skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
If you placed your life savings in a car and the car blew up, would you be angry with the car?

No hang on, that's not being rational, you can't blame the whole car, you must blame the faulty component that triggered the blast. Hell you'd better not be angry with it at all if you want any chance of making that money back again.
The "alone in the crowd" is an often-discussed phenomenon in crushing modern cultures. The wireless-wired-version is only the latest. It's not less of an option now to have alone time: just takes more courage. ...and maybe the wisdom to perceive the diminishing value of "friends" when they are counted in thousands.

An ironic impact may be the effect of elevating the "wheat" of those willing to claim their need for alone "downtime" to achieve the introverted productivity in which tasks such as hacking thrive - above the chaff of those who cannot bear to miss any social chatter (sorry, I meant 'twitter').

As my yoga teacher liked to say, "Solitude is the price of greatness."
For one thing, taxes are high in New York City, which makes everything expensive. The "maintenance fees" can include more than what might normally be considered "maintenance": salaries for doormen and superintendants, utilities, building mortgage, and real-estate taxes. http://www.wallfly.com/review/manhattan_ny/faqs/faqs_co-ops....
Excellent points. I like the idea of a * or something by the names.
I agree with you. I certainly feel that I read a lot online now, but so much of it is in small bursts. I find it hard now to maintain decent concentration while trying to read long documents/books offline.
The amount of kiss-assery in this post is disgusting. No offense, pg. smooch smooch smooch
Well, that's really cheap by akamai standards. They used to not even start talking below 5 digits (a month) in fees.

Looks like they're starting to feel the pressure from cachefly, simpleCDN, S3 and slowly adjusting to reality - a most welcome development.
If you want to win at football, you most definitely need a good football coach, and the markets for pro football coaches and college football coaches are hardly separate. So you have to pay college football coaches somewhere in the ballpark of pro football coaches.

If you want to be successful in business, you most definitely need a good CEO...etc.
Yup, that's the first thing I wondered, too.
How does gmail cope with mailing lists? Just stitching every post of a thread one after another?
It depends. If I were to write an app that I was sure was only for macs, I'd write Cocoa only. I find it a joy to develop for.

If platform independence is important, I'd still choose Cocoa but try to wrap the main functionality in platform-agnostic C/C++ or the like.
Compliment... you seem to have a lot of experience with C++.
Distractions of a crisis
blatant ad?
http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=472975
Well, he didn't mention that in the article. Such a model generally requires a staging server which implies integration testing, though. Unless he suggests the release manager (or even developer de jour?) just merges the stuff on his local machine and pushes it out as he sees fit...
5 Ways to Push your Media
I had this situation (astroturfing for sale, which is what this really is) back when I was a Palm Developer.

Does anyone read their reviews? Do you look at their reviews when thinking about buying an app?

I usually find the answer to be no to both these questions.
Well, I'm not against frequent deploys. I just found the article a bit light-hearted in tone - as if no testing at all was going on.

No matter how many classes of failures you have ironed out, in any reasonable complex system you will still regularly have regressions that are not caught by a quick "two eyes" check.
The logic there seems faulty. Basically, "I can't read Hacker News as much so now I don't waste time reading alternatives." So before when you couldn't access HN you turned to Reddit, but now you do work/other productive activities...seems like a stretch to attribute this change in behavior to an HN tweak. Also seems like this behavior will not last.
Yeah. So some conversations will have "(97)" next to them and you're SOL.
Munin has worked great for me. I've written a few node scripts for monitoring Passenger (aka mod_rails) and Beanstalkd and it was super easy.

Ex: http://gist.github.com/37525
It's a subconscious thing. For me, anyway. When I'm stuck on a hard problem, my default behaviour used to be to alt-tab to my browser and see what's new on HN. Now when I do that I'm blocked by noprocrast. Usually, this is enough to get me back to the problem.

It's actually broken my procrastination habit enough that I can leave noprocrast off most of the time and not have to worry about procrastinating. Sort of like training-wheels for self-discipline.
All they have to do is get jobs at profitable companies.
It'd be a great way to look for potential partners, as well. A lot of us lone hackers could use one for our startup ideas :-)

But, I am afraid of a sudden influx of people posting resumes and advertising them by posting excessively. I'm not sure it's worth it. If we could prevent that, it's worthwhile. Else not.

Frankly, I'd prefer to see that in a separate site. A marker (or set of markers, for looking-for-job, looking-for-employee, looking-for-partner, etc.) by the username here would be enough. I think it'd be useful without making HN a target.
Does Paul Buchheit have a secret HN alias I don't know about? Whoah, is Paul Buchheit nickb?!
This definitely isn't a problem just for technology, it's a broader symptom of modern society and culture. For example, I've heard New York is one of the worst places to get lonely or to be new to the city because it feels even more disorienting to not know anyone when you're surrounded by millions of people, and pedestrians at that rather than commuters in cars.

Technology definitely can help instead of hurt, you just need to seek out things that can help increase facetime and meeting new friends rather than getting your brain sucked in online for the entire night. Facebook events and meetup come to mind.
It would certainly make for an interesting experiment, but I think it would definitely alter the nature of this site.

I really enjoy the 'minimalist' nature of HN profiles. They are short and sweet. I can see how opening profiles here up for more details or letting people attach resumes could provide benefits (more information being shared about each other, people getting jobs). Ultimately, its really hard to predict what will happen when new features are introduced here, but if people are landing jobs as a result, it can only be a good thing.
I think the 'with maintenance' means 'room & board'.
At the cost of inviting controversy, there is legitimate argument as to whether Gandhi's insistence on the exclusive use of non-violent resistance worked in India's favor. To cite a prominent example, Gandhi suspended India's very successful non-cooperation movement (after tens of thousands of Indians had resigned their govt. jobs or dropped out of college to stop co-operation) because of one incidence of violence. [1]

In short: Rigid belief in the use of a single strategy is also harmful.

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Non-cooperation_movement
AIG spending half a million dollars for an "unrelated" business is unreasonable. It shows that according to AIG, the culture of eat-what-you-hunt is still okay - despite the enormous negative externalities that were caused by isolated groups taking on unprecendented risk in hopes of personal reward.
ah yes, I forgot about property taxes. We don't have them here where I live, taxation is mostly through income and consumption taxes. Property taxation always seemed stupid and somewhat evil to me. What if you happen to lost your income source for awhile or something along that line? You would loose your property you own because you cannot pay legal racketeering on something that is yours.
Aaron's speaking on a panel next week, "Tales of Young Entrepeneurs" at Stanford. Anyone going?

http://www.vlab.org/article.html?aid=253
I'm pretty sure he is http://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=paul.

The account is one of the oldest. Hard to be a fake.
Is Noca The Next PayPal?
I really like it. What would be a reward to most of us is a bitter punishment to them. They've created a life as artificial as their balance sheets and then bid it up to an absurd level.

This is a perfect punishment for the epic fail they have foisted on the world. Make them live like the merely rich. The sardonic nature of it all makes me damn near gleeful.
Aye... I missed that. Thank you!
When in High School I once, in the middle of history class, reached into my backpack and pulled out a stapler and computer mouse. This had the intended effect of distracting the teacher. He turned to me and asked, "What, exactly, are you doing?" I replied, "I'm being spontaneous."

His reply was pure gold, and sticks with me to this day. He said, "No you're not. You had to plan to put that stapler in your bag to be able to pull it out in the middle of class. That's anything but spontaneous!"

...this guy and his "choosing" to be eccentric reminds me of that experience.
As did Chavez.
i was utterly confused the first time i read this.
I think this would probably encourage people to use HN for the spammier variety of self-promotion.
My Gosh! This guy went on for 7 pages and all he really ended up saying was "Technology makes it harder to be truly alone and that might be a bad thing." Has anyone ever suggested the death of the print industry might be related to the fact that they go on for ages and say very little? Yeeesh.

As far as his point I don’t think it holds much weight. He makes it sound like this is some kind of societal problem that individuals can’t do anything about. But the reality is it’s an issue of individual self control. If you want to be alone than you should turn off the Blackberry. You being alone is simply a function of you making the choice to be alone. It doesn’t matter what the rest of the world does.

There are legitimate problems that are caused by the doors that technology opens but this just isn’t one of them.
...and live like shit! I should know, I'm a grad student just across the river, and I work a second job and live in Harlem just to make ends meet.

Anyone who hasn't lived in NYC will have a hard time understanding. Living in the city definitely has its perks, and even having to work the second job, I wouldn't trade it for the world...

...that said, I don't have a PS3, or an Xbox, or a Wii, or a Plasma/LCD, or a stereo, or a car less than 7 years old, or more than 7 changes of clothes, and I only just got cable last year. Life in the city is about trade-offs.

If you're coming from the suburbs, and expect the same sort of lifestyle in the city, don't take a job that pays less than $80k/yr!
Who cares. Start your own company.
Absolutely. Still the best distro.
...does it even matter? If you're a Christian, your faith lies in the death and resurrection of Jesus Christ, not the creation of the world 10,000 years ago. Frankly, it should be a non-issue.

But we should stop here because news.yc isn't the place to be discussing religion.
The advantage of desktop email is you control it. The server doesn't get to decide how it should be displayed, routed or filtered.

Why are people willing to relinquish control over something they use so much? I could understand if you are not technical: gmail brings things that have been in mutt for years to the masses. But this is Hacker News whats "hacker" about google deciding everything?

I find this annoying about HN as well, if this was usenet we wouldn't have to ask for features like notification of replies or kill lists we would have them already or have the control required to do them ourselves. RMS is right the whole cloud thing is a major step back it's walled us off from the backend.
Are people like bots?
A lot of SEO guides, in fact all of them will advise you to choose your page titles very carefully and try to incorporate the relevant keywords in the title. On page SEO, which includes things from title to meta tags to CONTENT, is very important as far as your ranking in the Search Results is concerned. Some of them would even advise you to repeat these keywords a couple of times in order to increase your probability of appearing higher in the search results
People only try to contact you all the time & expect you to be available if you give them that expectation. Tell your coworkers that you're not going to be checking email on weekends. Tell your friends that you don't answer your phone after X:00pm. Or just don't answer it. The calls will stop.

Almost everything can wait a couple hours, or until the next day. Personally, I don't like being perpetually connected. Often I'll go for a long jog, or bike ride, strangely happy about the fact that no one can contact me for the next hour or two, even if they wanted.

Set your boundaries, or they will be set for you.
I think this is an example of someone trying to extrapolate data from a source that's incapable of providing the conclusions he wants. He’s using Google Trends to try to determine the popularity of programming languages which doesn’t logically track.

I’ll give you one example of what I mean. He states that over the last 5 years searches for C# have remained flat and that VB.NET searches are going down. But in the last 5 years several very helpful .Net aggregation sites have gone up (dotnetkicks, asp.net weblogs, stackoverflow, etc...). That aggregation trend might cause people to search less

That’s just one of many reasons why search results aren’t an accurate measure of language popularity.
Hate to nit-pick, but an Oliver Wendell Holmes quote close to this is often attributed to Shakespeare: "Nothing is so common-place as to wish to be remarkable." [Note that in the numerous google citations that attribute either version of this maxim to Shakespeare there is NEVER a play:act:scene:line citation - a sure giveaway.]

[Sorry: I was a Shakespeare nerd in a previous life]
I think husbands and wives are a special case only in that they are almost always significantly motivated to preserve their relationship. And that is the key to avoiding the useless discussion problems PG saw. When it is important to preserve relationship with someone else (even only met in an on-line forum) then a discussion won't degrade into a "religious war".

Ironically for the context, this view has crystalized for me from religious teaching.
I've been critical of QT's somewhat restrictive license in the past, but the only reason not to use it with their coming shift to LGPL is the lack of iPhone support.
http://www.venturewoods.org/index.php/venturetalent/?cp=all#...
Am I missing something? If you're parents really can't afford your tuition at a top tier school, won't the school just pay for it? Most prestigious schools have a giant endowment and tons of financial aid. This has been the case with pretty much everyone I know. Just go to the best undergraduate school you can get in to.

But I guess this article could apply if you have rich parents that refuse to pay your tuition. Now you're in trouble.
Property taxation always seemed stupid and somewhat evil to me.

Given a choice of income-, consumption-, or property- taxation, it seems to me that property-taxation would provide the least perverse incentive. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Perverse_incentive Consumption taxation perversely punishes consumption, and income taxation perversely punishes productivity. The economic effect of either of those, therefore, is harmful. Property taxation, on the other hand, is simply rent on property that is also latently owned by various layers of government. If one wishes to pay less rent to the government, one is free to move to a less-desirable (e.g. smaller; less-conveniently located) property.

What if you happen to lost your income [...] You would loose your property

One could sell, and move to a less-expensive property. Then, the original property would be available to one who is more-productive. The economy, therefore, gains when low-productivity individuals sell expensive properties.

legal racketeering on something that is yours.

Actually, nothing within a governmental jurisdiction can be outright privately owned. Therefore, said property cannot be said to be outright "yours". A government always retains ultimate ownership of properties "privately owned" within its jurisdiction. If one wants to truly own his own property outright, he either needs to found it from scratch (and provide for all of the maintenance and defense needs), or buy it from some existing government. Buying a condo in Manhattan is usually not the same thing as buying it from its true latent owners: the borough of Manhattan, the city of New York, the state of New York, the nation of the United States of America, the North American Free Trade Agreement, and the United Nations.
Actually if I remember the Boston College change correctly, they weren't supplying students with email accounts, but were switching to an email forwarding service.

The idea is that an .edu address is important and necessary in more places than you think (and beyond the likes of facebook as well) and provides one way of verifying you are in some way affiliated with the .edu in question, but you don't have to check separate inboxes to do so. I know I haven't logged in to my .edu accounts in possibly years and just have them forwarded to my main email address. I can't imagine there aren't a lot of people out there doing the same.

I think this restriction is a valid one provided you have a provision for manually checking users that don't have such an email address (probably a small minority).
I think the argument might be similar to why so many people here are using OS X rather than Linux.

I happen to use Gmail + Thunderbird (IMAP) + Ubuntu.
It did once, but not anymore. Spammers started using HN profiles as landing pages.
Add-Art: Firefox Add-ons
Lots of room for improvement that is hard to get, perhaps. I'm most likely to leave reviews for professors if they were either exceptionally good or bad, and I'm too lazy to leave one for a mediocre one (the vast majority) unless I was already motivated by an exceptional one. A change in websites wouldn't change much there.
the video is really good.

did he say landlords in silicon valley will accept equity for rent price reductions? where does this happen?
"There were questions in my head as well. Questions like why didn’t he want my wallet? Or the camera gear on my back? Who the hell tries to mug somebody for a badge to a conference?"

Not just any conference, a $6,000 conference...
Ask HN: Uptime monitoring services
What is the best uptime monitoring service? Which one do you use?
Ask HN: first few things you notice in a web site
Hackers have a very different perspective of looking at things. These are a lot of things that actual users of a web site may not look for, but hackers do :)

So, what are the first few things you note when you visit a new site? (Apart from the obvious "What is this site about?" and "How does it work?")

For example, I myself try to find out the server side technology, JS frameworks used, JS errors (if any), registration etc. I am sure that knowing these things will help me and a lot of people improve their sites.
I have the same problem as you, but haven't tried the noprocrast feature. Maybe I'll give it a shot.
It is hard to make a good comparison because the economy was so fundamentally different. Our modern kg of corn could be anywhere from pennies (for animal feed) to several bucks at Whole Foods. Which do you compare against?

(In fact, what we call corn is a new world crop, unknown in Europe until the 16th century. The word would have referred to barley or wheat before that.) So not even the most basic foodstuffs were comparable.

Wages are a much better basis for comparison. Unskilled, medium-skilled, and high-skilled jobs are pretty comparable now and then.
Twits Know: Google Quietly Laying Off Engineers
Porting Hacker News links to Delicious
RBS WorldPay Security Breach Earns Fraudsters $9 Million
RBS WorldPay announced in December that a security breach on its network might have compromised the personal information of 1.5 million credit card holders.
Tune your TV into a GPS
Comparison of S3 and Rackspace/Mosso Cloud Files
to be honest, i think minimum "comfortable" wage in SF is about 200k. i make in the 6figs (as most senior engineers around here), and why I live comfortably as bachelor, I still don't think I make enough for me to afford having a family in SF.

I rent and have a roomate, cook often at home (drink lot of coffee though), but still, when you substract taxes, 401k, medical stuff for the parents, when you add everything up the savings are about 2k a month at best.

Think about it, 24k a year, where the cheapest comfortable place to live go for about 700k+.
If you are conservative, and want to put 20% down, (that's about 140k) of savings you need in the bank.

To live in SF, you will have to have at least 200k, as a family to live comfortably.
About 100k if you are a bachelor.

Sure you can live with a lot less, but you are probably not saving much for your future.
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A lot changes in four years. Especially those four years. This much planning makes little sense.
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Maybe people will wake up and realise that real time doesn't actually matter; you can easily keep up to date polling 1-2x per month if you really wanted to.

It's not like anything truly vanguard happens more than a few times per year in most industries. And it's not twitter or bloggers that do it. Real innovation happens so infrequently that it's pretty easy to keep up if you have a system.

Unfortunately most young programmers I talk to don't even read papers [where the real action happens]!! They read blogs & twitter. Perhaps they don't realize that this IS science, and the plural of anecdotes on twitter et al do not make data.
BMC Evolutionary Biology: Inbred males live long and don't prosper
I'm saying that it's easy to always try to do something, it's not always easy to succeed the first time.

You should always make it easy for yourself to fix mistakes, even if you shouldn't have made them in the first place.
Maybe instead of an asterisk we could use orange names.
Thanks for the input. I stand corrected and ashamed for blindly trusting the authenticity of quotes randomly found on the internet ;-)
Interesting, but how do you choose which tags belongs to a specific bookmark?
See also: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=473007

Same news, posted 2 hours earlier.
OK none of this is scientific - just observations:

A lot of old school (shall we call them) programmers are still operating but in their "comfort zone" in VB5 and VB6 - which is why they are not searching for new information and tools on the Net.

Lot's of occasional programmers have just given up - there is a good deal more "bodging" of mini apps using spreadsheets within businesses that I get a chance to observe. This is probably good for the overall quality of corporate code but worrying - while some of those old VB apps were pretty clunky home grown spreadsheets are just about guaranteed to be buggy and likely to lead to management errors/
That is one very interesting link, I'm going to do some experimenting, I'll report back in a bit.

thank you!
I am using the suggest API to get popular tags for the links.

http://delicious.com/help/api https://api.del.icio.us/v1/posts/suggest
Looks like my suggestion got implemented. Thanks PG!