skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
One of the few ways Britannica could make themselves at all relevant in the online world today would be to take the contents of Wikipedia and verify it using whatever method they use to verify and vet their own content. "Wikipedia, verified by Britannica" _could_ be very powerful branding (but it might be too late for that also).

Consider the Britannica website and the Wikipedia website. The Wikipedia website is designed for mass consumption of content. The Main_Page has interesting, topical and relevant links and blurbs on it that _encourage_ you to click and go deeper -- true browsing. When you click on "browse" in the upper right on the britannica.com home page, you are presented with a popup listing the alphabet. This isn't browsing. Britannica's navigation down the right side, with the sliding tabs, is relatively bare in the content topic headings: there are only four or five entries under each one. Compared to Wikipedia, just the "Did you know..." box (one of seven major content divisions on Main_Page) has (as I write this) _23_links_ plus a "nominate an article" link, further encouraging interaction, and deep exploration. And these get updated (most likely automatically) every day. Britannica's interface doesn't seem to encourage exploration. The experience appears to be a direct translation of using a hard-copy of a reference work. Britannica.com is really becoming a poster boy for the complete irrelevance of the ivory tower model of information dissemination (if they aren't already).

Guh, this is embarrassing. Maybe you get more if you pay for a subscription (in which case Wikipedia already has a significant lead), but these two pages:

http://www.britannica.com/EBchecked/topic/1494445/Challenger-disaster
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Challenger_disaster

are incomparable. Ignoring the content for a moment, wikipedia has a references list, external links, related wikipedia links, and the edit history. If you don't believe that Wikipedia is accurate, you are well on your way to verifying the content yourself. Britannica's entry contains none of that.

Britannica.com, the company and the website, seems to have barely changed in the nine years since I worked there.
You know, it really is possible to be working on something which is the "fun code" in your life. I try to avoid jobs where I don't have real passion for the thing I'm creating.

Now, some of my "fun" might be in prototypes or similar concept testing or learning - lately it's been parser combinators - but ultimately it's all applicable to my day job, working on compilers.
IPhone background applications - the solution, sort of
From what I understand, game programming has been a niche and, god forbid, an actual profit center for Mono, particularly since the runtime can be customized and sublicensed (closed source) from Novell.
>>> "If I were to be the CEO of Google or the founders of Google I would be very [displeased] that the best search engine in the world continues to provide as a first link, Wikipedia," he said."Is this the best they can do? Is this the best that [their] algorithm can do?" <<<

This remark convinces me that they still do not get it...
Perhaps some kind soul will create a VM image for download -- it would be great to play around with.
SEO Still Counts
Rankings have evolved in the past few years. Now people are more internet savvy, and rarely click past page one of the SERPS - let alone page two. They back up and rephrase their question. This means making the top ten - or preferably the top five - more important than ever.
Can Bee Dances and Index Finger Length Show Market Trends?
One of those articles (esp. in the Economist) that you never want to have written about you. Ouch.
This could be done, but only on some subset of wikipedia articles. One of the strong points of W is that it reacts to new events very quickly...for example, look at how detailed is the page for Obama inauguration (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Barack_Obama_2009_presidential_...). And, there are many more current events happening which are continuously updated on W...how could Britannica staff verify it in a timely manner? They will still be behind...

My feelings is, that the Britannica approach, taking the explosion of information and speed everything changes, just can't catch up anymore. They need to reinvent themselves in some more radical way to survive.
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I've got the impression that FedEx wanted to fire Ketchum and now they have found a good pretence. If I am wrong, couldn't they just be quiet about it?
I am overwhelmed by the potential of this man.

Forgive my ignorance, but does anyone know the substance of Executive Order 13233?

"Sec. 6. Revocation. Executive Order 13233 of November 1, 2001, is revoked."

edit: Oh forgive my trigger happiness. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Executive_Order_13233
"Would-be editors on the Britannica site will have to register using their real names and addresses before they are allowed to modify or write their own articles."

And thats why its going to fail.
Ironically, isn't most, if not all, of their data available via web pages? You'd just need to scrape them. It would be odd if using the API was made so difficult that scraping was considered the easier, legitimate route.
Completely agree with the main point...

However,

"Public APIs enable everyone to experiment with new ideas and create new ways of using your product. This is incredibly powerful because no matter how brilliant you and your coworkers are, there are always going to be smarter people outside of your company."

The only thing that worries me about this, is that in Twitters case, they have lost control to a large extent. They're not really a destination anymore. They're a backend service with a free API.
They're no longer the gatekeeper. Just suppose Twitter introduces some advert tweets in everyones stream. 3rd party apps could just ignore those. Suppose twitter does something else to try and monetize... The major twitter apps could just decide to get together and pass messages between themselves instead of through twitter.

Having a public API is awesome for innovation and growing userbases, but it seems like there could be a reasonable risk and cost to that.
I think a public API should not be so complete that people don't need to use your app anymore.
Another blog post that furthers bad security practices by actually showing you how write SQL-injection prone code. You don't even need to write it, just cut and paste the security hole right into your project!
I don't play WOW but I can't see the logic behind this. Is it some kind of discriminating? Why don't the recruiters/employers give them a chance to take the exam, take time to look at the resume (see the achievement) and have them interviewed.

I have a nephew who's been playing WOW for a year and all of his grades is okay. I see that he has been developing skills by grinding wow gold, questing and mingling to his guild mates. Btw, his parents bought that account and there a reward system goes, everytime he got the highest score in his class his parent will buy wow gold http://wowgoldpig.com for him.
Bad situation? Dude..it's free lemons. :)
Mathematician or a Sportsman... who knows!
U.K twitter use explodeds as celebrities get on board
has anyone heard of that guy? I mean seriously if you were going to hire someone to talk about social media, wouldn't you want someone with a little bit more clout and more than 1500 friends?

i.e someone like Gary Vanderchuck(or however you spell it), he at least puts his money where his mouth is
Obama will get an NSA enhanced blackberry
You should never hire a secretary who doesn't type for fun.

You should never hire a caretaker who doesn't mop floors for fun.

Doesn't actually work, does it? Why are programmers "special"?
American capitalism is failing because it is not competitive enough.
Cloning Linux Systems With CloneZilla Server Edition (CloneZilla SE)
holing up and hacking away is more likely though, if you have passion.
because it's mental work, not physical.

you can't force creativity. of course, not all programmers need to be creative, but some do have to be.

i agree though, it's a bit foolish to expect all your programmers to be "rock stars".
Ask HN: Slinkset or not?
What could be the potential disadvantages of choosing Slinkset to build a commercial consumer product...

I've tried Pligg - It attracts too much SPAM and i couldn't figure a way to avoid it...

I like Slinkset but not sure if its the right way to go, given that it is hosted and not completely flexible...

Would you try build a business that's too dependent on a provider like Slinkset?
why not just host the reddit code yourself?
Why did the magazine endorse Bush in 2000 and then again in 2004? What exactly is obvious in retrospect that wasn't apparent to even marginally informed observers at the time.

The Economist has been a weathervane since they decided expanding into the US market required an editorial shift to the right. The International Herald Tribune is producing much higher quality and politically neutral reporting these days imho.
Obama staff arrives at White House stuck in dark ages of technology
the suggested heuristic obviously works only if a measurable segment of people of profession x practice their trade for fun. but, it seems credible to me in the case of writing software (and not so much for mopping floors).
We just call them rock stars.

No we don't. We stopped doing that when other folks who were hiring "rock stars" failed to get a product off the ground, and proved their salaries couldn't live up to the livelihood of what a rock star expects to be compensated, thereby making the phrase "rock star" in any sense other than someone who does what Jimmy Buffet did overwhelmingly kitschy, and anyone using the phrase mind-numbingly foolish.

Thanks for playing.
You should never hire a musician who doesn't play for fun.

You should never hire an artist who doesn't paint/draw/whatever for fun.

Seems to work ok for creative professions.
There's definitely a cost-benefit scenario, but I think in Twitter's case much of their run-away usage has been because exactly that ecosystem exists. It's like an early adopter's wet dream. My biggest gripe with it is the rate limiting since it means I can't actually build the apps that I want to.

(I'd love to build a friend-finder for it. Theirs sucks. That's a perfect setup for our graph discovery stuff, but we need to be able to traverse several levels out to do something useful with it.)
Because you can learn typing without loving it and you can learn mopping without loving it. Not so with programming which is ultimately a creative task. I know plenty of people who went through university and learned the mechanics of programming without really liking it. These people will never be good programmers just like most people who wrote essays in college will never be good writers.

Ironically a mediocre programmer really compares better to a secretary than to a great programmer. He may be able to churn out code when given detailed instructions, just like the secretary will type out your letter when you dictate it to her. But the great programmer on the other hand; he decides what letter to write...
The Battle of the Startup Pages, Which Type of Page Do You Use?
Google Ads Appear on Isohunt and TorrentFreak Gets Details a little Wrong
Today it was repoted by Torrentfreak that according to a report in the Norwegian press today, some companies have reacted uncomfortably to the news that their Google Adwords text ads have been appearing on IsoHunt, the world’s third largest BitTorrent site.
A secretary who typed for fun or a caretaker who mopped floors for fun would actually probably be more productive than one who didn't. More specifically, someone who IMs all night long is probably a faster typing than someone who avoids a keyboard after clocking out.

What makes programmers special?

1) There are actually people who program for fun. If you looked for rockstar janitors who mopped floors for fun, you wouldn't find any.

2) There is an order of magnitude or two difference in the productivity of great programmers compared to average programmers, whereas a great janitor or secretary may be something like twice as productive as an average one. It's more important to find a good one.

3) Filtering good programmers is notoriously difficult - it's not like typing where you can give candidates a simple test and get a straightforward, quantitative answer, so every bit of information helps.
this sounds like a great idea to me. it is a kind of middle ground between power/bandwidth hogging apps updating themselves all the time and the complete silence everyone is subjected to now.

the follow on to the main 'update all' icon, which is kind of a 'force sync now' option, which is a user defined sync definition on a per application basis is the big win.

apple - listen up and expose some update scheduling apis!
Who are the dragons?
Why do you think that?

Because Schwartz as much as said so at a conference last year. Maybe I misinterpret the remark, but it was something along the lines of, "I've caught some flak for our Open Source strategy from Wall Street and some of our institutional investors, but I believe that long-term this is the only viable option for Sun." I took this to mean he believes, and that some investors believe, that in the short term, going all Open Source is a net negative for their revenue.
Congratulation on failing to spell 30% of your words properly.
I can. The guy who is always listening for chances to jump in and prove how smart he is, instead of actually hearing what the other person is saying.
Congratulations PG on the coming child
I wish you both all the joy and blessings which a child brings. The up side is you're used to short nights from the startup lifestyle, so you can pull the night shift with the kid!

But in all seriousness, congratulations and I wish you all the best :)
Do you know if attracts spam, as much as pligg?
Also, FedEx didn't publicly call the guy out or try to punish him. An employee sent him an email and cc'd their director. The employee's email got leaked out somehow later.

http://blogs.zdnet.com/collaboration/?p=189

http://shankman.com/be-careful-what-you-post/
They did not endorse Bush in 2004. They don't claim to be neutral - they're very much in favor of things like free trade, for instance.
There is a biweekly YC meetup at Tipjoy HQ: http://bit.ly/startup_poker

We had a good crowd last night. I need to buy more chairs.
Two reasons why the most successful people are often very nice
It's been about a year since I've been in business and because I'm building my company in Japan, I've had to pay particularly close attention to the intricacies of building relationships. As I've had the opportunity to come into contact with many amazing people, one thing has struck me about the most successful among the people I have met.

The most successful and well-connected people I have met over the last year are, more often than not, the most humble and accessible people I've met. I think this is because of two reasons:

The first is that you never really know who someone is based on simple first impressions. And, perhaps more importantly, you never know who someone will become. So, aside from the natural human decency that should accompany all of our relationships, it's just smart from a business perspective to treat everyone with respect and not write off those who don't necessarily make a strong impression in person. I've met quite a few people here personally responsible for earning tens or hundreds of millions of dollars and it's not rare for these people to be decidedly non-flashy and almost a little awkward. It would, of course, be a mistake to misjudge these individuals merely on the basis of the first impression they make because they are truly heavy hitters.

The other reason is one that is probably more common and it's simply part of the natural humility that comes from building up a business out of nothing. Many of the successful people I know come from modest, decidedly non-elite backgrounds and this gives them the right combination of empathy and ambition that enables them to succeed.

Just wanted to share that here in the hopes that it will be useful to the other startup founders here.
This is something that occurs again and again in the creative arts. People say they want to write a poem or a novel, but they end up writing something that's actually best expressed as an essay, or the poem itself becomes a veiled essay (see also: screenplays filled with pointless exposition and explanatory speeches).

It's probably a consequence of the fact that we're all taught in school to write essays, but not to be creative. When we don't know what we're doing, we fall back on that way of expressing ourselves. To beat it, you have to unlearn what you've been taught.
Rands in Repose has a useful take on "Rock Star" programmers; he calls them "Free Electrons."

http://www.randsinrepose.com/archives/2005/03/20/free_electr...
"Maybe it's time for the White House to upgrade to Windows Vista?"

Or let the Mac-savvy team, continue to use Macs?
icanhasimacpwease!
I found this cartoon appropriate as a response:
http://tumble.dominik.net/post/70979983/via-julianakeibel

(Two lemons see a sign that says: "When the world gives you lemons, make lemonade." One lemon asks the other, "Daddy, why do they hate us?")
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dragons'_Den
Not so with programming which is ultimately a creative task.

90% of programming - sometimes 99% - is forms or reports. Validate and store some data, or retrieve and format some data. No-one does that "for fun". You need professionals who can execute at a high level of competence true, but "creative" is a bit of an exaggeration.
This seems like a detail which should have been examined prior to the handoff. If the domain changeover happened, they obviously considered technology, but somehow overlooked the PC data systems in the White House IT dept.?
As I said before: pg&jl made someone that will hopefully make something people want. It'll need to be more than three months though :P
"to my day job, working on compilers"

This is the kind of day job one doesn't see here in Bangalore! Hereabouts everything is enterprisey this, soa that. :-(
"Obama and other officials won't be able to use Instant Messaging in the White House."

Here are some considerations to pull inter-government communication out of the last century:

https://www.yammer.com/

http://www.adiumx.com/

http://www.jabber.org/web/Main_Page

as for the super secret nsa approved barakberry - me wants one, precious!
It depends what stage the project you're working on is at. Adding new forms to an enterprise-level CRM might be where a lot of (boring) programming jobs are at, but it doesn't preclude creative programmers: those who create a system from scratch that does something that has never been done before.
I have mixed feelings about the sentiment, but mostly I feel like making setting up a development environment confusing probably isn't the best way to weed people out. Besides, a recent CS graduate who can't install Eclipse on their own is one thing, but a bright kid with books about programming from the public library that wants to move from QBASIC to C is another thing entirely.
for a sniper to hit a target in the head, he would have to be on higher ground

Why so?
On Monday, a government agency that the Obama administration -- but that is probably the National Security Agency -- added to a standard blackberry a super-encryption package.... and Obama WILL be able to use it ... still for routine and personal messages.

Whoa. Someone needs coffee before writing their blog posts. Does not parse.
All Web 2.0 is is forms and reports.

You think, back in the 60s when it was the latest thing, COBOL programmers called themselves "rockstars"?
Unrelated, but I do it so if someone breaks in, it's apparent they're breaking in.
For working up the motivation to write I recommend "Bird by Bird" by Ann Lamont.

http://www.amazon.com/Bird-Some-Instructions-Writing-Life/dp...
Presumably because of the glass enclosure.
The ultimate startup

Congrats!
Sorry - UK Dragons Den investors. They joined yesterday, but haven't quite got the hang of it yet. They're using it like email and arranging their day while everyone else watches - stalkers' paradise!! Someone should say something...
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Ask HN: advices for presenting a project
Hello,

I have been working on a project for quite some time now, and I have been struggling to get in touch with a big organization that could both help me kicking off my "startup" and receive good attention out of my project. After a lot of hunting I managed to find two contacts (the president and the secretary of the said organization). I am about to contact them to see if I can manage to convince them about my "baby" and I would hate to ruin everything because I badly planned the presentation.

Since many of you (and ycombinator) dealt with this all already, do you mind to share some advice and URI on this matter? I'd also love to improve my slideshow skills, any suggestion?

Thanks
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You should never hire a chef who doesn't cook for fun.
New staff find White House in tech Dark Ages
I have a slideshow for you which will help you improve your slideshow skills: http://www.slideshare.net/thecroaker/death-by-powerpoint

Definitely one of the best I've ever seen. Its a tutorial what to do and how to do it.
Sony and the "ten-year" console: a look at the argument
in a early stage startup you better off with few of the rockerstars types

Sure, but the article should make a point of including this qualifier. Because, of all the teams of programmers in the world -- even if you just count the competent ones! -- a very very small percentage are involved in early-stage startups, despite PG's best efforts. And a lot of those teams benefit from a mix of personalities, ranging from the energetic free electron to the dedicated day worker to the manager who actually kind of enjoys all those tedious meetings where (s)he evangelizes your work to upper management.
Good news that you're working on the replacements! Version 2.0 is always better than 1.0 -- once you get the bugs worked out.

Best of luck. Kids are can be a lot of sweat and tears, but they're also the best thing you can experience in life. "Terrible blessings" might be a good aphorism.
Well, that depends on your environment ofcourse, but I'd say when you're spending 90% of your time on forms and reports then you're doing something wrong. A smart programmer would probably find or build a framework that allows the consumers of said reports to build their own so he doesn't have to continiously waste his time on that.

That's btw one of the main differences that I see between great and mediocre programmers. When you give the task of "build a report" to a mediocre programmer then he'll go and build a report that meets to your specs. He'll keep doing that even if he gets the same task every week.
A great programmer on the other hand will soon start trying to optimize the process by generalizing and automating. That's where the creativity kicks in. Programmers who love to code will try to get a repetitive, monotone duty out of their way asap, in order to free their time for more interesting problems. Programmers who merely "write code for a living" will rather stick to such tasks despite their inefficiency, because that "one hour per day on boring recurring tasks" is one hour that they don't have to do real work.