skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
This study wouldn't have gotten any attention if it didn't have a bunch of baity headlines attached to it, such as "How using Facebook could raise your risk of cancer" or "Facebook causes cancer."

So prevalent is this in the media now that even scientists are getting in on the action by making scandalous or outrageous claims that are weakly supported by their results just in order to get some attention.
No, by the denizens of the 80's for teleporting things 'in' from the future ;)
Netflix streams already rushing past DVDs in 2009?
Hmmm... I hadn't realized submissions retrieval would be so slow, since my 17 submissions show almost instantaneously; your hundreds do take a while.

Something about the indexing for submissions doesn't work that fast, even though all in memory?
Tried to get to it last nite and this morning. No luck. Is it the "slashdot" effect, or is something else going on?
IPhone ELITE Concept Designer & Artist Exclusive Interview
A History of PMOG: Pursuit of a Playful Web
You can always sit there and stare.
Im kind of tired of them too, but they seem to keep coming. Why? Maybe its a good thing to always see positive thoughts. Maybe its a good thing to get away from the news some times.

News isn't the only thing in this world that matters. Its the positives and happiness too.
There's a big disconnect here. Copyright controls distribution, not use. Amazon is distributing ebooks, the exact same ebooks as they were distributing 3 months ago. The only difference is, they now have a tool that consumes the book differently.

It's the equivalent of music visualization tools. When I play a CD in my Xbox and it shows me pretty lights, no one considers that copyright infringement. It's the exact same functionality as text-to-speech, but in reverse.
Yes. See Max Weber on the topic.
Speaking as a former enterpreneur, I don't think having a BS represents anything at all.

Speaking as an employee, one thing I came to notice was that the BEST people I worked with did not even attend an IT course (they had graduations on other areas, like math or physics - one in english literature!). Of course there were some IT bachelors in the bunch - what I'm trying to say is that, as far as I've noticed, it didn't make anyone better than the ones without a degree on the field.

I'd get to know new technologies, get to meet new people (both online and offline), take part on things (like JUGs or other technology groups - even give a try at setting up my own, maybe), get involved on open source, write.

Investing in a bit of hype also helps - like jumping on RoR one year ago, when it was 1.0, for instance, would automatically turn you into a 'Rails Hacker', which is a 'niche'.

Bottomline: I don't really think getting back to work or learning 'low level stuff' would really help in anyone's career (except if you plan on becoming an academic).
You cannot redistribute the audio recording you created of yourself reading the book.
Udefn.com - everything's a txt away
TCMalloc has excellent performance. I was fighting a losing performance battle with it, and eventually dropped an old project on mulithreaded memory allocation.

The only drawback it had at the time was that it never returned memory to the OS. But if you know that doesn't matter for you (as I doubt it mattered for Google), then it's probably the best choice.
What to Expect When You’re Seeking Stimulus Funds
Adobe is working on a promising product called Catalyst that aims to allow designers working on Illustrator/Photoshop templates to convert them into Adobe Flex UI screens (mxml). It is promising because from what I've seen so far the mxml isn't very developer friendly.

The aim, of course, is for the designer to generate the exact look and feel for the wireframes and render them (using Catalyst) to MXML for the Adobe Flash/Flex developer to code in the behavior/functionality. Catalyst will require Flex Builder 4 (which will not be out until 2nd half of 2009).

http://labs.adobe.com/technologies/flashcatalyst/

FXG (the interchange format spec):

http://opensource.adobe.com/wiki/display/flexsdk/FXG+1.0+Spe...

As an aside, I work on a large project (at least 10 UI developers) that uses Flex. We don't even use the GUI builder.
Sorry about that. We're still in a hotel in Miami with shitty Internet. Will be back in California tonight and everything should be smooth sailing after that.
I don't take your meaning. You think compared to what we have in 2008, the web of 1996 didn't suck? I was connected directly to the backbone (I ran an ISP), and I agree with him.
Yahoo Briefcase will be closing on March 30, 2009.
There were thriving Usenet and IRC communities (I miss Usenet), but you had those things on BBS's too; it wasn't really a breakthrough.
Maybe, since the submissions stretch back over a longer time (I submit less than I comment), they're hitting the disk, and consequently slow?
To be fair, The "Causes Cancer" rather than other alarmist results from using Facebook et al came from a Daily Mail report - and the Daily Mail is a rag that seems to add a gratuitous "Causes Cancer" or "Cures Cancer" tag to any (even pseudo) scientific report.
I was also "limpressed". Nice coinage there.
The best comedy works because it is intuitively true and engaging.
So, when do we get to play with it??
Interesting idea, serving all HTML static and combining that on client side with the dynamic content using JavaScript. And having a pure JSON server. Sounds ground breaking to me, anyone know of other sites/frameworks that would work like this?
I am not sure if someone asked for this before...

But I want to write a comment on someone's page... to contact him/her or ask about something.

Something like the "Wall" on Facebook.

And users would choose if they want to enable their "wall" or not... so they would have control over this... if they want people to write to them or not!
I don't think the refresh rate is fast enough to "scroll".
I heard a fun lecture once from a professor at the Stanford Center on Longevity. Their psychologists have observed a so-called positivity effect in older people, and they've got lots of studies on the subject:

http://longevity.stanford.edu/mymind/mentalhealthandemotiona...

“Human minds don’t process information like a computer,” says Carstensen, who was one of the first researchers to discover that older people tend to be happier. “We process what is relevant to our goals.”

And as we age, our goals tend to change — toward achieving emotional well-being, she says.

My favorite part of this article is this paragraph:

Further studies that showed a similar positivity effect in young people whose expected life spans were cut short by cancer or AIDS led to Carstensen’s current “shorter life span” explanation for the positivity effect.

This suggests that maintaining an awareness of your own mortality is a useful way to improve your happiness -- by encouraging yourself to focus on the positive -- and, paradoxically, that pretending you are going to live forever may be a recipe for unhappiness.
Monads are one attempt at solving this problem.
You work for six months or a year building up your product, for no pay. A startup founder - or an unpublished author.

What most tech types don't realize is how much risk there is already in the writers profession. These are not fat-cat music executives. They don't have anything like as much chance of becoming rich as a founder of a startup. Heck, most don't even make a living, and have to keep the day job; even once they get published and get advances on later books. And if one book tanks, they're back to square one.

That's why they don't like change. They are already drowning in risk, and people are saying they should take on some more?

I don't buy the idea that text-to-speech is infringement, personally. But it's too easy to say that authors should just 'change their business model'. How?
How difficult is it to move there? I am finishing up my Masters degree this September and want to go to California for at least a year to work.

But it looks to me that you can only get H1B visa's which makes you totally dependent on a single employer without the ability to change jobs.

Do you have citizenship?
I am not sure if someone asked for this or not..

To prevent any abuse to the story's title... why don't you make a curl/wget request to the URL that a user is submitting, and get the title of that URL/page automatically?

So... user won't have any control over the title when submitting a link.

In fact I need this feature.. because I am tired of copying the title of the story that I submit! :(
What do you think?
Students Stand When Called Upon, and When Not
One off the cuff question related to this that popped into my head - Does a person implicitly own the digital rights to all of the music they have purchased in the past? (cds, vinyl, etc)

Can an older guy to download via torrent all of the music from old vinyl records he has in the closet? Considering economic conditions, receiving 9.99 for every crappy cd I bought as a teen would be nice.

Could one sell back to the record industry for the "value" of the digital rights?

I don't really agree with this, but one could apply this logic to vhs/dvds, books.
Two features I miss from Win/Gnome/KDE world: cut+paste and merging of folders (when you move something to a folder which has another with the same name, you actually override it in OSX).
It's probably just me. Meh...
It seems that Amazon would agree with that assessment, since they own Audible.com, the web's biggest audio book seller. One would imagine that if they thought the kindle's reading feature would infringe upon/destroy the audio book business, they wouldn't have given it the green light.
the reason is probably "let's not release all the revolutionary UI stuff we had thought at the same time, so we can send a dozen other felines with minor enhancements, one every year".
How much is a first class stamp?
Hey,
This story has more than 660 comments on it, it takes many seconds to load, and it does not load completely!

I can't see the whole comments...the page stops loading!

Why don't you devide the comments to several pages? So you would display something like 100 comments per page.. and you click next to display the next 100, if any!

That would be better... page would load faster... and things would be fine!
Love the idea. Will be looking to implement something like this soon.
I'm curious to know how do you do web development. Mind sharing?
Human happiness seems to be calibrated by whatever situation you consider to be your ordinary world. I traveled to Africa and visited a lot of people who's living conditions where less than ideal by my standards, but they where no more or less happy than I am, despite my (by western standards) better living conditions.

It reminds me of the quote by Bertrand Russell: "To be without some of the things you want is an indispensable part of happiness."No doubt in a few hundred years people will wonder how we ever got along happily in the era we live in now. They may think it inconceivable that we could be happy under such circumstances.
The Unhealthy Obsession with Social Media ROI
> We see stark differences in food quality laws in countries where the government pays for health care. For example, in most of Europe there's real sugar instead of corn syrup in soda.

There's no "corn lobby" in the EU, a lobby that won't go away with universal healthcare.

> I am optimistic that universal health care may reduce costs indirectly.

"optimistic" isn't a plan or an estimation of likelyhood.
Hi thepanister,

Thank you so much for the feedback! I appreciate it!
I've been having a similar discussion with all of my friends lately. When I brought a plant to work someone asked 'Why did you bring that?' and I explained to him that not 50 years ago the majority of Americans would see green on a daily basis, in fact so much green it would seem like a jungle. Now we work in concrete jungles, grey cubes, beige walls and highways.

People forget that for thousands of years we were hard wired to kill those attacking us, hunt for food, and protect our family. We struggled through disease, famine, lived in every condition this world can throw, and now we only use our brain and our bodies become confused when the genes tell them one thing and we do another.

Its probably going to be a while until our bodies catch up to our brains(maybe never).
yeah, like fart jokes.
Best cherrypickers are available at platform rentals
Panther, the UK's leading cherrypickers provider stock a number of cherry pickers/specialist platforms for the more challenging access
That seems likely. But I thought I saw a thread where pg seemed to say it was all in RAM ?

[Though in a fairly recent post, I seem to recall he was musing about upgrading from a 32 to a 64 system - and working with more than 4GB RAM. Can all HN comments & indexes be happening in 4GB RAM? ]
No, but I've head a suspicion for a while that something like Erlang could actually be useful for doing web stuff if, instead of doing much in the way of templates (Erlang is not fun for strings, IMO), it concentrated on sending and receiving JSON.
If managers were interviewed the same way as developers
There is something funny that I really wish to see here... but it's not essential.

I want to see kind of analytical tool for my karma.. and see how I am doing!

Let me explain: Can you program a tool that would draw charts of your karma history... so you can see if your karma is raising or not? And it would be great if you can let the users choose to display their karma in specific dates!

There is something more advanced also... Can you analyze the topics that user is writing about that helped him in increasing his karma?
Also recommend a stories for the user to comment on... that's related to the user's interested topics based on his/her previous comments.

I think this is hard somehow... because it needs so much of analyzing, data mining... and some logical factors to work with!

What do you think? :D
"They don't have anything like as much chance of becoming rich as a founder of a startup."

Have you ever looked at the revenues for a best selling author? They very much a have a small chance of hitting it big. They should change their business model by offering interesting things like McSweeney's which uses both online and offline products to attract an audience.
fart jokes aren't best comedy
CK is my favorite comedian and I am still waiting for the chance to catch him live. I whole-heatedly agree and recommend him to anyone who'll listen.
App Purchases Are Adding Up
Michael Moritz: Lessons from a Long-Ball Hitter
Ask y combinator: Why not release the Hacker News source as open source?
I have no idea which technologies are used for the news site engine, but would you ever consider releasing the source code?

Would anyone find it useful?
Adobe (and the assimilated Macromedia) are the state of the art at UI for designers (Photoshop; Flash authoring tools). While they can include interactivity for many standard widgets (much as Word includes code for many standard typographical symbols), they can't customize the interactivity within the tool. It still needs developers, who must work with the generated code...

OTOH, there's an argument that standard interaction is a good thing, so maybe a lack of customization/abstraction isn't so bad?
You are welcome!

If you like what I wrote, then consider voting for it :P
No its not the pirates that killed the music biz...its the music biz themselves. Instead of adapting to the changing market conditions, they've dug in and decided to litigate
Pictures of you - Imagini secures $13.5 million for its visual profiling
what is the point of this site...
its funny, cuz it seems like money wasted on a domain name,,,
Economy lifting college prospects of the well-heeled
HN is built using Arc: http://arclanguage.org/
in other words, it would probably be worth the same 400 millions from 10 years ago? :-)
Google App Engine Offers Pricing Plan Beyond Quotas; Grab A Free I/O Ticket To Celebrate
For a text-to-speech system to be as good as the standard audiobook, it would require the software actually understand the material and give each line the correct emotion and cadence it deserves. I find that words spoken at monotone or at a pace inappropriate to the content go right through me.

The audiobook is a performance and as a performance, deserves additional rights and royalties.
In that case couldn't this help with the adoption of Arc?
Google explains Gmail outage
More precisely it treats text and audio as distinct works which must be licensed individually. I wrote a lot about this at http://ourdoings.com/ourdoings-startup/2009-02-11
I send maybe 4 letters a year. I have no idea what the price of a first class stamp is but always have a vague idea that they have fiddled with it, probably since I bought my stamps.

That puts me in need of this information, and this site might google very well to provide me with the answer. Still, I would not bother to look it up. I just double stamp.

Oh, he's got google analytics and his style sheet says he is planning to have ads. I particularly like the <META NAME="ROBOTS" CONTENT="NOSNIPPET"> directive. The whole site would fit in anyone's snippet.
UK Government backs open source
Prosecution Alters Pirate Bay Charges in Bid to Win Conviction
Norway Education Minister: there's no future in fighting P2P
Your Taxes Are Going Up
2. I read the speech in its entirety twice and did not find one mention of immigration. The President says we owe our prosperity to our ingenuity and tenacity. I think that's true but a lot of that ingenuity and tenacity came from first and second generation immigrants. If we are not prepared to open up our borders more broadly to the best and brightest and toughest in this world, all the rest is just words

We have a president whose father wasn't even born in the US. I think that speaks for itself. The population of the US has doubled since 1943 or something (source: http://www.pbs.org/saf/1304/features/raven2.htm). I love diversity and am all for opening up our borders, but let's concentrate on giving the immigrants who are already here lawful employment with ethical compensation first.
Would anyone find it useful?

nickb found it useful enough to make his own yc, for financial news: http://www.newmogul.com/
Wow. I've always been a little frustrated by Atwood, but this comment just got him removed from my feed reader.
The immigration comment is moronic. The reason that our borders aren't wider open to the world's "best and brightest" is 2-fold.

1) Current American immigration is saturated by the world's worst and dumbest. Low-IQ immigrants contribute marginally to GDP and are a huge drain on social resources. Look at the modern equivalent of white flight going on in California and what it's doing to state budgets. Insane family reunification policies exacerbate this. The fix: build a fence on our southern border, and we'll have a lot more capacity to import skilled labor.

2) Europe is unfortunately reproducing at low levels (just like WASPs in America, in case you didn't know). So our historical sources of quality immigrants are running low. However East Asians are even higher IQ (perhaps less creative), and there are plenty of them.

Oh, and if you are getting ready to call me a racist (I'm not), I'd like you to state your magic means for getting even 2nd and 3rd-generation Mexican immigrants to graduate high school. Because we might want to figure that out before importing many more.
" He then admitted to not knowing how The Pirate Bay works so the defense lawyers put it to him - if you don’t understand how TPB works, how can you say they are to blame?"
I really want to hear the answer to that one. Most people probably know how TPB works even if they don't use it. This guy probably doesn't know a thing about the internet except that it is a source of money, and people can use it to download music.
DAb: Interactive Haptic Painting with 3D Virtual Brushes
If you're able to make 400 million bucks with that, it definitely is!
(a business genius, at least - which by itself is a lot, no?)
And you cannot redistribute the audio recording the Kindle makes on the fly.

No audio book is being distributed by Amazon. An ebook is being distributed by Amazon.
that's a very interesting question!
Twitter anyone?
Recovery.gov uses simile for timeline
Just noticed that recovery.gov is using simile for timeline. Do you know of any other sites using this for their timeline?
"Charge $5-10 a month and viola, revenue"

That would be the perfect moment for someone to launch a similar tool. I guess Pownce's history would be a lot different if it could be launched the day twitter decides to do that.

seriously, $10 a month to read what your friends are doing? As useful as twitter can be, it's never worth that much a month!
What Sells Online? Unsexy Newsletters
The source code for this site has been released as open source. I think it is included with arc, but I might be mistaken. In any case, if you search for it, you should be able to find it.
Read more about No Child Left Behind. Pay attention to what it requires schools to do in order to receive funding. With that information look at what schools are receiving as products (children). When 200 immigrant children get to your school and are ESL, can't pass tests and can't get the support at home because Dad is working 2 jobs and Mom is probably still in Mexico, you quickly realize that you have a serious problem. So then you request more books, more ESL programs and reading curriculum. Then the state and federal agencies say "sorry". You're under-performing. Get kids to pass more tests and you'll get money.

There is no magic means. Simply lack of appreciation for children from other countries compound with a reversed process of quality.
There isn't an 'audio right' in copyright law. The author is trying to justify the loss of an established contractual norm for a sold derivative work (a professionally produced reading) by expanding the notion of copyright. The author is confusing contract rights with copyright. http://www.bitlaw.com/copyright/scope.html
I know, but I wrote "anything legal". Reading the book to an audience might not be legal, but running it through the reading software at my home certainly is not illegal.
I think the interesting bit here is whether the technology in the Kindle is actually infringing on the audio rights. It is a legal question that is going to need to define if the software generated voice is the same thing as an audio recording and therefore requires the same rights to distribute. I would think not as an audio recording exists when outside of software, and I assume the Kindle does this on the fly. But I am not a lawyer and all that, so who knows how this will play out.
This is very interesting, but I'm wondering what the cost to users is by pushing most of the computation down to their browser? Certainly, for most of us here, that's not an issue, but what about the person running an older desktop without much processing power and/or RAM?
I find myself most enjoying the comedy that points out problems in society that would often be too taboo to talk about if not done in a humorous manner. I'd say that Lewis Black, Lewis C.K., and Jon Stewart all exemplify this quality.
You might not consider him a procrastinator, but the folks who had paid him for paintings and sculptures that he never produced probably did.

Just because you're doing something productive doesn't mean that you aren't procrastinating. The trick, I think is getting the things that you are supposed to be doing matched up with the things you want to do. I think that's what most people mean by "find your passion."
I'd just like to point out how exciting this actually is, because it seems like the reviewers mentioned it but missed the point.

This isn't some vaporware product that some company is geewizzing us with that will likely never get released. The greatness here is that its completely open. Not "going to be open when we're done with it". You can download the schematic now. You can get a dev kit built by someone else now.

For $99 you can start automating your lavalamps right away. The internet of things starts with the plugs. Tres cool.