skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
sounds like webOS is going to be a powerful system. Personally can't wait to see the SDK.
I don't pay much attention to Al Jazeera, but it was interesting to watch their portrayal in the Western media morph from the "Arab BBC" to "propaganda outlet" between 2001 and 2003.
He's a good entrepreneur and a tech guy. What would possess him to invest heavily in a newspaper? It's so far from technology, and it's a dying industry.

Memo to anyone thinking of investing in companies: when considering in what field to invest, the word dying should be a huge red flag.
I'd have agreed if she did this two years ago. Now RickRolling is way over its prime. Macy's parade? YouTube RickRolling their whole site?

Now it seems like a has-been thing. Arrington is melodramatic about it, but it's not "cool" anymore.
This is a great article and Joel is a smart guy, but how many times has he written this article? I guess it's new because he put a new anecdote about an actual person, but he's been harping about this for years on his blog. He makes a good point but I wish he'd put new stuff in his Inc column.

(sorry for the rant)
Whopper Sacrifice Shut Down by Facebook
The double edged sword of Craigslist is that they accept nearly everything. They're good enough for most people, which is why they'll continue to dominate.

However there are many vertical niches within classifieds that can still compete with Craigslist. Apartments, Houses, Cars, Crafts and Jobs have all split out into separate niches and seem to be doing well. There are still tons of smaller markets virtually untapped (Pets come to mind).
Simple, Open Source XM Radio Client for Mac OS X
You're still viewing the house as an investment and not a purchase.

You're not parking money, you're buying a house, the same way you don't worry about the resale value of your TV, you won't worry about the resale value of your home. If you manage to sell the TV at a gain, wonderful, if not, no worries.
Can Growth Destroy A Site?
Google Chrome iPhone On The Way?
Scott McCloud: Understanding Comics (Ted Presentation)
Economies of scale?

The thing is, hosting takes commodity parts (where most of the 'economies of scale' are available almost at the retail level) and uses those parts to provide service. The barriers to entry are small: one really good SysAdmin and enough money to rent a full rack with power and servers.

see, I think that if you buy less than a full rack, sure, you get eaten alive. But if you can fill a full rack and 1 30A 208V circuit, the savings as you buy more space diminish. Again, hosting is a commodity, and most of the economies of scale are available almost at the retail level. (in this case, from what I've seen the full rack with 1 208V 30A circuit is about the minimum you need to buy to get a reasonable price, but buying 10 racks like that doesn't get you much of a discount.)

SysAdmin time... well, really you need at least 2 SysAdmins, for reasonable coverage, but one can be less experienced (but still very, very careful!) Now, two sysadmins can handle more than one rack, so you do gain benefits if you scale out the capacity to what your two guys can handle.

Look at amazon EC2, they are still charging $70/month for 1.7GB ram. That was a pretty good price, in 2006. Think about how many of those you can fit on a $4000 dual quad-core system with 32GB ram. that's a lot of money.

From what I have seen consulting for large companies, they don't get a discount on hardware or people, either. Sure, they might give dell millions of dollars, but I pay $1.5K per 32G box less just 'cause I buy motherboards with 16 ram slots and use 2gb modules, while the dells use motherboards with 8 ram slots, requiring expensive 4GB modules.

And SysAdmins, well, from what I have seen good people are much cheaper for small companies (at least in part because small companies can hire people and then easily fire them if they aren't that great.)
I don't know how to say this but... are you paid by Amazon?

Perhaps I'm being a bit too paranoid, I'll assume you're an honest kindle fan.

It is not the kindle that I hate, it is the Amazon marketing.

The kindle is in fact not selling well.
It can't both: sell to a niche and sell well at the same time.

Not if you go by the standard definition of well.

It only sells well if you go by Amazon's much lowered sales expectations.

But honestly I sort of admire Amazon's hutzpa, they know what they're doing and they're dong it well.

The kindle, I don't hate, it's not for me, but I wish you the best with it.
Jeff Polakow: Is Haskell Ready for Everyday Computing?

http://cufp.galois.com/2008/slides/PolakowJeff.pdf
What was the most negative score?
You caught OpenMIKE red-handed. Quick, let's all downmod him to -31337!

Edit: in case it wasn't clear, the purpose of this comment was to block the impending group-downmod of OpenMIKE. He was already at -1 when I posted this. That already happened once today to a brand-new member of HN (rambo), so I'm rather passionate about preventing that kind of behavior.
161192
can i pick you to be on my team?
Why Don’t Others Detail Their Income, Economy’s Got Their Tongue?
Doesn't this make Nancy Pelosi a music pirate? And if she is, doesn't it prove that the laws are screwed up?
"one could make an argument that the $1 million should mostly be Joel's anyway."

It probably is.
If you look at Reddit, almost any comment saying anything positive about Israel (or negative about the Palestinians) is downmodded massively. Enough of HN is from Reddit that you're almost certain to get the same sort of thing here, too.

Disclaimer to the downmodders: I'm not pro-Israel at all--I just think this sort of downmodding the other side of an issue, regardless of the merits of the post itself, is ridiculous.
Indeed; all functional languages are not alike. Haskell is not just functional, it's also lazy and has "weird" syntax. If functional programming is going to take off, I would expect to see it in the form of an eagerly-evaluated language with C-like syntax.
Well, I'll be glad as hell if Haskell is as popular in 4.5 years from now as Python is currently (pg's article about the Python Paradox was written August 2004). Hmm, I think I'll even be glad if Haskell will ever be as popular as Python was 4.5 years ago :)
Our team is hiring: http://djangogigs.com/gigs/468/ :-)
I know PG posted that YC would like to fund a Craigslist competitor. The issue is that it's hard to build the number of people needed to reach a critical mass. Likewise, it's not that eBay is so great, it's just the only place with that many people.

The CL search is really simple - really just whole word matches. That makes it hard to search for things that haven't been adopted by the CL community as keywords for items. I'm guessing this might be related to the amount of hardware they run. While search isn't that taxing a thing to do, it isn't necessarily easy (especially on CL's budget which doesn't rake in dough from VC or ads).

Think about comparing it to something like Digg. CL has more traffic (http://siteanalytics.compete.com/craigslist.org+digg.com/?me... - go to visitors->visits monthly and engagement->pages per visit). About 3.5 times the number of visits and about 10 times the number of pages per visit. So, CL is getting 35 times the amount of traffic of a major site like Digg. It's hard to scale up to 17.5 billion page views per month (24M per hour, 6,800 per second) - especially when you're not monetizing most of that. Comparatively, Digg is getting a mere 200 page views per second.

I'd love to see improvements to CL, but I feel like some of them would definitely require more hardware. CL wants to be independent with as little commercialness as possible. In the end, that leaves CL what it is - a bastion of whatever goes where it's also hard to find things.
Maybe I'm getting Haskell-blind, but what's "wierd" about the syntax? If I think about "wierd" syntax, I think about Erlang or Objective-C or Befunge for that matter. However, it seems that once you spent a day or so with a language the syntax wierdness tends to go away. (Still need to test that hypothesis with Erlang, though.)
...Wow. I say I like something and you accuse me of being from Amazon? No consideration that it's a good product?
114248050
What is your opinion of Rackable, iDataplex, and the secret Dell cloud servers? Supposedly these are really cheap but can only be ordered in large volume (like 10 racks).
Twilio Recipes Open source PHP for common PBX features
Netbook poised for price cuts, more than 50%
Book Is Rallying Resistance to the Antivaccine Crusade
This essay makes some good points, but ultimately it fails to address the titular 'real cause', due in part to an over-reliance on the personal experience of the author. In this last respect it is typical of the genre; Michael Lewis, for example, tends to focus on miscalculation of risk, and particularly on the defects of the Black-Scholes model for pricing options---based in large part on his experience as a Big Swinging Dick at Salomon Brothers in the '80s.

Based on my reading of a bunch of these economic diagnoses, I'd like to suggest a two-part litmus test for addressing the 'real cause' of the crisis:

(a) Explain the system of central banks and fractional reserve banking.

(b) Connect (a) to the present crisis.

I've become convinced that any explanation that falls short of this test invariably misses the forest for the trees.
The newspaper industry needs to stop complaining about Craigslist and realize that there's a market need for a better product. Craigslist is a good site, but it's full of scams + the search results are a mess + it's too anonymous.
Is that how the object works?
I'll give the same reply as was given in the comment thread of the article, which you apparently didn't read.

http://hackage.haskell.org/packages/archive/pkg-list.html
I didn't get in trouble at school, but I constantly got in trouble at home for choosing not to do chores so that I could read more. Thankfully my mother and stepfather didn't realize that grounding me to my room was not a punishment but rather what I wanted all along. The thing is, make do with what you have. Don't let people take things or time away from you.
I feel like I'm in a slightly similar situation at the moment.

I very recently told the founders of the startup I work at about a business idea I had that relies on our core technology. Our company really needs a new market, and this one looks like it could be huge. After explaining more of the details to them, they got very excited. We are currently investigating the feasibility of using our product for this application, etc., but if it works, it might "save the company".

Assuming it works out business and tech-wise, I have no idea how this might affect me (besides still having a job to go to).
For a guy who is apparently so pro-business, it's instructive to see another post on his blog about how to pirate books (the post doesn't even involve an interesting technical aspect, it's just "google for a pdf"). Apparently he is of the opinion that people should pay him for the product of his business, but he doen't need to pay other business owners for their products.

Perhaps a little education might have given him the critical thinking skills to see the problem with this position.
I saw it when it was -13 and went "wtf?"

I'm very relieved we were able to get rambo's karma back up to a net positive score (he's already up to 4). It also seems like he will prove to be a valuable member of HN: http://news.ycombinator.com/threads?id=rambo
Internet & Network Tweaks
> You don't go to college to expand your mind...you go to college to get a good job after you graduate. Or at least you are supposed to.

To get a "good job" you get training. That's usually a job you get after college. You go to college (for a Bachelors) to learn how to think rigorously logically and to learn the fundamentals of your field. That's of intrinsic value, irrespective of whether it gets you a job. If you enjoy and have a passion about the field you study, all the better (on the other hand if you chose to study CS to "make a lot of money", you get to miss out on the biggest advantage of a programming career - doing what you enjoy for a living).

When an employer gives you a "college hire" position (which is often the only way into some mature companies, unless you're already wildly known and successful), that means they're making an investment in you. Education (or lack thereof) is one way for them to gauge the risk of said investment.

As I've also said in earlier posts, if you're worried about outsourcing and/or your job going to entry-level candidates - then you need to pick up domain specific knowledge.

Domain specific knowledge builds on these fundamentals (of computer science and mathematics) and can't be looked up on google.
I have a feeling a big wireless company is going out in the next 6 months.
Pattern-matching for control flow rather than if statements is the main weird thing. E.g.

sum ys =
let sum' [] total = total
sum' (x:xs) total = sum' xs (total+x)
in sum' ys 0

That looks weird.
Indeed. In fact, we had almost exactly the same idea when brainstorming about cool iPhone apps with a couple of people, but thought it was too lame and that we couldn't pull it off in a high-quality way ;) Ideas don't matter, people (with their skills, enthusiasm, etc) do :)
Anyone know what kind of math is used for these network analysis? Linear Algebra?
Ask HN: how do you discover new music?
Well... the title says it all. Most of what I listen to came from hanging out with friends and parties, sometimes even from a car idling next to me in traffic. I guess that's called "old school" of acquiring personal taste in music. Very slow and time consuming.

I've tried using some social music sites too. Trying one out takes a lot of time and they usually end up recommending me what I already know and listen to (or used to listen). Or maybe I didn't use them right.

So, I'm wondering if there's something I haven't tried.
Yeah. Personally, I think it's OK to use downmodding as an expression of disagreement. (If I'm saying something stupid, I want my karma to take a hit for it.) However, as soon as the comment reaches -2 or maybe -3 max, then that has to stop, because any score lower than that needs to be reserved for troll comments.
This happens more than you might think, but generally the score won't stay that low for long. Comments like this seem to attract a large number of votes in both directions.
CL makes something like 50 million a year. I just don't believe they are incapable of fixing search. Hell Plenty of Fish runs on something like 6 servers + a CDN and offers a very structured advanced search.

I think this is just the typical case of someone being surprised by their success, and being too scared to change anything, in fear of driving users away.

CL can spend 5-10 million on infrastructure out of profits...w/o selling out, not that it would cost that much...they just choose not to.
Pattern matching, also the lack of syntax for function calls (I realize there's a good reason for it).
I'm totally going to set that as all the default windows sounds on my coworker's computer who used to be my ICQ contact years ago.
It seems that way to you because you were probably first rickrolled at least a year ago. A lot of non-techie people probably still think it's cute. If she had done this 2 years ago most people would have no idea what it was about; she would have seemed out of touch.
IBM breaks U.S. patent record
Seriously considering a Thinkpad so that I can run BSD/Linux without hassle.
It's not really a new business model or anything, but the simple idea (which some companies successfully implement) that some portion, say 30%, of the organization's net profit of each pay period is divided up by the number of workers (non-management, non-executive employees) and dispersed to those workers at the next pay period.

Bonuses, retirement plans, health benefits, and all other incentives are still set at management's discretion, but are funded with the other 70% of the profit. It's really that simple.

Realize too, that simple profit sharing coexists with the normal grading of wages based on whatever position/seniority algorithm the organization uses. So you're guaranteed, as a developer or designer or whatever, to make your normal wage and be considered for increases. But every pay period would have that profit sharing bonus that shows you how the business is doing and exactly how much your organization values your contribution.

Stock-based incentives are supposed to fulfill this role, but they're often given out after some major event and then only to the most visible members of the contribution. Arbitrarily, in other words. Holiday bonuses are nice, too, but they are supposed to be confidential in most organizations (creating uncomfortable speculation and comparisons) and can lead to unmet expectations.
They made $80 million in revenue for 2008.
I've been poking around a cheap Thinkpad on Craigslist.

I didn't know the situation was that hairy with the ports on mac os x. From the way others spoke of macports and fink, it had that same apple 'just works' going on.
I'm curious about the consistency of applications written for WebOS. Just to name a few:

* Is there a standard set of controls?
* Will an app built as a "local app" work on the web?
* Do you have to use HTML 5 to build mobile sites for WebOS?
* Does WebOS's browser support meta viewport width/height and will it generally be compatible with MobileSafari?
* Does everyone have to write a home brewed drag and drop or are these gestures included for free?
* No Accelerometer.

I personally don't see the Apple App store hurting for submissions because you have to know Objective-C. I would also rather spend my time using Objective-c controls than writing JavaScript controls to use.
About 3 years ago, my 6-digit ICQ number got hijacked without any way of getting it back (I had created it with a geocities.com email address). That was when I stopped using it.
The design is cool, but I prefer a tree structure TOC so I can skip between higher-level sections. Good thing they have the filter!
Just because you keep posting stupid crap, doesn't mean you can censor others who disagree with you. Grow up.
If the profit sharing income is significant that may pit ordinary workers against owners who want to expand the business. E.g. if you are on route for $100k profit this year it might be better to invest that profit in the company by hiring another salesperson that sells even more next year. If you own the company you generally decide your own compensation and you might be more interested in working towards selling the company off anyway.

Perhaps if the IT company was one with hourly billing you could have a more law-firm like "partner" system where some senior people have more say and a share of the profits.
I don't know, I haven't used them. It's possible that they really are cheap, but I kindof doubt it. From what I have seen at large companies, purchasing decisions are first filtered based on what companies are willing and able to jump through the 'preferred vendor' hoops, and then largely decided on whoever gives the best kickbacks (or whoever has the best 'relationship' with the otherwise powerless middle manager making the decision) rather than on price or other objective concerns. Maybe I am wrong, and there really is information being exchanged that I am not seeing. I'm just saying how it looks from the point of view of a consultant brought in to advise on the technical suitability of the servers.

I worked at a company that bought large volumes of servers from rackable a while back, (as a SysAdmin, not a consultant) and I don't know about the price, but the support was pretty good,
I'm surprised antivaccine people read books. You think they would've noticed the mountains of evidence against them.

Oh wait, it is an emotional argument, not a rational, I'll step aside while you blame others for the failure of your own children.
- Windows MSN Messenger
- Network effects
- Hesitation to adapt the product
Win $25,000 for ideas that inspire "a better world through media and technology".
Does anybody know of a good jQuery plug-in that detects and lists the plugins installed in one's web browser?
as I understand it they are using the built in SQLlite aspects of HTML5 for db storage. not sure about your other q's
I completely agree, and I believe that this is something unique to Haskell+Hoogle+Hackage.
I guess some people haven't heard of Comet.
what part of the iphone mind chooses to buy worthless applications that shouldn't be sold for even $1?
It's remarkable what users will "put up with" when their core needs are being met. I don't like a lot of things about CL, but does it meet my core needs? Yes; I can reach an enormous number of people with a high rate of success.

It seems to me that CL is a great example of the 80/20 rule -- but unlike most other firms, they simply didn't bother to implement the other 80% of the features.
the point is you shouldn't need comet...
After seeing the comments - I think you might be right about the politicizig.
I agree.

And, there's merit in an under-graduate degree. There is merit in going to prison too. But that doesn't mean we don't have better alternatives.

1. Most of the professors I had cannot teach as well as a well-written textbook. You can choose your textbooks on Amazon. You cannot (usually) choose your lecture professor. With MIT open course, Berkeley webcast, nowadays you can even choose your professor for without going to college.

2. The good professors and grad student that you met in college, why can't you meet them when you are not in college? What stop you from send them emails or just stop by their offices anyway? In fact, I've talked to far more professors who are not in my college than ones that are.

3. People who want more than a vocational education will actively go out and get their knowledge. The internet + a good library + Amazon is a far larger reservoir of knowledge than any college. Why do you need an excuse like college to learn more?

4. People who just care about a vocational education, and really don't give a damn about liberal arts or general education, why should they let a college force them to learn things useless to them, trick them into thinking that a degree is equal to vocational training, and rob them of their money so they had to spend the rest of their life paying back loans?

5. People who network in college, what stops you from networking in the real world? What stop you from talking to people on a bus, in a park, in the subway, in a conference, in a bar, in a farmers market, in your jobs? Most people don't learn networking in college. They are given their network by dorm assignment. Of course, there are exceptions, and those are the people who eventually learn how to network in the real world anyway, so why not start in the real world?

I can go on for a while. My point is under-graduate college has it's place, but it certainly shouldn't be the only way.

Yes the post author is generalizing. But the fact remains true that most people are not getting what they want out of their college degrees. If that's the way we educate the mass, then there's something wrong with that.
Rationality is largely a myth.

Have you read anything like Predictably Irrational, or the less famous Stumbling On Happiness, or maybe The New Brain? Or Mistakes Were Made (But Not By Me)?

They all make psychology and behavioral economics research very digestible, and all underscore the point: we're not rational. Even if we think we are. Our brains are essentially wired to be tangled up and self-deluding.

Moreover, lots of people use "logic and reason" as shield to hide behind when they say and do unfeeling, cutting things to other human beings who happen to react with emotions.
But without the idea or software, Joel's large following and years of brand building would be making him nothing.

Every idea is obvious once it's thought of and implemented.
I wrote this article; while I don't mind the reposting (its original host is gone), they might have kept my name on it. Here's a repost on my own site: http://wry.me/misc/peval.html