skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Author here.

First, I did say, but perhaps not strong enough, that I include myself in the list of people who do not what they are talking about (or, more properly, in the group of people that do not have strong opinions).

I’ve done a fair bit of reading on topics like the Federal Reserve and money creation, like any good amateur, and the only thing I know for certain is that it’s insanely complex.

More importantly, however, you've missed my point. Nowhere did I want to claim that you shouldn't have opinions, beliefs, or the desire to argue about topics you are interested in, even as an amateur. "Its complicated, trust us" is not my point. It's missed my point by a wide margin.

My point is that bringing a false sense of expertise, or authority to the issue makes the discussions worthless and turns them into flamewars. People in online discussions want to pretend they are experts in macroeconomic theory. That makes them defensive and emotional. That makes the discussions uninteresting.
This is a tiny procedural ruling. It's extremely unlikely that Psystar will win the right to sell OSX on non-Apple hardware against Apple's wishes.
The Apple stores will only fix Apples - that's what you're paying the premium for.
You might benefit from all the new apps that will get ported to Mac if it suddenly has 3-4x the market share.
I'm not downmodding you, but I will suggest that there is a difference between "Cheap PCs that run OS X" and "Cheap Macs." Apple tries to ship a certain complete Macintosh experience. Certain types of cheap PC would undermine this experience even if they run OS X.

So, I think that a "Cheap PC running OS X" might not provide the same experience as a Macintosh. Is this a good thing? Should the market choose what they want? I don't know. But I can see the argument that such a device would not be a "Cheap Mac."
These are some great comments. Thanks so much for your time/review/thoughts.

The site is more of an introduction/matchmaking site. I only billed it as a "dating" site in the link I submitted to HNYC because that's kind of the niche it fits in.

Business model: We're testing this out initially to see how it goes. We will be adding location/nearness, but that's not used initially until we reach a critical mass. We definitely weren't trying to hide our messaging costs-- we just didn't want to dissuade people who are just curious from at least getting on the site and seeing matches. I don't want people to get confused and think it costs any money whatsoever to use/match/vote with our site or widgets. We'll keep that impression in mind and do our best to find a better middleground.

Moderation: I 100% agree. We're definitely going to be moderating these pictures before inclusion (a day or two after launch). If you saw a nonhuman it was one of our left-over test images-- we have to track that one down. Sorry about that and thanks for mentioning it.

Facebook: The entire backend is designed to work well as MySpace/Facebook/iPhone apps-- so that's soon on the radar. We wanted to start with the core site and build from there.

On opening the page: We saw that a bit in user testing, too-- so we added the "arrow" and some initial flash animation to encourage clicking. We'll be watching how people handle this and adapting-- thanks for mentioning.

Your other points I absolutely agree with, too-- we'll work on those.

Thanks again!
Praxis High Integrity Systems uses Ada to write large systems that are practically bug-free, for a fraction of the cost of standard approaches:

http://www.spectrum.ieee.org/sep05/1454

While most projects don't need perfect code, Praxis' success makes me think there is something to the engineering argument.
Yeah this is a great point and its a lesson the entire US economy has completely forgotten. The last decade - really the entire period after 1980 - is one big credit orgy. We really really really need to learn how to live within our means again and stop our debt-fueled overconsumption binge.

The last few years have been particularly disgusting. People competed to get ever-bigger and fancier houses, cars, and various toys that they really did not need.

Its time to start spending only what we earn as a nation, and individually.
The last paragraph was a joke, meant to be ironic.
To me saying "you don't have a clue" amounts to almost the same as saying "you shouldn't open your mouth in this discussion".
The Three Horsemen of the Coming Network Revolution
Ask HN: How to bring back the subscription business model for news?
So, in a different story that hit the front page today I had a mini-rant (http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=473489). That mini-rant (plus the 3 hours noprocrast time), got me thinking...

It seems to me that there has been a shift in news reporting recently, away from intensive, in-depth reporting toward quick-hit, sensationalism. Surely, some of both has always existed (i.e. "Dewey Beats Truman"), but I do think there has been a subtle, yet perceptible shift. Now, I think I understand why.

Time was that you subscribed to a newspaper. The number of subscribers the newspaper had was used to determine the cost of advertising, and so a newspaper was rewarded for a constant high-level of reporting which would attract a large number of readers. Then came TV news and Nielsen ratings. Nielsen was closer to being instant gratification for advertisers than subscriber-base numbers, but it was still a statistical average. Appeal to a large range of average people over a long enough period of time was still the surest way to maintain consistently high ratings.

Now we have the ultimate in advertiser instant gratification: click-through rate! And sensationalists have the perfect platforms: Digg, Reddit, and (dare I say it?) HN! No longer is there a need to appeal to an average group over an average time-span. Sensationalism rules the day. Gone are the days of always turning to the same source for news. Gone, even, are the days of channel surfing.

Thus, I feel the need to make subscriber-based business models viable again, if for no other reason that to give news organizations the incentive to do deep, far reaching reporting once again. The problem is, a lot of the advantages that the subscriber model had are gone. For example, subscribing to a news paper meant that it was delivered each day, saving you a trip to the news stand. Today, though, subscriptions and one-offs are equally easy to obtain. Other incentives like regular delivery of coupons or comic strips are also non-issues in an internet world.

Certainly, RSS has gone some of the way toward reviving the subscription model, but I'm thus far disappointed with it's ability to penetrate the market. I find RSS adoption rates to be hugely polarized, with nearly all of my geekier friends subscribing to multiple feeds, and nearly none of my less technology literate friends even aware of what RSS is!

I suppose there is also a question of whether the subscription model even is better. I'm sure the advertisers might have a different opinion that I do. Anyway, I'm at a loss...The one idea I came up with is that maybe aggregation sites like HN should start rewarding the content producers the same way they reward the consumers. That is, maybe individual sites should have Karma too, so that any one submission is more likely to find its way to the front page.

Sorry that got so long...I feel better now...

</rant>

Cheers,

Josh
OK, so I read this article and I want to give this Gnat thing a try. I go to this AdaCore company's homepage and I'm looking for a place to download a batteries-included Ada distribution. Where? Where?

Finally I click "pricing" and I find a ridiculously long survey form of some kind I'm supposed to fill out. At that point, I'm gone and I'm never coming back.

That is why developers are not interested in Ada.

Compare the experience to getting Python: go to Python.org, click "download" on the left-hand menu, click an appropriate installer. Or if you're in Linux, fire up a package manager, type "python", see it's probably already installed, open up a terminal, type "python", type "2+2" at the REPL and see that you get "4" back, and go from there.
Great points, but ... given the title and topic, I think this article would be more effective by including some examples and screenshots for each point.
All these plans are doomed to failure. These are mass transit systems designed to be more convenient to people. However, I don't think people were spending $40,000 on an SUV out of needing convenience.

People will want their own vehicle, not many people will be willing to give up their sports cars or their trucks and SUV's to switch to a smart car look-a-like that you don't even own.

The other problem with these systems, even if they do develop a way to beat the whole 'wanting your own car' problem. What happens when you want to go to a different country? I mean quite honestly, this system will never work in Europe as anything more than an alternative to buses. The systems need to be universally accessible, I need to be able to move from England to France to Spain and into Portugal without my vehicle losing control and driving me off the side of a bridge because Spain has a different system.

There's the whole doorstep to station problem in PRT's, however thats only the first problem they've got. Allowing people to have their own vehicles (something that has to happen, there's too many vehicle companies that would need take out a PRT system to stay in business) would solve the doorstep to station, because the station is in your garage and thus negates the doorstep. However, then there's recognition between cities, I'm sure users and car manufacturers don't want vehicles doing a game of chicken when you drive onto another cities system, and the same happens between states and countries. What happens if California drove on the right and Nevada drove on the left? Someone would have to change their system. It's happened in lots of countries around the world, that one changed the side of the road they drove on because it just made it safer than trying to teach the 'stupid foreigners' they're in a different country with different rules.
It also says this will only be sold in none-developed markets. It's a way of selling cheap(free) copies of windows in China/India to reduce piracy while still protecting the market of business customers.
Correct me if I'm wrong, but aren't both Orange and Vodafone GSM networks and not CDMA?
The attitude suggested by "Heir of authority" [sic] is not compatible with those suggested by "defensive" and "emotional". I don't want to explicate a confused rant to show that it's confused, but:

Unlike the evolutionists, though, economists don’t have a mini-community of people making youtube videos and evangelizing their points of view to the general public.

Yes, there are economists who make youtube videos.

Programmers love to talk about quantum physics, the speed of light, and black holes. But you won’t find geeks getting all authoritative on the finer points of the event horizon? Why?

Economics is arguable because it is a soft science. We don't argue hard science because it's subject to controlled experiment. He's confusing apples and oranges.

Every, single, person in the discussion is an expert. Except, of course, they aren’t. None of them are.

Nope. Some of them are. He's confused "Some" with "None".

...blah blah. I'm picking up random sentences and they're all fucked up. If the point is to be funny, well, he failed at that as well.
It is also important to note as it states in the article that order does not matter in these operations. Clearly it does not matter in addition or multiplication but say two boxes are outlined with "3-" the contents of the two boxes could be 4,1 or 1,4 in either order.
Jonathan Zittrain on the new Kindle
Yeah, the matchmaker problem we're attacking this way:

* Coming soon, stats/points/levels for matchmakers.

* Users ask their friends to matchmaker for them specifically, and we interleave other matches once in a while to spread out the love.

So far we've had a lot of non-single people who just loved to play matchmaker, so we're hoping that will continue/carry-over as well.

Thanks for the great feedback-- if you have other ideas on increasing matchmakers, we'd love to hear them!
I didn't realize I was receiving an activation email, but after I got it I realized you do have Matches/Messages/Share/etc. Perhaps you should make these pages available even before people activate, but mention that they'll have to activate before they become, well, active.

Great job so far!
Kindle books on laptops, iPhone coming soon along with international versions
Can you point to any negative examples of such discussions? No doubt the web is full of stupid discussions, but I mean specifically on geek sites like HN?
this post doesnt mention international versions
I think the multiple versions are daft, there should be two versions — Home, and Pro. You're not giving people who can afford it the choice of a more feature filled (or in this case, less limited) OS, you're just giving the people who can't afford it half an OS.

Until I can find a decent explanation to why the world needs six versions of Windows 7, I'll have to say Microsoft have done it for one reason — money, which is a shame really...
...to protect the people of New Jersey from this fate.
I meant this book, actually:

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2007/01...
> The author's chief defense of academic economic hypothesis is they are complicated. I have not had much patience for the "its complicated, trust us" idea since Catholic school.

The author didn't make a defense of "academic economic hypothesis". He made an attack on geeks' false sense of expertise on macroeconomics. Macroeconomics remains a giant, complex, poorly understood system regardless of whether there are academic economic models of it. It's not like "academic economic hypothesis" creates the system. The system is there regardless. It's hard to understand, but lots of people run around pretending they understand it.

> Perhaps the author's and our time would have been better spent if he offered a coherent defense (maybe even using vaguely correct grammar) of these academic economic hypothesis rather than a sweeping ad hominem attack.

Presumably you note the irony of making an ad hominem attack while simultaneously rebuking the author for making an ad hominem attack. In actuality, your ad hominem was far less called for because the author's "ad hominem" was the whole point. He was arguing that the quality of debate is poor, not arguing against any particular line of reasoning.

On a side note, it's disappointing that there's been so much made recently of the high quality of discussion on Hacker News and how we need to preserve it, and yet rubbish like "maybe even using vaguely correct grammar" still gets voted sharply up. Some day I truly hope to find a popular forum of well-informed members where snide comments are penalized as a natural side-effect of the forum design.
I'm not being snide or smug here (just a disclaimer). If anything, i'm 100% dead serious and curious about this:

Who did, how many did, and why did so many people think this was a good idea? Microsoft isn't a small company, and i'm sure tons of people have to review a decision like this. How did no one pick up that this would be a horrible idea? At least test the waters on it. I barely use desktop apps, and i still have quite a few open now:

-Firefox, ichat, itunes, mailplane, and textedit

Do apps like last.fm, dropbox, etc. count as apps? If so throw that on there too.
As a Kindle 1 owner, the only major improvement I see in Kindle 2 is TTS. I am assuming they have new dedicated hardware support for this, otherwise it would just be a software update. No SD card slot though, just increased memory. No folder support, no native PDF viewing, no third party apps. Case not included in the base package anymore. I don't think I'm going to upgrade.
I disagree. Hot or Not was a huge success, but not in the dating market. They launched a dating extension to the website that never really took off (http://meetme.hotornot.com/).

Look at their stats: http://siteanalytics.compete.com/hotornot.com/?metric=uv

People used HotorNot for fun, not for finding real dates. I suspect the case will be the same here.
I was also under the impression that permanent redirects preserve pagerank... how are you supposed to execute a domain change like this properly?
as far as means produce ends -- a counter example could be some sort of slavery; the means are horrible but they might produce the ends one wants..

of course it also depends on the timescale we are looking at 10 years, 100 years, 1000 years, etc
Understood, but I believe it highlights how you landed at the premise of the article. You make multiple disparaging remarks about youtube. I dare infer you don't object to commentary on MSNBC that agrees with your final paragraph. It's just an endorsement of appeal to authority.
I understand what you're saying. And I think this whole mess could be clarified by simply not using "lazy." I think it's pretty normal for people to assume the dictionary definition, and I don't think I would challenge anyone against thinking differently.
The rare site that does a good job with its typography is well worth study/emulation. Not just font, typeface, but leading (interline spacing) and column width for example.

Also, editorial composition. All the design in the world won't hold me in place if I have to scale a "wall of text" (particularly enormous paragraphs without any visual landmarks).

I see site design as a means to an end. If you focus primarily on the means, you're doing it wrong. Well, it may be fine for you, and I don't begrudge you that. But you are doing it wrong for me.

If enough people feel that way, you won't have much traffic. If traffic is a goal, well then, there you go.
As I recall, they were doing pretty well, aside from the court case. There seems to be a demand for a generic machine running OSX even if it doesn't "deliver an experience like Apple".
Except, AFAIK, pystar machines dont come with "real" OS X. They require either A. OS X to be hacked to run on the machines (aka: your pirated copy) or B. Nonstandard hardware specifically designed to emulate things that PC's cant run.

The latter is much much more of a grey area then the former. However, I think pystar does the former. I remember reading awhile ago that pystar shipped with a legit copy of OS X but a hacked copy installed, so if anyone wanted to reinstall, they would have to send it back and pay $50.
The only machines that Apple has shipped with TPM chips built in were the early developer kits that were under NDA.
EBay ex-CEO Whitman plans run for California governor
Being able to hire 2 newbies for the price of one experienced developer doesn't imply that replacement makes sense. It could equally well imply that the experienced developer is a bargain.
Does Amazon offer any sort of "buy the book get the ebook for less" type deals? As someone who likes the convenience of downloadable goods but also likes both the aesthetics and security of a physical hardcopy, that sort of deal often strongly appeals to me (and is decently common in music and video games, especially with indie and sold-direct-from-artist situations).

I don't know how much it would appeal to most people, or how much of a weirdo it makes me, but I would love to be able to purchase a book and have it shipped to me, and also simultaneously get the instant-read "disposable" Kindle copy downloaded immediately while I wait for the shipment to make its way to my home.
Alright, at the bottom of this thread is a downmodded discussions about macroeconomics (started by someone who read only the last paragraph of my post and decided to argue with me about my facetious assertions).

Last week, there was a post here about the youtube video "money as debt" that ended up getting killed here: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=461720

Equally, you could peruse Reddit (espsecially, say, politics). I don't know about digg, because I stopped going there for awhile, but it was as bad as reddit is now.

Now, you could argue that these discussions are all fairly above board, with none of the emotion-laden rhetoric that I appear to see. I'd disagree though but we can leave that as a matter of perspective. I think there is an -obvious- tonal difference in matters of economics (or politics, or religion) versus other topics.
Right now I'm desperate to buy a couple of games. One is Fable 2 because I loved Fable, but I'm not spending $60 on a game, I'm just waiting for the drop to $20 that inevitably happens. The other game is Fallout 3, I've been a huge fan of the series and I want to look at the 3rd, again I'm waiting for the drop to $20 however this doesn't look like it's going to happen anytime soon as they jacked up the price here in Canada from $60 to $70!

I worked as a game reviewer for a number of years, and this is perhaps why I can value a video game much better than most other people. I reviewed many a game that I wouldn't ever justify spending $5 on.

I mean it's like the extended warranty they try to sell you on games. Whenever I buy a DS game, they always ask me for extended warranty (It's their job, so I don't snap at them) but the SD cartridge a DS game uses is virtually indestructible through normal accidents. I've had one go through a washing machine with suds and everything in and I took it out, peeled the remnants of the label off and continued playing the game. I stepped on one on a concrete floor in boots (it fell out of my pocket when I grabbed my iPod, tangled up in the headphones or something) and no one would be the wiser. Yet they ask me if I want to spend $3 to insure something that'll survive me: if I fall off a skyscraper, if I fall in the ocean and drown, get hit by a car and numerous other things.
Current Apple models lack a TPM, and those that did have them never used them for anything. To check a machine:
# ioreg -x | grep TPM
I don't know how huge a success has to be to qualify, but they had revenues $5M - $10M / year at one point, I'm assuming that is from meet me. It's not match.com, but not too shabby:

http://www.startup-review.com/blog/hotornotcom-case-study-mi...
I did (almost) this same thing 12 years ago: http://joeganley.com/code/jslisp.html ... though his is more complete and polished than mine, and the interface is nicer in ways that were basically impossible in 1997.
I doubt Apple would let Walmart carry Psystar machines. I mean, they can't officially allow or not allow Walmart to do such a thing, but Apple could probably threaten to pull the iPod/iPhone line and all first party accessories, iTunes gift cards, etc, or something like that.
> client side Javascript apps doing asynchronous communication with servers

that much I'm aware of, but the fact that there is enough general functionality in there to be able to stick together a complete implementation of another language was definitely news to me.

I've been using JavaScript since its introduction to deliver 'video' (as in one jpeg replacing another) for the longest time, and I found a way to do an underwater call to the server long before 'ajax' even had a name or microsoft introduced the corresponding http request call.

I'll look at the examples you cited, it definitely sounds like cool stuff.
I stand corrected, thanks for the Cola war insight :)

I guess I let out my own personal taste and bias and some faulty memory...