the same article gets more votes when it has a red number, as opposed to green.
The best shortest short story is still by Hemmingway:

"For Sale: Baby shoes, never worn"
And isn't it even more striking that he had no idea that he was carefully twisting and sidestepping? This must be closely related to the quintessential stroke symptom: one closed eye that the victim claims is open. I guess this all comes under the category of "things the stroke victim does without realizing it."
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With all due respect, you're doing it wrong. Get a blog FTW.

That said, it's all relative. To be sure, people make mistakes, yadda yadda yadda. But I think we can all agree, everyone is entitled to an opinion.
Yeah, we already allowed FDA to look the other way in order to "boost innovation" which resulted in virtual disappearance of fruit and vegetables from nearly all American grocery stores, they got replaced by engineered tasteless cheap biomass that only visually resembles the originals. Some Americans I know haven't ever tasted a tomato in their life. We even pushed EU using our WTO muscle to force-feed them genetically modified bananas (even though they really preferred the real thing) to support our suffering enterprises. I recommend "The Blessed Unrest" as an introductory reading on what happens when you let enterprises to get too creative.

Do you know that it is FCC that keeps you from being eaten alive by your friendly cable company? It's FCC who has been forcing them to open up and free us from those retarded cable boxes. It is FCC who is fighting the war against cable morons to eventually allow us simply hook up our computers and watch Hi-def unencrypted TV.

Telecom industry is prone to "natural monopolies". How many cable companies do you have to choose from? How about landline phone lines? Someone needs to watch these assholes.
Merb + Rails3 = Rarb?
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What I would give to have real fruit again. I don't think many Americans realize what they are missing out on when it comes to food (especially fruit).
Do I detect the hand of Benchmark Capital here?

Edit: I wrote the orginal comment in a hurry - but what I was getting at was that Engine Yard took quite a bit of cash from Benchmark. I somehow doubt that a move like this could have happened without their approval, and I have to wonder if they instigated it (and why...)
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The problem with mentioning a few anecdotal examples to show why we need more government regulation in a given area is they are just that, anecdotal. Here's an (anecdotal) counter to your take on the FDA:

Chicago Tribune - Stop the government's mad cow disease test ban - http://www.organicconsumers.org/madcow/chicago42304.cfm
Truth hurts?
Bar Camp Buenos Aires last year was lots of fun; you can check out my post about it. I missed it this year. It's true that Chile is more capitalist; that could be an advantage or disadvantage depending on your point of view. My wife and I just got our work visas last week after working on it for a year and a half. (It's much easier if you aren't trying to set up a new Argentine company, without Argentine employees or partners, at the same time.)
I'm definitely one of the technical/scientific people, but I'm having a lot of trouble believing this.

How can anybody NOT want to live longer if they were in good health? How can you possibly get that bored?

Maybe its just me, but I can't conceive it.
Is there anything (Other than outsourcing to MT or something like that) to do the reverse?
It seems to me to be the more valuable (albeit significantly harder) approach.
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more like "why i want to be a pseudo-intellectual". the author seems obsessed with name and meme dropping with the intent of dazzling us with the contents of his browser bookmarks, few of which he probably even understands, but he knows enough to drop it into a blog post. why hasn't he done the obvious and cited "Transgressing the Boundaries: Towards a Transformative Hermeneutics of Quantum Gravity" by Sokal? if you don't know the significance of this paper, don't reply or mod me.
Actually I want to say they were all windows apps, but I could be wrong. Prototyping anything doesn't mean using the new whiz bang language, it means using whatever you know. html+javascript, flash, sed, java, lisp, C++, it doesn't matter. It is about finding out if the idea works or not.

For a fun side story I wrote the original search engine for toybin.org in sed :)
Am I the only one who immediately went to acct preferences to see if this is turn off-able? ;-)
Going from bailing hay during the summers in a town called Hope to New York City and starting a startup, all the while having learned on my own not to hate people.

Hope has a volunteer fire department, a church, and a post office... only... and is more than 97 percent caucasian.

New York City is, well, a melting pot of epic proportions.

Perhaps I shouldn't be proud. At the very least I'm humbled and encouraged that just because you're surrounded by something doesn't mean you are necessarily that something.
are you trying to tell me aff somehow predated yahoo? i'll file this story under "bs" and you should too
Hotornot.com vs pickthehottie.com (from an algorithmic perspective)
I'm fed up with punks like you complaining about my use of language. I'm not a dump truck. I'm a series of tubes.
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Ask YC: Review my Startup (HN with a business/fundraising focus)
The reason why they shouldn't go public : very bad timing in this volatile economy. I don't know if AFF can be categorized as startup, but startups that do not have enough cash flow (the real cash) for 2 or 3 year of expenses and etc should not go for public unless you want to get burned by short-sellers and opportunist. I work part-time in Japanese startup in my leisure time. We are only 10~ people (not all of us are developer) but already generating $4M of net income last year(not try to brag on it, since I'm sure we're not the best) and by the way we did end-year party last night I am pretty sure it's more than doubled. We choose not to raise fund or sell IPO because we feel steadier without it. Unless you have great growth that can ensure market (remember, todays market is mostly based on fear) or you have great trouble and IPO is the only thing that can save you, don't enter the market :)
IPhone fart app pulls in nearly $10,000 a day
I know. I live in Texas and my wife after years of eating American biomass decided to start a garden and grow our own. Didn't work: the seeds they sell everywhere are altered junk: the results are a little better (after all the soil is real) but due to genetic modification everything still grows too fast and too big, devoid, of course, of any taste.

Corporate innovation at work.
Poll: When do you think the economy will improve?
(Define "improve" however you want to.)
Early 2009
Late 2009
Early 2010
Late 2010
Hmmm.

http://www.benchmark.com/news/sv/2008/10_21_2008.php
After 2012
Congrats! What's your field?
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It's a collective action problem. I'm just giving the my Ayn Rand-esque solution to the problem, whereby I look out for myself and end up unintentionally screwing everyone else. =(
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Word. I grew up in a village of 1,500 people. I left for Chicago as soon as I graduated high school and am not out in the SF Bay Area. Most of my classmates went to school nearby and returned home after they graduated college.
I definitely meant "interesting" in the broader sense.
Related to this is http://www.ludumdare.com -- a game design orientated competition that has been running since 2002.

You get 48 hours to make a game from scratch (art, code, everything) to a theme voted on weeks before, and chosen 0 minutes before the competition starts. These are the same elements which the Experimental Gameplay project copied.

There you can see a journal from all the entrants, as well as source code -- so you can learn how the better game makers approach it.

Many game developers use it as a chance to prototype games, and get immediate feedback as you develop. Also to help you refine your skills to allow you to make games more rapidly.

It's a real buzz to enter the competition, as there's often 100 or so people working on their games at the same time.

Since it's from scratch, you are forced to finish things up, rather than working on engines(for you web dev people engines are the frameworks of game development).

If you're into making games I highly recommend you join in on one of these competitions :)
I didn't say anything about new technology or marketing hacks, but about publicizing itself to other developers, which are also either the target market or a big part of the initial target market. Plenty of fish used the strategy of blogging about its growth, which was picked up by none other than other developers and posted about in developer and indie forums on a regular basis over the past few years. This is exactly what I described--a developer talking about how successful their app is, which causes developers to sign up for it. Remember, the 20-30 year old software developer demographic who would hear about the site is most likely single and with money, making them the perfect target market to seed. This is exactly the same as creating a project management site for developers that grows in popularity to the point most users are no longer developers, or a social news site like reddit.
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FCC may do a lot of good things, but those get trumped by their enforcement of morality on everyone. I mean really, its the year 2009 almost, and you can't even say the word shit on TV without being bleeped.
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