skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Some newspapers charge for some (most) of their online content. The Financial Times is the one that springs to mind. If the newspapers need to make money from their content, they should charge for it.

They don't need anyone to 'save them', they just need the balls to ask a fair price for good content. Of course, if most newspapers are just publishing badly written stories with little depth, maybe people wont be willing to pay for it.
The problem is that grammar flames are socially awkward. They've got a bad reputation on the web that goes way back to Usenet days. To issue one is kind of like telling someone that they've got some food on their face. But it's worse, because on the web you can't whisper: By default your criticism is preserved forever, smack in the middle of what's supposed to be a conversation about something other than grammar. Unless the author takes the trouble to delete some comments -- which is an extra step, and which can also sometimes be socially awkward, since comment deletion is generally reserved for trolls.

I wouldn't have bothered correcting this one if I hadn't been able to make a lame joke at the same time.

I agree that a feature to fix this might well not have enough utility to be worthwhile, which is perhaps why nobody's built it yet!
> For a similar reason to the amphetamine prohibition above, I think that welfare/health is essential & should be provided by the state.

I think you will find that a libertarians actually don't mind it being provided by a /state/ government (myself included) The issue comes in when the /federal/ government provides it. This is not freedom, because unless you move from the USA you are forced to subsidize what is arguably an inefficient system caused by bad government policies.

I'm a strong believer in the 10th Amendment. If it ain't in the Constitution, it's for the states to decide. If the people of a state want welfare, they'll vote someone in who will give it to them; whoever opposes can move to another state. 50 different implementation possibilities for everything. That's freedom.
In addition to various ad hoc meetings we current have:

- a daily status meeting

- a weekly department meeting

- a weekly one on one

- a weekly status report

- an end of sprint status report

We also use an issue tracking system which records the status of everything we are working on.
Only if it's entirely unpredictable. Most of the things happening while most progress bars are, er, progressing (or not) are pretty predictable. I bet that at least 95% of bad progress bars could be improved considerably; whether it would be worth the trouble is of course a different question.
"The XML one does not use standard human-punctuation characters as markup. It doesn't require quoting of apostrophes, double quotes or parentheses."

(:p "Lisp doesn't require quoting of apostrophes (') or parentheses (()) either...")
Why are editorial comments something you want to discourage? I'm not for or against the idea really but I have always wondered what the reasoning is.
The problem with stories like this is that they never compare the rate of psychological distress amongst users of hallucinogens versus the general population.

It's easy to point the finger and say it's the acid's fault, but what about all the schizophrenics who never took a drug in their life?

Of course, there are people who also think that people who have a predilection to psychosis are also more likely to try drugs as a form of self-medication.

I'm not pro or con drugs in general, with the exception of thinking that marijuana laws are somewhat baffling; but this seems like one of those cases where otherwise highly logical people get sucked in by convenient explanations, regardless of their basis (or lack thereof) in fact.

=====

Editing to provide my own counterpoint: Since I honestly don't have any kind of deep knowledge on the matter, I spent some time with Google and found this:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hallucinogen_persisting_percept...

as well as:

http://bjp.rcpsych.org/cgi/content/abstract/118/543/229

Make your own judgments, I suppose.
DivX 7 adds support for Blu-ray rips
A new model for news is definitely needed, but is hard to figure out.

At outside.in we're indexing and organizing local news across the US and have recently started partnering with national news sources (like nbc) to fill gaps in our index and to provide them with the local coverage that they're missing. Along with providing their users a new way to find and read news (by putting it on a map, for example.)

Eventually, it will be a combination of both major media and citizen journalists covering issues that are important. What compounds the problem for the newspapers is that people have stopped consuming news the same way they were doing it 5-10 years ago. The internet has obviously played a big part in this, but so have changing social patterns and expectations on the part of the consumer on news availability.

The bigger shift we're noticing that people are actively searching for topics they're interested in, as opposed to flipping through a newspaper, they want to see things they may be tangentially interested in ('crime', in 'Brooklyn') but had no way to get to earlier.

It will definitely be interesting to see how this plays out.
> If your libertarian politics doesn't include an actual plan to diminish the power of these centralized social organizations that want to control people's lives then it's not politics, it's fantasy.

The plan is simple: education. Libertarianism is so unconventional you'll be lucky to hear the media bring it up once or twice a year. Ron Paul (probably not a "pure" libertarian, but pretty close) is starting to change this with his huge grassroots following.

I'd venture to say 98% of Americans have never heard of libertarianism, and if they have, they simply dismissed the ideas as illogical, without actually researching the ideas. This needs to change.

The people ultimately decide who gets into Congress and who gets elected President. Once the people are educated and accept the ideas of libertarianism, it's cake.
Stanford launches $100M energy institute for cleantech research, teaching
If nuclear is so cheap and has such few externalities, how did we wind up with the Price-Anderson Nuclear Industries Indemnity Act?
JavaScript 1.6 added seven new array methods (indexOf, lastIndexOf, every, filter, forEach, map, and some). If only backward compatibility weren't a problem, the warring JavaScript libraries could just use these (or implement them into the prototype like Sugar Arrays, http://www.dustindiaz.com/sugar-arrays/) instead of creating their own quirky methods.
David Allen on Productivity, Software, and Making It Work
There is a real-world example against prohibition of narcotics, and that is prohibition of alcohol. It did not work. Billions are spent on the War on Drugs, and yet it's clear that it's easier than ever to get drugs on the street. Posession of marijuana is the number one most committed crime.

The point you made at the end is essentially the argument for why legalization of drugs will solve a lot of problems. Competition will bring in ligitimate sellers (as in the alcohol industry) and get rid of all of the crime that comes from the local dealers who "own" street corners.
No, I think you're right. There seem to be separate queues for different categories.
Algae - the slimy scum that could end the fuel crisis
CPI  CPC
Is there the possibility that everyone who answers "no" truthfully to the drug question is intentionally hounded like this? Intelligence work is incredibly stressful. This seems like it would be an opportune time to see how someone handles stress conditions without water boarding them.
The author doesn't really make the case for this. What the hell is a 'solid RSS strategy' for enterprises? What features make a reader 'business class'? How does not using RSS make you a 'sitting duck', and if so, why is no one using it? Why petulantly insult people who read RSS in their email program?
Should you move from MyISAM to Innodb?
As far as I know the youth ball tickets aren't available yet. The ticketing process for the balls is quite mysterious. I received an e-mail earlier from the Obama campaign to pre-order ball tickets but the youth ball wasn't listed. Currently I'm under the assumption that tickets will be at door, or available for purchase a day or two in advance.
He makes some good points that I didn't consider when first I hated upon XML. I agree that XML is better for its problem domain than s-expressions, but in that case the whole article is an apples to oranges comparison.

He claims that syntax is important, otherwise we'd still be using binary formats. If that's true then the only reason syntax is important is for humans, because machines can read binary formats just as well as anything else. So why compare it to s-expressions instead of to a human-friendly ideal? Is XML the best human-friendly markup language possible? Yes his paragraph is similarly readable in both forms, but would it be if wrapped in XML namespace clauses and an XML Schema? Would the s-expression version be if wrapped in a macro to parse text outside quotes as significant text?

The purpose of XML shouldn't be to make everything more XML-y, but to make everything easier. Maybe it does, in big enterprisey systems and between large data silos. Look at the recent ODF v. Office XML file formats. Have any of you been tempted to process Microsoft Office documents directly because now they're XML they must be easier than the old binary formats?

It's still not human friendly - you can't use the Jabber protocol by hand over telnet like you can use POP3, SMTP, IRC.
an interssting quote from a cnn story about the sale of del.icio.us: (http://money.cnn.com/magazines/business2/business2_archive/2...)

Interestingly, Google was both least aggressive and least attractive to Schachter. When he'd interviewed for a job there, the company had told him, "We don't need idea guys--we've got plenty of them. We just need developers." Now Google was wracked by internal debate over the value of Del.icio.us. Schachter says, "They came in and said, 'Well, maybe we're kinda sorta interested,' but there was no 'What's the plan? What are you thinking about? Where do you want to take this?'"
Posterous had an amazing growth spike in December
The term "citizen journalism" does not have to mean "your wacky neighbor up the street". What about the, few, independent journalists working out there. They are certainly citizens, yet they don't work for any mainstream news org.

And if your definition of CJ is rubbish, then we need search engines and aggregators set in place to help us filter through the crap. Still, this isn't part of the mainstream sources.

And I'm having a hard time seeing how you are rationalizing that news orgs like CNN or NBC are not comprised of iffy product placement and factual errors. They report what they want you to hear, not what you want to hear. Fox News, for how much of a news organization than a tabloid they are, reports factual errors on a constant basis. Product placement, have you ever watched the filler crap that CNN or any of them show during the slow news days? Sanjay Gupta, who works for CNN, has continuiously promoted big pharma companies that he has financial interests in.

Every news organization, no matter what its name, is biased in one way or another. They have to sell ad revenue or else they'll go off the air, so they show you what they want you to hear. Not what you want to hear. This is where citizen/independent journalism shines and is also a reason why newspapers are failing. People have found out that there are better sources of news out there than what you get through your television or off the newsstands.
great article, delicious is one of my all time favourite websites - thank you.
webapp is usually easier than real apple app which may have the potential to crash the whole iphone OS.
Why Text Remains King of the Web
There was not this much hoopla for the 2000 inauguration. This is likely due to the dragged out election ultimately stolen by the supreme court, and that it was yet another white guy assuming the role of the presidency.

This inauguration is historic for severeal reasons, the most obvious one being that it's the first time the United States has elected an African American. Second, it's hopefully a clean break from the devastation of the past eight years. Finally, this is the first election where the electorate has an intimate role with the election process whether it be through web 2.0, or unprecedented volunteer efforts. Because of this it's likely that millions of people feel as if they played a significant role in helping to elect Barack Obama.
Awesome submission. I love seeing technical articles on HN.

Also, this is a pretty good read about memory and cache stuff:
http://people.redhat.com/drepper/cpumemory.pdf
My favorite part of Google meeting philosophy is that meetings almost never go longer than an hour. If you're meeting for more than an hour, break it up into smaller meetings, and most people shouldn't have to go to both of them.
TechCrunch Says Jump, Twitterers Say How High?
I assumed anyone who read News.YC would know that, e.g.

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=276229

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=281157

but there have been so many new users lately that I suppose there might be some who didn't realize it.

I'm not sure what the convention should be about identifying YC alumni in link titles. Putting (YC S08) after company names is awkward and only intermittently done. I've considered displaying them in a slightly different color instead. If anyone has other suggestions, let me know.
How good could that deal on eggs be to justify the time and PITA to freeze and bag 10 dozen eggs individually? Were they paying her $5 a dozen to take 'em?
A few things other people don't seem to be mentioning:

1. RAM prices can be quite volatile, while hosting prices generally are not. Hosts may have taken lower margins back when their RAM costs were higher that they are now trying to recoup. At the very least, they aren't in a hurry to cut prices right now because their costs could go back up again if the economy picks up and RAM prices head upward.

2. Hosting is basically a subscription business model. Subscriber acquisition costs are balanced against total lifetime value of the average subscriber. A host may take a lower margin, or even a loss, in the first stretch of a hosting relationship and treat that as part of the SAC in anticipation of their margins improve over time thanks to declining costs due Moore's law.
There are indigenous tribes who use peyote in religious rituals, and users have no higher rate of mental illness than nonusers.

However, drug use in our society doesn't occur under such safe circumstances, and I know people who have been burned by drug use. One is a schizophrenic who used obscene amounts of ecstasy, shrooms, salvia and DMT throughout his 20s and early 30s. When he was 24, he was popular, a great basketball player, and able to interact normally with other people. At 35, he's incapable of holding a job and has been in trouble with the law countless times. His psychological collapse might have happened anyway had he not been using psychedelic drugs, but I suspect it wouldn't have happened in the same way, and it might have been more manageable.

I don't know anyone, though, who has burned out on a small amount of psychedelic drug use. I believe it can probably happen, but I've never seen it. Also, there are a lot of people out there who've used these drugs and had few or no ill effects, and their cases simply aren't reported.
a solid RSS strategy is subscribing to key news sources in your field, your competitors' blogs and search results, keyword searches, thought leaders and in the enterprise, internal company announcements, requests for assistance, financial, inventory or other information.

features that make an reader business class = support for authenticated (pw protected) feeds, a good mobile version, local/offline caching, displaying diffs when items in feed have been changed, administrative control over dynamic OPML files, etc.

sitting duck: not using an RSS reader well leaves means it is going to take you more time to absorb less information regarding your industry. RSS automates immediate delivery of targeted information.

why petulantly insult email RSS readers? because I am a snob.

- the author.
I've never heard that web apps require approval. Probably a typo? Also, it would be nearly impossible to "crash the whole iphone OS." An app runs in a sandbox, the worst thing it could crash is itself.
Stanford Announces $100 Million Energy Institute
If someone needs to see you in the eyes to deliver an honest answer, then you probably do not need them in your company.
I think I signed up for 360MB two years ago at the same price. Have other resources increased? Bandwidth? CPU?

Don't get the wrong idea, I love the service, and the prices are still very competitive, it just seems strange in general that prices aren't falling faster. My own VPS experience is the only concrete example I have so that's why I mention it.
There's a difference between winning a market with better business practices and winning a market with a better product. All signs point to Microsoft's ability to do the former being stifled by everyone else's ability to do the latter.
I'm not going to get into the hypocrite issue, but I certainly would like the dialog box better if it did just say "Java Loves You - Please Wait".

I'd like to think that I am generally attractive from a programming language's point of view and such a dialog box wouls only reinforce this belief.
What I want to avoid is editorial titles. The idea is roughly that comments are individual property, because people can make as many of them as they want, but link titles are common property in that everyone has to share one (except to the extent duplicate detection fails).

If links worked in "Ask HN" text, people would use such submissions as a way to get de facto extra long link titles. I know because they used to, and they did.
Here's an example of a succesful local newspaper
JSON is another contestant in the generic data serialization space, which is doing better than sexp - possibly due to the ubiquity of javascript (free-riding the web). Though, for this technology generation, the fight is over.

I think there'll be another chance when SOA/web services are superseded; but there's still huge scope for improvement within their present architecture/ecosystem (e.g. REST vs. SOAP vs. ?).

For programming languages, sexps are competing against all the other language syntaxes out there, not just XML. I agree that it seems odd that ant uses XML though... perhaps the extensibility of ant is easier with some kind of generic format (like XML/sexp/JSON)? yet other languages manage to be extensible via functions/classes/modules etc.

Thank goodness no one uses JSON to encode a language (in the way that ant uses XML).
Web startups focus on college choice, online tipping
Congrats posterous guys! Thats pretty huge. Would you mind to tell us how :)
When I lived in Burlington, everyone I knew read this paper and all the local businesses advertised in it. From what I hear it's still going strong.

Quality of content was consistently high.

It's a weekly, which I think may be important: maybe not enough stuff happens on a local level to support a daily in the modern era. (The daily feed from national & international is better supplied by e.g. NYTimes or WSJ.)

I thought people on HN might be interested in a counter-example to the general trend of failing newspapers.
Florida State Player Is Heading to Oxford, Not the N.F.L.
The article is refuted by both reality
-- the godawful messes that people have made out of XML, the
complexity of the systems built on top of it, its failure to
amount to more than a bloated machine format, and the exodus in
favor of more lightweight notations like JSON -- as well as by
itself: the author expects the reader to consider the
proliferation of single-shot technologies built on XML as a good
thing and not a Tower of Babel. He lists DTDs, RELAX, XML Schema,
XPointer, XQuery, XPath (edit: whoops, I snuck that one in), XSLT, and CSS and cites the "decades of
person-effort embodied in those specifications" as if it were an
argument in their favor!

I found this statement in the article interesting: "The central idea of the XML family of standards is to separate code from data." It explains why all the systems that express programming constructs in XML are such monstrosities (including XSLT, which he cites approvingly and yet which totally violates this separation). I wonder what the author would say to the people who do this kind of thing? They're not using it according to specification?

Edit: some of the arguments are out of date, too. I don't know anything about Lisp documentation in LaTeX; the open-source Lisp world tends to generate HTML documentation from s-expressions, as for example here: http://www.weitz.de/cl-ppcre/.
Dust Silicon Valley, Cambridge, Manhattan, Pasadena, Austin, and Chapel Hill with prions.
I am thinking ant did it to get the parser and some kind of tools for free. Certainly no one really likes it as XML.
Interesting... I suspect that some people have them based on Craigslist listings. I do wonder if it won't be open bar based on the $75 rather than $150 ticket price and the 18+ age requirement.

Did you end up buying tickets for one of the other balls?
A correction: it's better to say "Prototype expands built-in classes", i.e. it adds methods that otherwise aren't there. This is never risky nor dangerous unless you have another global-namespace library, which jQuery isn't.
Changing China one loan at a time
> you can't use the Jabber protocol by hand over telnet like you can use POP3, SMTP, IRC.

There's an intriguing view that text can't be used by hand either - you have to use a "text shell". Wouldn't a fair comparison use an "XML shell"? If it knew the schema, it could even autocomplete/intellisense for you, showing you the available choices at that point... it's pretty cool how XML has factored out the grammar of a language, in a reusable way.

I don't know the Jabber protocol, but the difficulty I've experienced with web-based XML protocols (web services) is that the http header needs the length of the message, which is hard to do by hand - it's not due to XML (and a "http shell" would fix that...)
I find plenty of quality news in text form. What I want is better stuff for when I'm on the go. Radio fails - it's mostly ads and the banal. Podcasts are better but they're not interactive and I can't un/subscribe until I'm back at my computer. Audio books and lectures from The Teaching Company dominate my ipod in transit - but with these I don't get news or blog content.

Maybe the solution is phone based. What if you could call a phone number and hear the news read to you by a good narrator? By pressing keys you could drill down into Tech, World, blogs etc. It would be an opinionated filter of news, essays, wikipedia. Like this http://audiothink.com/concept1.png. With twilio you could <play> .mp3s. First time callers could maybe get x minutes free after which point they'd pay for their callerID to continue working. Not sure how to handle payments - sending phone visitors to a web page might kill conversion. I think bored commuters with hands-free devices and cell minutes to burn might use such a service.
That's some good detail, thanks. Why do you think it hasn't taken off in large organizations? Have you talked with anyone at those companies?

My own suspicion: Is the slow, enterprise sales pitch cycle really compatible with the idea of nimble, pull-based information gathering?
An answer to David Carr's question on "how to build an iTunes for newspapers."