skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Yeah, it seemed to me like an ironic jab at all those people that followed the "get ahead" mantra, did what they were "supposed" to do, and then found they lost everything when they got laid off, their 401k crashed, and their mortgage was foreclosed upon.

Interestingly, I've heard these sort of cataclysmic shifts in the environment are why procrastination and lazyness evolved. In the ancestral human environment, a "black swan" event wasn't just losing your job, it was having your whole tribe killed by marauding invaders, or losing your food supply to a bunch of hungry monkeys, or having a brushfire sweep through your camp and destroy everything. And they happened much more frequently than they do today. So it makes sense to eat the food now rather than stockpile it, fuck lots of women instead of raise the offspring, and not bother with building shelter because it'll just be destroyed. People who did otherwise often found their hard work negated by events outside of their control, and so they evolved impulses to not bother.
Wait a second... Cringely is concerned about Microsoft screwing up Yahoo?

Yahoo. The company which has been incapable of implementing business-friendly search advertising after more than a decade of trying? _That_ Yahoo?!?

Heck, if Yahoo's Sponsored Search provided the same limited functionality Microsoft Live delivers today, we'd be happy to shovel buckets of advertising dollars their way. Yahoo is definitely not the zombie one would want in charge of that business partnership.
Well, I've read through your essay somewhat more tolerantly. It seems to be a fairly vague assertion that "addictive" "technology" will have a deleterious effect on the lives of many people by virtue of taking more and more of their time and "energy" (I assume you mean attention), wound around with a lot of nicely-told stories, which (as I noted previously, and you acknowledge above) are retold there without any concern for accuracy.

It seems that if you were interested in whether "addictive" "technology" would have a good or bad effect on people's lives, you could start by being more specific about the technology; there isn't much sensible that you can say about a category that encompasses the phonograph, Facebook, SMS, and a lot of etc. Then you could examine what effect it actually has on people's lives: does it make them more social or less social? Does it make them better informed or worse informed? Does it make them more or less likely to marry, or to stay married? Does it make them richer or poorer? Does it make their governments more or less accountable?

You wouldn't necessarily have to go out and interview people yourself. The Pew Internet and American Life project has already done quite a bit of quantitative research along these lines. danah boyd has done a lot of peer-reviewed qualitative research along these lines. I haven't read it all but the things I have read don't really seem to support your thesis, although it is hard to tell because it is so vague.

Nice stories and pictures, though, as long as nobody reads them and thinks they're true.
Awesome. I'll check out JustUptime and give it a try, it's less expensive than Pingdom.
I think this a pretty interesting concept. But, I think your branding needs work.

Forgive me for being so blunt, but the name yumbunny is way to creepy and awkward for a dating website. I think it a catchy name that could definitely work for something else.

But the second I loaded the page and saw that guy looking down lasciviously at that way to eager girl, the name became way too much.

yum...bunny. Bunnies are an awful lot like cats (you follow). I just showed this to my roommate's girlfriend; she said, "ew".

A dating website's biggest challenge branding. I am pretty impressed with the branding on downtoearth.com. I think you will be much more successful if you can tone down the creepiness to a basal level like match.com or better achieve negative creepiness like downtoearth.com.

I'm sorry I am not offering other suggestions. If I think of any today, I will post them.
I'm not sure if Jeff knows what a monopoly is.
Ada does have a huge following... In its incarnation as Oracle PL/SQL.
dup http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=472645
That's not the impression I got. I go the impression that he was saying that because these things are incredibly complex, these opinion are necessarily wrong because they come from inexperts.
I actually studied economics and worked 4 years in the economic department of a bank, but I can't say I understand much about the economy. My feeling is macroeconomics itself doesn't help understand much of the economy. There is hardly a topic where all economists agree.

If you want to have an idea about how the best economists think the economy works, read the economist. Don't be surprised if they completely change their minds now and then. Only last year I would not have believed they would support a stimulus package today.
I read this as "Don't do/marry career women" to start with.
Being a stay at home mom is a full time job and a very demanding one at that.

As for the rest of your posting, all I can say is wow, you two should talk. Now.

Whether he sees a problem with it or not it not really relevant, the fact is you are clearly not happy which means he has a problem.
Thanks for the feedback so quickly!

Regarding looks:
Sure, looks are superficial ways to recommend matches, but that's just to get the conversation started (as it is on every dating website, pretty much ever). There's also a key here that you don't get while searching on a traditional site: (in theory) people will recommend matches for you that are actually somewhat attainable rather than everyone drowning the hottest people in contact requests. This should get people closer to more likely matches than they'd get otherwise.

Looks absolutely matter-- and while it is superficial, it's clear that this is what people base first impressions on. We're not looking to be highbrow-- we're looking to help people meet those they'd look good with. I personally agree that I'd hesitate a little, but we tried to find a middleground without going overboard. We'll keep an eye on that, though-- thanks for the feedback there.

As for matchmaking:
The idea is for friends to play matchmaker as much/more than random people-- after you signup, you're given a personal widget that matches you up with potential people. And you would send it to friends, embed in your MySpace profile, etc.

For example:
http://www.yumbunny.com/public/3FDdUkHKSrSzDy2njcF28u/

Thanks again for the great feedback, keep it coming.
Google may not be a monopoly, but they are certainly a single point of failure for many businesses. As such, these businesses should not be happy that their continued survival depends on some algorithm not flagging them a 'false positive'. Monopoly or not, I can't help but think that this is not a healthy situation.
On Paul's disagreement scale this comment is right down in the sewer, but please pardon me while I vent:

How come Jeff is always grumbling about Apple's "Monopoly" on music and now Google's "Monopoly" on search but he never grumbles about Microsoft's actual monopoly on desktop operating systems and office back ends?

In this post he even calls out the people who grumble about Miscosoft and asks them to grumble about Google. But somehow, he never makes the connection that perhaps people who grumble about Apple and Google might want to do a little grumbling about Microsoft?

> I find that talent is far less important than enthusiasm.

--Jeff Atwood
How are you going to prevent rampant abuse from rapid clicking? I was able to click no constantly. Liked how fast new couples load up.

What about a point system for popular accuracy of a users choices?
"Proactive laziness" is slightly better, I think.
I had the unfortunate experience of being forced to use Ada as my primary programming language for three years during college. I hated it with a passion, though I can't tell you exactly why at this point.

Ada took all the fun out of programming. I think the major problem was that there weren't any good GUIs that supported it. The one we used was ugly and counterintuitive. Additionally, the compiler was very strict and the error messages it spit out were cryptic. We spent so much time just trying to get the syntax right that it discouraged us from exploring and trying new things, the exact opposite of what a good programming language should do.

Not only that, but only a few few organizations actually use Ada. We graduated with an expertise in a programming language no one used. A year later someone made the decision to stop using it and to switch to Java. I think that person deserves a medal of some kind :)
Having a good work ethic when you are doing useless stuff like making triplicate copies of your TPS reports is bad.

Americans work more hours each week than other industrialized nations, but we have one of the lowest per-hour productivities. We need to change the productivity, at least.
How is the early stage funding market?
The reason people find Google less objectionable than Microsoft is that it is far easier for the average consumer to switch search engines than it is for them to switch operating systems. So while Microsoft could force out better competitors, there's no way for Google to stop people from using another search engine. There just needs to be one that is worth switching to.
Thanks for posting this. Am about to design our product homepage and I would have missed a few of the points.
How does your matching algorithm work? This seems like a very exciting problem.
Iranian anti-government Digg clone gets hacked to oblivion.
Thanks for the great feedback. :)

We've done lots of user testing so far and get different impressions. The front page image will definitely change and be A/B tested to death once we launch-- it's just what we've got so far.

Note that we're hoping the front page won't be the first thing people see when they encounter YB-- they'll hopefully see it first via the widget on their friends MySpace profile, etc.

Thanks again for the great feedback.
If my company deposits a sun at a bank, my accountants will treat the deposit as an asset. If I then take out a loan from the same bank, that 'new' money is then treated as an asset. Companies and banks can trade on these 'assets,' in the form of stocks and bonds. In this way, the same money can be treated as an asset several times and the money supply, in the form of credit, can be effectively expanded. Reputable banks wouldn't allow this, but it's completely legal.
To joe public .me.uk is more memorable. I own a semi-popular domain which is accessed from the .co.uk, .me.uk, .me and .org variants. .me is barely used (in fact this is what we use as the advertising URL on certain sites - however we find people tend to use me.uk when revisiting via that intro method).

So by no difference I meant there is no real difference to the UK public between the 2 (but me.uk is probably a safer bet).

(btw the site in question normalizes to .com so there is no infered bia by the "browse" url).
It's interesting, particularly the crowd-source matchmaking approach.

I suspect the "people who would look great together" meme will put quite a few people off simply because it seems superficial and they won't want to be seen to be overly influenced by looks alone.

You do already expose other information about likes and dislikes, so maybe you could replace "look" with "be"?

On the other hand, I'm not the target demographic. It could be that you will appeal to a rich vein of people who are interested in looks alone, and are happy to be thought of in that way.

Personally, I would be tempted to do some multivariate testing, one with the "be" messaging and one with the "look" messaging and see how results compare.
Google is effectively a monopoly, however the issue here is that they do not appear to be misusing their monopoly. Microsoft has been convicted of using illegal tactics to build and maintain their monopoly like licensing agreements that effectively shut competitors out of the OEM operating system business. Apple has been accused of abusing their monopoly by leveraging their position in music players into dominance in online music sales and then enchaining the two the way Microsoft enchained Office and Windows dominance.

What, exactly, have Google done to shut competitors out of the search business? What agreements have they forced on advertisers to discourage them from advertising with anyone else?

And while they ship other products that leverage their competence in search, they do not appear to enchain them. For example, they dominate in online search and have a strong position in online mail. And yes, they can leverage scale to sell advertising on both properties. However, their does not appear to be a link between the two products. For example, when I perform a web search it does not appear to use my mail inbox to influence the relevance rankings of online search.

So far, Google appears to be following a different strategic path than Microsoft did.
Are all the books tied to Amazon DRM? That makes me wary of getting a Kindle as what happens if Amazon goes under (unlikely as that may be)...

Does Amazon provide any guarantee books for Kindle1 and Kindle2 will continue to work on all future versions of Kindle? I don't want to get stranded having to upgrade book media in 10 or 15 years.

It doesn't seem there's a way to "borrow" books from friends (or a local library) on the Kindle... is that right?

I guess I'm trying to answer "What problem does the Kindle solve that merit using it over books?"
Err, his overarching implication was that people should just shut up and let the experts have their way. I guess that was his implication, because it's hard to tell from all the whiny confusion:

The more interesting question is why? Why the false expertise? Why the heir of authority? Why the certainty?. The conversations tend to be extremely emotional and defensive.

I actually don't see too much false expertise, or pretenses of authority, etc. People want to discuss things so they do. If it effects their lives, well, who's to say otherwise? Oh right, some jerk with a blog.

If the treasury department issues 750 billion dollars with my name on it, I'm frankly not much a citizen if I declare my unavoidable ignorance on the matter and so devote myself to my suitable recreations of drinking beer and watching football.
The solution to doing the wrong thing is not to do the wrong thing badly, it's to do something else.
Amazon Kindle bites the dust... $187 to fix
There are lots of fun problems in this-- our matching algorithm at the moment is not super complex. Once we have more feedback/data, we will constantly tweak, but the starting plan is to make more successful matchmakers weighed slightly higher over time. And obviously if by random chance two people recommend each other for each other, that'd get a pretty strong rating.

We send matches to the users every week, so we're expecting we don't have to be spot on perfect each week.

Some of the more interesting problems we solved was trying to make this widget as fast and scalable as possible. It's fed entirely from Amazon SQS queues and so has no database access what-so-ever. The entire architecture is designed to scale easily over multiple servers in stages as we need.

Fun stuff all around. Thanks for the feedback!
"Microsoft says the restriction is designed to ensure that users get the best possible performance from limited netbook hardware."

Because being able to run more than three applications at once makes your hardware less efficient?

(EDIT: To be fair, I suppose that having a low fixed number of applications could let you pull off some useful optimizations. However, most of those optimizations seem like they would significantly change the OS architecture, so I doubt that Microsoft performed them. Maybe they did, though.)
Hmmm.... IMHO economics is a point that should be discussed. Of course not everyone is an economist. The problem is that people decide how the economy should be run (i.e. voting for a welfare state, limited state, etc...).

This affects people a hell of a lot (e.g. the financial+current bailout will cost every tax payer $10,000). Large groups of people already made very bad decisions on this topic earlier this century. Good decisions is the difference between S. Korea and Ghana.

Astro-physics, the finer points of quantum mechanics or the Hilbert effect do not affect people directly that much.
Python runs fine on Windows, both as a native Windows thing and under the more Unix-like (perhaps I should say Linux-like) environment you get with Cygwin.

Cygwin is, BTW, definitively recommended for anyone programming under Windows and who cares enough not to make Windows-only software. If not for Python, for the Unix-ish environment. It's a command line that's useful, something you can't get in Windows.
Also, it's a basic freedom issue. The desired end results of a given economic policy are debatable, so even if we knew what the exact outcome of any given policy would be there would still be debate about what we should do.

Personally, I am not an "ends justify the means" kind of guy so a lot of economic policies are off the table from the start, even if they would in the end generate more wealth -- wealth is not the end all be all.

The reason people are so passionate about it is because the ideas people are expressing will have a real effect on them, often at the point of gun. Someone advocating higher taxes is in effect taking what is yours, someone advocating nationalization is one again advocating taking what is yours. Someone advocating setting minimum/maximum prices is directly controlling how much stuff you can have.
Best of Global Game Jam
If Psystar actually wins this it could be a huge loss for Apple. Think about the Mac OS showing up in Walmart on discount machines. Then again they might also sell more OS licenses.
I assumed you did, I was honestly just trying to formulate my point. That, and I was talking about C++ macros, which is what Joel was referring to as well.
The last paragraph makes it clear the real point of the article is: "People in TV and major newspapers agree with me. Only silly internet people say anything different. So shut up."
Hadn't even thought to do this and loving it so far today.
We want rapid clicking to be fast. Abuse isn't going to be super common because people are going to be bored.

Also "No" doesn't count against anything in our matching algorithm. It's basically just not recommending them for a match. Spamming yes/maybe would end up being averaged out.

We definitely are going to keep track of the best matchmakers in a coming version so we can weigh their pieces better (and also give them some rank/etc to encourage them to make matches).

Thanks for the kind words and great feedback.
Your quote doesn't back up your point at all, nor can I see any 'confusion' there. He is saying that geeks overrate their expertise in economics. It couldn't be clearer.
Funny, since when is a dup notification something you downmod. This is an established practice here.
As if they're hard to write...?

(define (foldr f end xs) (if (null? xs) end (f (car xs) (foldr f end (cdr xs)))))

(define (foldl f start xs) (if (null? xs) start (foldl f (f start (car xs)) (cdr xs))))
I actually got a ton of money from a state school while private schools universally denied me any aid. Being a white middle class male kind of hurts from that perspective.
Great feedback-- we can definitely do that. We went with the more superficial approach to catch people's attention initially and try to raise some eyebrows. I do think I would also prefer to date on a website not exactly termed this way, too-- but we're definitely going to be doing a good bit of testing to see what resonates best. This is our first best guess. :)
Yes, that's exactly what I'm saying. I'll post about this to HN soon.
I was curious about your claim, but looking at GDP/hour, it doesn't appear true:

http://www.conference-board.org/economics/downloads/Producti...
(page 18)

What studies are you basing your claim off of?
Hmmm. Currently dead for me: The file you requested was not found.
JQuery Case Study: How Boxee.tv uses jQuery
I would imagine that most economic libertarians are such because they believe the economy, like the weather, to be too complex to feasibly manage. Of course, the weather may eventually be manageable with enough computing power, but the economy is unlikely to be, because the complexity of individual units is increased (more or less) proportionately to the computing power of the managers, in any semi-free society.
I think you are missing some nuances of what it means to be a Slacker. It's not just about work or non-work. It's also about a kind of passive, almost anti-social way of assigning a low value to things that most of society considers important.

I get the point about slackers bringing the internet. The internet may have been invented for "workaholic scientists" to scam more grant money out of DARPA, but it is what it is today due to the persistent, unstoppable, abuse of employer's computers and resources for non-work related activity.

It takes a slacker to show up to work early on Monday morning to use the faster internet connection to browse ebay.

If so much internet usage wasn't on employer's computers, there would less incentive to use javascript and AJAX, because it would be easier to get people to just install desktop applications.
I am one of the co-founders of Koofers.com (one of the LaunchBox08 portfolio companies) and we have a VERY in depth professor rating system.

Check out our page and video over at CrunchBase for more info:
http://www.crunchbase.com/company/koofers-com

Feel free to E-mail me at michael@koofers.com with any of your thoughts, comments, or suggestions.
I recommend you learn about At-will employment: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/At-will_employment

"At-will employment is a doctrine of American law that defines an employment relationship in which either party can break the relationship with no liability, provided there was no express contract for a definite term governing the employment relationship and that the employer does not belong to a collective bargain (i.e. a union)."

This is the default employment relationship in the US. Most states, in particular California, have implied contract or good faith exceptions to this, where an employee has more protection, but the law is different in every state, and if you do not have an explicit contract, you should probably operate under the assumption that your company can terminate you at any time, without cause.
I stand by what I've said thus far and am finished.