skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Because the kind of people who start software companies don't participate in book clubs.

Same answer for "Why isn't there a startup for knitters?", "Why isn't there a startup for school supply purchasing agents?", and "Why isn't there a software company which makes educational bingo cards?" (OK, last one perhaps not a great example.)

P.S. Somebody explain to me why more people haven't clued in that a) adult women have money and b) nobody else is trying to get it with software. Oh no, lets take the 473rd attempt at showing a 17 year old unemployed World of Warcraft player banner advertisements instead.
So, what do you do during the 2 years your competition is catching up on that model? Get ahead again, or do nothing and be really surprised when you lose your edge?

I'm not saying labor cost isn't a disadvantage. I'm saying you're treating it like the necessary and sufficient condition for success across the board, which it really shouldn't be. You're suggesting that if you have a labor cost disadvantage, it is intellectually obvious that it's impossible to stay ahead of your competition with advances in other areas (like RnD or supply chain efficiency)?
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Hey! We can keep it in BETA for a few years! Nice idea.
I think a requirement for a random subset to be inspected by a real independent group like the SEC would cut down on a lot of this crap. You would see a lot of stuff get through but it would put a dampener effect on bubbles. You would also need to keep track of how the agency rated vs each company.
Agree with these criteria. I personally like also some "airiness" so the Bitsteam Vera Sans Mono mentioned seems a bit too compact for me, but the Liberation fonts were a nice surprise.

Personal favorites include Andale Mono, Dina and Consolas (Inconsolata is sometimes adequate except it doesn't seem to scale well to different sizes). For some reason I've always used Crisp for javascript, even if it too does not scale well at all, and is in fact too small for my tired eyes.
Bellezza da spalmare - Benvenuti in Pianeta Donna
At first I thought this was a paid service which did the work of posting on your behalf on various social networks. But after I signed up I realized they actually want you to set up your own accounts on each of the various social networks that they broadcast to and then access all of those accounts using Ping as an account aggregator. In this case, it makes sense that this is not a paid service.

But couldn't it be? Admittedly, given the current financial environment, I would see many people opting to do this work themselves with Ping as the free intermediary. But what about people who either don't have the time or don't want to deal with the tedium of that kind of grunt work and would rather pay to have someone do that work on their behalf? Publicity is a big job and not much fun.

I would be curious how much time HN members spend promoting their projects on social networks and whether, if they had the money to spend, they would gladly let someone do that work on their behalf. I could see Ping introducing a premium account option which tests to see whether such a market exists.
Feature proposal: a way to order comments by posting date
On occasions I can't follow discussions because posts are ordered by score, the latter being an (unknown to me) combination of posting date and votes. When arriving late to a discussion, I can't follow the thread.

A simple link switch to order by posting date alone would help me lots.
It's a technique very used by some bosses (that dont know shxt).
It's specially effective with young/big-ego !! developers. The modus operandi would be saying thay some work you did is crap. After that you provide a detailed report on the advantages of your work. And after that, he can tell his own boss what are the wonders he is acomplishing, all without reading a single line of the related documentation.

!! replace young/big-ego with any of these: ninja, guru, hacker, elvis, etc. :D
Did you happen to notice the date on that RFC? It's an old April fools joke. I think I remember seeing it on Slashdot several years ago.

Here are some test results showing that AvianIP is faster than ADSL: http://www.notes.co.il/benbasat/5240.asp

And the Slashdot discussion here: http://science.slashdot.org/science/04/03/31/2224227.shtml?t...

This thing has been recycled for years. I can't find the original post.
And you can check out http://lwjgl.org/ too.
Oh My God, It's 1993 Again! Historical data defuses "Depression" talk
The problem is Java Applets are limited to 64MB of memory unless you have the user go through a horribly unusable process to change that. This include Xith3d, jMonkeyEngine, etc.

The best 3d web engine is Unity3D. Best game engine tool is Flash, even for some small 3D.

You can always have a downloadable client but if you want good web based browser games Unity3D and Flash (AS3 since it is on AVM2 and much faster) are the only way to go.

If you want a pretty sweet Python 3D engine check out Panda 3D.
I thought this was some great data to calm nerves about the "Next Great Depression" many people speculate we are entering. Funding may have temporarily dried up, but as long as things don't crater we are actually doing ok at least vis-a-vis unemployment.

BTW headline came from Virginia Postrel's Dynamist blog:

http://dynamist.com/weblog/index.html
I spent a week in Tokyo in 2005 and "must buy Japanese toilet in my eventual house" was a key takeaway message.

It does take a few days to turn your opinion around on the warm seat issue. On a legacy toilet, a warm toilet seat feels gross because you can't help but think about how it got warm and how recently that must have been. The reptilian part of my brain took a few days to get over that; afterwards it was the second-best feature ever.

The best? Those sprays. At the risk of taking it to the gutter, which I'll try to avoid: think about a time when you might have been ill or otherwise had intestinal troubles. You may have, as I have, just stepped right off the john and into the shower to tidy up rather than deforest all of Washington state for TP. With the spray, your normal hygeine regimen steps up to "almost freshly showered" and it requires almost no paper as you're simply drying with the paper. (I never had the patience to wait for the heated fans to dry my bottom, as they work about as quickly as the old-style ones in US bathrooms, and there too I'd have to wipe my hand/bottom on my pants.)

The heated seat is good, but the spray is the business!
Are you sure you aren't me?

http://is.gd/d7G0
Hmmm, now I realized why child psychologists still use old ratio based definition. It's just more useful for them to think in terms of mental ages.

To respond to your original question, I have a hunch that intelligence variance (as opposed to IQ) is indeed quantitative.

It kind of make sense. Intelligence seems to correlate positively with simple stuff, like reaction speed or short term memory span.

Qualitative differences may arise as consequence of applying different "processing power" throughout your life.

For the first order effects, you can imagine that if you don't have enough "CPU-minutes", for some problems you simply time out.

For the higher order effects, it's like compound interest. For example, as written in the article, smarter kids start to speak and read sooner, thus they acquire more information and they also acquire it at higher rate. And as we know from financial compound interests, even tiny initial amounts can balloon into huge sums given enough time.
A second mortgage shock heading for the economy
Developer, a job you "fall into"
I find it funny that the "game degree" is exploding at the same time the indie game scene is. I understand why... but I just wish people would realize that they don't need to go to school to make games on their own.
Why do you rule out depending on advertising? :/ Is income from advertising not real money?...

FWIW Mibbit makes real money, all from advertising at the moment. Premium paid accounts are planned, but it's a lot more work than just putting some useful adverts up.
One where __ looks like two underscores and not a single line.
The Myth of Digital Democracy.
Animoto On The iPhone: Trust Me, You Want It
Coding Horror: Pressing the Software Turbo Button
Stack Overflow: Vote Fraud and You
Will Ferrell site, Funny Or Die, raises $3 million
http://www.goodreads.com/
Windows 7: "The Linux Killer"
The Long Tail Theory Gets Challenged, Just Not in Search Query Demand
Wholesale Thailand Products - Thai Silk Products Thailand Products
State of the Twittersphere - Q4 2008 Report
http://www.ravelry.com/
Don't forget the "We'll be chopped up by the exhaust fans unless we start burping" and the "fat kid gets stuck in a pipe until the pressure blasts him out". Oh, and Wonka's creepy counterspy guy.
You really bought 6 books just on Rails? That seems a bit ... excessive.
Oh my god! That looks like the pile of books that is currently sitting underneath my desk!

http://twitpic.com/uyw7

I keep moving the pile around hoping a new location will give me the necessary kick in the guts to start reading, but I just keep adding to it.
Add this to the list of company founders that show up when they're discussed. This is why I love HN.
"at temperatures close to absolute zero, or -273º Celsius."

Weird things are bound to happen when you remove all kinetic energy from a system.
2009 KPSS Sınavı
So the argument here is that Windows 7 is a Linux "killer" because it's got high yield possibilities for netbooks. Is that what we're supposed to believe?
Ask HN: How do you deal with mental illness?
I used to have panic disorder, which I've essentially squashed through meditation practice. Panic cost me a job and a relationship, but I seem to have trained my mind well-enough of late to have PD in permanent remission.

I also tend to be mildly bipolar. I'm not diagnosed, but I've known myself to be cyclothymic since 13. I treat this as a spiritual and personal challenge. It only affects me 10-15 days out of the average year, and it allows me to have experiences that most people never will, so I regard it as a blessing, though a mixed one.

I'm extremely sensitive to light, sound, and drugs. I don't use recreational drugs, and "social drinking" is out of the question because a 5-year-old could drink me under the table. (I love beer, but I probably drink 1-2 per month.) The high school cafeteria was torture, because lunch was the main social context of that era, and I wanted to be a "normal kid" but the intensely loud noise rendered me a social cripple.

My most beautiful but also damaging mental quirk, however, is probably hypergraphia. I don't think I have OCD, but I have an intense compulsion to write. I'm good at it. I can pound out 2000 words of coherent English prose in half an hour. Unfortunately, it can be a bit dicey. When I had a blog, I'd inevitably find myself posting inappropriate personal confessions on it... hence the reason I do not have a blog. I've ruined relationships with brutally honest emails. I also used to have a "flame habit"; I was addicted to the flow state I could attain by launching offensive/provocative discussions on Internet message boards (that was before I came here) and watching hundreds of people react. Some of these online misbehaviors have been tied to my real name but, worse yet, the "troll" era has cost me an immense amount of time that could have been better employed.

If I could divert the hypergraphic tendency into a more precise (and, frankly, often more useful) form of writing-- code-- I would be able to go from a 5-6 hacker to a 8-9 in a matter of weeks. Unfortunately, I haven't refined this mental quirk to such a degree yet. Does anyone have any suggestions?

What mental challenges have you faced, and how have you dealt with them?
I enjoyed the Key Club in high school. But then again, that's how we referred to our lock-picking training sessions.
Our new archives
Ask HN: SaaS vs. distributed app
Hi, I'm trying to decide between SaaS and a distributed model for a business web app I'm building. Does anybody have recommendations or experiences they can share on this topic?

With SaaS I can use whatever framework I like. However this would basically require me to become a 24/7 systems administrator, something I'm not interested in or really even qualified for. Some of that responsibility could be owned by a hosting company, but if the app goes down in the middle of the night I'll be the one contacted by angry customers.

With a distributed app hosting and support responsibilities are owned primarily by the customer's sysadmins. However this means I'll have to build using technologies they're willing to support, such as .NET, which means I won't enjoy development and ongoing maintenance of the app.

I'm also concerned about whether SMBs prefer owning an app and data or would rather outsource this responsibility in the current market.

Anybody else been down this road? Thanks.
I am so tired of the "X killer" meme, it really is the time to put it to rest. Has it ever proved true? Ever?

What does it even me? Taking over market dominance? Completely eradicating from existence?
I second the UI needing some user feedback. I was expecting a Google Suggest style dropdown and it took me a few seconds to realise I was filtering the results already in the page.

It didn't take me long to figure out the purpose of the site but - then again, I shouldn't have to work it out / think. Check out Steve Krug's book on UI design, Don't Make Me Think. The title says it all.

Correct me if my assumptions are wrong but I sense some scaling issues just around the corner. The live search doesn't make any AJAX requests - will the app always start with every listing on the homepage? How will it behave when you have hundreds or thousands of listings?

The Technologies taxonomy is not what I would expect (no programming languages). Is MySpace really a technology you'd list on your resume? Perhaps I've not quite got who the site is aimed at. If that's the case then (as others have said) you should make that explicit, in bullet-list style on the homepage.

Link the logo to the homepage. Lose the icons. Bump up the font size. Add some visual hierarchy to the listings to make them easier to scan (the dev's name isn't the most important piece of information in the listing).

crickets Not sure what that is/means.

What's your strategy for filling out content?
"and of course, to cut of the supply... like going after drug dealers instead of drug users"

and we all know how well that turned out...
I'm not the type to say that Linux isn't good. I use it on a daily basis. However, if you're in a large enough non-tech firm, you know that there are people who really don't get tech. Any difference (even difference for the better) is bad. That will prevent Linux adoption.

While I don't work in tech support, I'm the next office over from the ones who do and they'll face problems as silly as people thinking that their printer didn't need to be plugged in (to the wall) to print things or that you can un-send email. For many people you just can't change things without a lot of retraining even if it should be obvious.
Who Watches The Watchers:Aussie Threatened w Arrest Under Terrorism Act For police video
I love the Internet.
Check out PyGame. Also check out the PyWeek game development challenge.

Building a game in a week is an invigorating challenge. I learned python during one of the PyWeeks and I'd never made a game before. The best part is that because of the short deadline it isn't some huge amorphous task. Even if the game is crap, you learn something, have some fun, and get to see how more experienced people get things done.

I also like to take a holiday from the languages I have to use for work. I mean, Flash games are pretty hot, but spending some time in a different language is good for the brain. Regardless of tool analogy.
Python 3.0 Primer, Part 1: What's New
I'd rather be running something not Linux on a laptop... and I do. I use it on the desktop, but its shite on the laptop. Awful wireless and less than stellar performance as far as battery life goes compared to Vista (and likely Win 7).

Meh. All the OS's suck, its just a matter of choosing one that sucks the least for your use case.
Bazaar and Python are a natural fit. Besides being written in Python, Bazaar provides nice integration with Launchpad -- and Ubuntu makes heavy use of Python in general.

Anyhow, Bazaar has very nice documentation, is easy to use, and certainly has a helpful and friendly community behind it. It's also now officially a GNU project, so it's not going anywhere any time soon.
Kento Cho also should get crazy amounts of respect. He just codes crazy shmups for his own amusement. Seems even someone developing for Wii took notice: http://www.nintendo.com/games/detail/ZIhL8DajewM6w7pMaFOVrFY...

I love a good shmup.
The only thing to fear is fear itself
No, it isn't deflationary. We had bubbles in housing, oil, food, and other commodities. Anyone remember the news articles saying "food prices are rising to levels not seen since 1998, gas prices too, the end is nigh?"

Those bubbles have burst, and prices are returning to their normal level. Over the short term, that looks like deflation (just as the bubble looked like inflation), but it's really very different from actual Japan-style deflation.

By the way, "shadow banking system" is just a scary term invented by Paul Krugman to describe non-S&L investors.
Star issue 313 to encourage Google App Engine team to provide distributed transactions.
Merry Grav-mass
NeWS didn't kill X11 and DPDF won't either!
the rest of us are fine, but thank you very much for asking
This is a topic worth discussion -- I bet a lot of people here have some of these issues.

For your writing, I'd suggest continuing it, but putting it into some kind of "buffer" so that it doesn't get immediately posted to your blog. Then trim it down to the best, most polished entries, and pass it through some friends to review before being published. I think PG does something like this for his more significant/weighty essays.
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How would someone actually implement an effective mechanism for controlling suspicious voting? For example, if 10 people log on from the same corporate network, say Citibank headquarters in NYC, doesn't Stackoverflow/HN/Reddit see them as coming from a single location since they won't have distinct IP's coming through the corporate gateway? If they all vote in a similar pattern, that is certainly an indication of collusion. But what if it's not? I realize we're not deciding people's lives here, and yet it is a noble goal to try to create an online world more perfect than the one in which we live.

If it is possible to identify voting collusion, can we not remove downvoting and be confident that we are close to a virtual utopia?

As confident as Joel sounds in this post, I suspect the identification process is not quite so seamless. I don't know how many other technical scenarios exist similar to the Citibank one above. Perhaps someone here has tried to solve this problem and could shed some light?

While Reddit would be an entirely different thing (mostly better) without downvoting, I have often wondered what HN would look like if no one had downvoting capability - is it needed at all? I would think the best comments would bubble up as they do currently and the worthless or offensive ones would either get forgotten or responded to, without the need for being downgraded.
How to reduce procrastination
"Windows Senior Vice President Steve Sinofsky showed off Windows 7 on his Lenovo S10 and said it used less than half of the netbook's 1GB of RAM."

o rly? Only half the system's resources to sit and do nothing?
Ask HN: Domain management?
Is anyone satisfied with GoDaddy's domain management system? Does anyone have any recommendations for alternatives? By manage I'm referring to controling DNS, renewal notices, private registration, etc. GoDaddy just seems very clunky. Bonus question: do you use GoDaddy to register your domains or another provider?
Britain: Job-losing workers unload secret office data
Scarcely "Hacker News" ... surely this is simply spam.
I'm not sure that you are...
http://www.json.org/json2.js

// In the third stage we use the eval function to compile the text into a

// JavaScript structure. The '{' operator is subject to a syntactic ambiguity

// in JavaScript: it can begin a block or an object literal. We wrap the text

// in parens to eliminate the ambiguity.
I have to disagree. Americans do suffer from quailty engineering. Look at Lockheed, Boeing, etc. The Joint Strike Fighter costs something like $140 million a plane. Its foreign competition costs somewhere in the range of 40 to 60 million. Oh, and it already has most of the kinks out.

Or take the Apache helicopter, which are still hand built. At current capacity, only about 60 can be built a year. And we're on a war footing. 51% of your tax dollars get shuffled to the DoD. We're fighting and losing two wars.

Chrysler is a private company that couldn't get a loan from the firm that owns an 80% stake in the company. They know better than anyone that its not "labor cost" that's holding back Chrysler, but fundamental inability to run their business in a profitable fashion.
This is nothing but free advertising for these so-called consultants.
Maybe the world would be a better place if it had... ;)
Thanks for this delightful and helpful comment. I'm very glad to hear it.
FLOSS Manuals sprints to build quality free documentation for free software
Er... People do use Python to make games. Well-known ones include Eve Online, Grim Fandango, and Vampire: The Masquerade.

I take it you are advocating learning C/C++ to make games before learning Python? If so, consider why anyone who already knows C/C++ would bother embedding Python or Lua in their game... That would also be "going back to relearn a new technology when you reach a certain stage where your development capacity is limited by the tools you are using". And if you need to know both C and a scripting language to make a game, it doesn't really matter which you learn first... except that by learning the scripting language first you can prototype earlier and faster.

(And, considering the article's context of indie games, being able to rapidly prototype game designs is more important than having them perform well from the start.)
I don't think anyone is worrying about a depression based on the _current_ unemployment number. The concern is that things are going to get much worse because of frozen credit markets, nationalized banks, globalized finance, trade deficits, a worldwide demand slump, a weirdly-behaving dollar, and, most importantly, the fact that interest rates are at zero so we don't have any normal macroeconomic tools left.
I use GoDaddy. And that's only because I couldn't think of anyone better. It seems like the domain registration space is filled with shady characters. GoDaddy's interface is clunky and confusing and every time I go there I wish someone would just take a giant digital red pen and cross off everything that's not needed and it would magically go away leaving a clean interface. But it doesn't happen.

So, once you get used to how it works, you can get done what you need to get done. I'm pretty clueless when it comes to domain names, but whenever I've been going through tutorials on websites, the settings I need to change have been there in GoDaddy, so that's a plus. At least they're not missing anything I need through all that clutter.