skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I should point out that the conclusion of the linked study is complete bullshit. It claimed that poor people are more polite than rich people. What it should have claimed was that poor people who went to Berkeley are more polite than rich people who went to Berkeley.

Poor people who go to Berkeley are likely to be moving up in the world relative to their families; their eyes are being opened to a whole new world of knowledge and power and all that, and they are humbled by it.

Rich people who go to Berkeley are likely to come from prep schools, and feel vindicated by having been admitted to a top school, and therefore are snooty.

The conclusion doesn't jibe at all with my personal experience, either, and I think this is why.
Ask HN: I'm making a location bookmarking site, what does it need to do?
I will be interested to see how they keep people from gaming the system.

Once you get someone to support your site the goal will be to get them to visit your site as many times as possible in a month. I think this will lead to increased sensationalism and gimmicks.

Also, visits are typically delimited by a period of inactivity (say, 30 minutes). I can think of several ways off the top of my head that publishers could manipulate that inactivity window to create additional visits (thus increasing their slice of the pie).

It is an interesting idea, but as always, the devil is in the details.
Several people have mentioned running ssh in a loop. Here is an example of that:

http://www.commandlinefu.com/commands/view/357/ssh-tunnel-wi...
For a microblog product, it's not a bad idea! A socially-networked microblog can stand to add some milliblog, possibly deciblog-style functionality for a price :-)
CEOs transferring assets into wife's names
While the "one in a million" better is a cool blurb, what does it really mean?

Let's say your team makes 25 commits per day.

25 * ~300 working days = 7,500 commits per year

That would take 133+ years to reach 1 in a million.

The more interesting metric to me is how often the build gets broken.
A few results I think we might see if pg were to try this experiment. 1. Refocus karma on discussion, as opposed to submission. 2. Flatten the karma curve. Not sure what good this would do, though. 3. Help some folks get more work done as I wonder how some folks here get anything done with all the reading of, and posting of articles/content. I'd be interested to see how many, if any, "good" submissions were missed. Sure this is pretty hard to globally quantify, but if you want to post something, and can't as you're still in your 24 hour post post no post window, how long will it take for someone else to scoop you? I wonder if it will actually hurt the community (ie: missed content). I bet little of value would slip through the cracks, but some posts wouldn't attain the point heights that we see now as they'd be posted by regular folks, not the same, always voted up, uber-submitters.
Psst, its a simple way to describe a dynamic economic situation without having to go in depth. Nuance, dude.

Chill.
Only one broke the buck, the Reserve Fund. And they shouldn't have been anywhere near risky Lehman debt. That's what sparked the run-- people wanted out of the Reserve Fund and other investors were freaked that other money markets holding similar risky paper. The situation was fixed directly with a federal guarantee for money markets-- but the example was used as part of the fear-mongering to pass the TARP, which has absolutely nothing to do with money markets.

Also money markets/commercial paper debt markets are important to all businesses issuing short term debt, not just financials.
Wow. Not a big brochure-printing crowd. I ended up going with PSPrint.com, mainly because they have an option for overnighting a proof.
For the purpose of disruption, which vertical?
No , but the links between economic entities will collapse.
Cows will produce milk but no one will come to deliver it to the stores for example.And actually cows will stop producing milk at some point because you will not have food to feed them.
Look at the history books on Soviet Union collapse , it was very bad but it was not devastating as wars are...
Just curious - who maintains the Selenium tets, and how big is the development / "QA" team?

I've never worked in a team big enough that it could devote resources to maintaining all of the following kinds of tests:
* unit
* functional
* AND acceptance
* plus writing the actual code

IMHO, a neutral third-party group like QA should be responsible for writing & maintaining acceptance tests.
This incident was widely reported at the time.
This works fine if you are tackling a problem that can be sufficiently addressed by 4 developers. Depending on the size and scale of the problem you are trying to suggest and the time line required for delivery you may need a larger team.

When you begin to take that into account you realize you have to find ways for the larger team to work together and still produce a quality product. Hence the techniques being used by the author and other companies out there trying to address similar problems.
You'd think there would be some back of the envelope physics we could do. Anyone want to jump in?

Here's a start .. maybe

A bumpy road only uses extra energy because the bumps cause the vehicle to move upwards at the expense of its forward momentum. This invention would in the best case be able to recapture that energy and thus simulate being on a perfectly smooth road. So the most power it could produce would be the potential energy gained by raising a vehicle N cm off the ground every M seconds. N, and M would be affected by speed, and road bumpiness.
Linux admin needs ruby/shell-scripting help
Need to automate the pulling down of some processes and logs. The perl script has become horrid. I'm starting to rebuild it in ruby and it's going well, but I see that capistrano can supposedly do multiple ssh logins at once.

This would speed up the script quite a bit, because I'm dealing with about 300 servers.

Can I make capistrano do this? It's built for rails and I don't care about rails, so if someone could help me translate cap's functionality into what I'm doing, I'd be greatly appreciative.

Or a different way of doing it entirely.
Checkout WWW SQL Designer: http://ondras.zarovi.cz/sql/

Demo: http://ondras.zarovi.cz/sql/demo/?keyword=default

Source: http://code.google.com/p/wwwsqldesigner/
It is interesting, for cultural and for business reasons, most tech companies do not use debt markets. (Tech companies-- especially software companies-- generate lots of cash flow and aren't as capital intensive as other industries).

There are also federal tax breaks that encourage the use of debt financing.
Amish Hackers and Early Adopters
I like free content very much. Still... maybe we already have micropayments, but they aren't evenly distributed yet.

The current generation of gaming consoles does something close to micropayments and scrip at the same time, through their online shopping points. They solve the transaction cost problem by making you buy $20 worth of points at a time (I bought 15 Nintendo points for World of Goo, and then blew the change on an impulse buy - a copy of Opera). Points also solve the resistance problem, by having a captive audience of users who want what they offer.

The next step might be to allow game review sites to accept Nintendo/Sony/XBox points for access to content, demos, trailers, etc. At the same time, that would tie them more closely to the console manufacturers. More mainstream channels could follow as they see fit.
Give your Valentine link love
Continuing on this line of though, say there's a 0 incline fairly bumpy road where on average there's 3 3cm bumps every meter and the vehicle is traveling 60km/h (~17m/s). So the car has to provide energy to raise the car 9cm for every meter traveled. That's 1.5m/s vertically. So for an average car of 2000kg, we have to provide 2000x9.8x1.5 J per second, which is ~29KW. (That's gravitational potential energy mass x grav. x h)

Wow, so maybe it's right. Or my math is wrong somewhere, or my hypothetical road is way to bumpy?
No problem. Good luck on YB.
Interesting point. If you I understand you correctly, you are saying that a category should be a higher level of abstraction than a tag.
Here's where we are putting our effort:

- Monitoring the production environment, tons of effort. We record and analyze an incredible amount of data about everything that happens on the site, and have more and more automated processes looking for anomalies (though still nowhere near as many as I would like).

- Automated testing not including unit tests, some effort. I wouldn't be opposed to us doing more of this, but it's not incredibly high-priority and there always seems to be something else that's more important.

- Unit testing, yeah, not worth our time as far as I'm concerned.
"What happens when... adult human beings are more or less free to have all the sex and food they want?"

Well, I read Motley Crue's biography, and the answer is nothing good.
I agree that Microsoft wastes resources on research. Normally, I love the idea of private companies funding research, but Microsoft has a habit of not using its research for anything commercial. Instead, they file for thousands of patents and just sit on them.

I feel the same way about Google - by spending their vast profits on hiring more smart people than they need (instead of say, giving a dividend out to shareholders), they do a disservice to the entire industry. Smart engineers and researchers are relatively rare, and shouldn't be sitting in some research building writing up papers that will never produce a dollar - that's what Universities are for. Instead, they should be out there starting companies and heading the engineering teams at small to medium companies.

It's almost tragic to the tech industry that Microsoft and Google are so profitable.
Why do you want to use Windows if you're not using SQLServer, .NET, or other nice stuff that doesn't run elsewhere?
The food part certainly is a true statement. It's pretty clear both how it can ruin you, and how it (in the form of the processed food diet) has ruined the American health system. Even people like me, who eat pretty healthily, end up subsidizing the lifestyle diseases of the rest of the population that doesn't.
This is basically the "pay what you like" monetization that Radiohead used - 60-65% paid nothing and the rest paid an average of $6 (30% of market price). Personally, I feel that this is not sustainable.

Newspaper monetization could be in the form of customized filtering. While many companies try to provide such a service, the quality isn't high enough that someone would pay from it.
An Open Letter To Jona Bechtolt
http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=476387
> They solve the transaction cost problem by making you buy $20 worth of points at a time...

The transaction fees on a one time purchase of $20 is cheaper than on 15+5 or $1 20 times or even $0.05 400 times. The problem then is if the users would pay that much in advance, or if you can wait until that much as accumulated until you charge them for it. Then again there are services like tipjoy that manage that for you.
A Box Surrounded By Chains
But why should we have always voted-up uber-submitters?

Shouldn't the upvotes be based on the merit of the post, not that of the poster?
The New White House Bailout Plan Reaches $2.5 Trillion, Higher Than Predicted
Specialist development hardware? None of it is necessary

1. Buy a Mac

It may not be specialized to development, but it still is something special you have to buy. And it pushes your lower bound for computer price up by a lot.
LCE008 Perl, in a Nutshell
Ubiquity’s Python Feed Plugin
interesting. From reading it, it sounds like the author is going to make it difficult for the pirate to move in the circles which the author has influence in? Personally I think I'd prefer to give the pirate the chance to pay for the software first, but I may have miss-read the blog post.
Bah, I knew that guy on RentACoder was overcharging. $100 for one line of code! Outrageous.
It's an interesting article, but reminds me of the divide between techies and the great unwashed. When I buy a car I want a 5-speed, and stuff that, when it breaks, I can fix. I want a spare tire, even if there are run-flat tires - I like long road trips.

I do recognize that my tastes are not mainstream, but I value companies that also recognize that.

EDIT: Ok, maybe not fix myself, but I appreciate stuff that's cheap to get fixed, and maybe a little old-school. There's not too much that I can actually fix, but there's a larger constellation of stuff that I understand the cost of.
As to the potentially missed content, perhaps you could submit multiple stories, but they'd go in a queue and only one story from your queue would be pushed public per day.
It seems plausible to me - they're talking about the buttons on the wire going up to the buds communicating back to the device... I'm certainly no expert, but I can't think of any other devices that do that via a standard 3.5mm socket.
A few years back I was working on a blue-sky real estate database project. I spent a lot of time trying to decide between building the project with a triple store or an RDBMS.

The reason I mention this is that the parent notes that "professional onotologies are expensive to create and maintain" which is very true, but even worse, like Shirky's DSM example, you have to be an expert in the ontology to make good use of it!

To me, this was the critical argument against doing the project with a triple store, and ultimately, made me a pessimistic cynic of the semantic web. I can't put my finger on it, but it just feels way too complex to work in reality.

People don't like systems that manifest themselves as deterministic (not sure if that's the right word) but then act heuristically. However, people are fine with a heuristic system that acts that way. Ex: google.
Not a single response?

Edit: or an upvote?
Venture capitalist & enterpreneur Schuler on what’s “unnatural”
In 2001 this topic was extensively discussed in http://discuss.fogcreek.com/joelonsoftware1/default.asp?cmd=...
I think this is the best idea for the site's benefit but you'll get a lot of complaints from users based on the Karma factor.

I mean, what if you submit 3 stories and only the first gets published on that day. But someone else submits your third story as their one for the day and it becomes the most popular item on HN that day. Suddenly you're annoyed because you think you should have gotten those points.

Maybe you could have a queue but if someone else submits a story you got to first and was queued than you both get the karma points. There's nothing that says only one person can have the points for one story added to their total.
I disagree. I'm a scientist; science is part of my identity. Therefore I can't have fruitful discussions about science? About the value of science? I don't think that's correct.

In fact, Paul Graham's set-up is flawed. If the amount of money a policy will cost has a definite answer then there won't be long discussion of how much a policy will cost. Instead the long discussion will be whether it's worth the cost. But if the everyone basically agrees that the policy of clear-cutting the Amazonian rain forest and burning all the wood is not only not worth the cost but a bad idea, then it won't spur long discussions either.

The flaw is rather basic. Paul Graham is conflating politics with specific issues in the political domain. Tsk tsk!
IP: It's a market failure argument
The Decline is Always Slow Until the Rapid Collapse at the End
By definition, there is only one apocalypse.
Yeah I don't know the details. I'm definitely not in favor of going behind anyone's back to start a company. But if I was working on something with a few other people and they turned out to not be contributing much, I'd fork. But would certainly be open and upfront about it.
He founded: MicroSolutions, broadcast.com, 2929 Entertainment, HDNet.

He invested/owns/owned: IceRocket, RedSwoosh (which sold to Akami), Weblogs, Inc (sold to AOL) and the Dallas Mavericks.

I think he has proven himself.
bloglines beta. I quite like the navigation and the feed handling behavior.

However, I wish they would give more customization and the feed aggregator break less often.

However, of late, it is become more and more sucky and I plan to move away from it sometime soon
When you're talking about wealth in the multi-millions and even billions, many people do employ money managers. I have friends who work at small money management firms that have only one or two clients.
The funds would have simply vaporized. The actual supply of green dollar bills in the world is about $800 billion. But money market funds are valued at $8 trillion. If everyone actually tries to redeem their shares for dollars, each share would ends up being worth pennies on the dollar.

Instead, the Fed stepped in an backed up the funds with the full faith and credit of the U.S. government. Essentially, the Fed monetized the money market funds.
http://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=nickb submits more than 365 worthwhile stories in a year.

The number of new submissions correlates with the number of users. Number of users correlates with number of people looking at and voting on the "new" page.
Hire HN: Looking for a developer to help with dead simple dating site
Hey all,

I have an idea, and a couple sketches, for a site I'd like to get help on developing. I think it's a relatively simple idea to actualize, along the lines of a twitter/craigslist mashup. The idea's imagined success is found in its simplicity, so I'm not looking to pack it with features.

Anyway, I noticed several recent posts about hackers here finding work, so I thought I'd come here to tell you that I need work done! This will be a paid gig.

What I'm looking for is a rockstar ninja fighter pilot sniper beast of a coder. I know that pisses off the majority of you. I wasn't serious. :P

Anyway, I'm looking for a talented developer with knowledge in your preferred language of choice, although, I'd prefer ruby/python because I hope to jump in and help out in the near future, as well. Good with databases, javascript, css, xhtml. A skill level sufficient enough to build something like a twitter.

If you're interested, you're more than welcome to email me at kyro@kyrobeshay.com.

Apologies if this job post comes off as wildly novice. I'm not a hacker myself, so my requirements and such might seem rooted in a bit of ignorance. But hopefully you get the gist of what I'm looking for.

Thank you.
Or modulate the URLs/day based on average pts per URL submitted.
This guy is definitely overstating his own importance, at least with regards to his "Google footprint" and I have to wonder how many club owners he actually knows. http://www.google.com/search?q=jona+bechtolt, Analog Industries is a few results down.
Less effective at what? Job protection? My own survey suggests it is almost equally as effective

http://nielsolson.us/STLHE020409/Olson_TimeValueOfStudyHabit...

more context here: http://nielsolson.us/Haversian/2009/02/some_current_thoughts...
Were you seriously looking for the word "catastrophe" in federal reserve press releases? Try to keep in mind that the DJIA can collapse if the fed chairman has the hiccups--so, they tend to wrap everything in "fedspeak"

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0liegrixknA

...what really happened was that the fed gave FDIC-style assurances to the money markets, which are not regulated in the manner of FDIC-insured commercial banks. That sounds boring as hell, I know.
Congrats on the coverage.
In New Procedure, Artificial Arm Listens to Brain
That's correct. Nonprofits can sell products and use the revenues to grow, but the fee paid for the products is not a tax deductible donation.
It isn't that hard to get karma...thresholds could go far in preserving the culture if set to something really high (I am thinking 1000+). I reached 500+ fairly effortlessly though and I was not always a good citizen- I have 5-10+ submissions that were killed and several of my comments have been downmodded or killed.
No one wants a reverse engineer/systems programmer anymore :(
Almost any industry can be rattled if the power goes to the consumer instead of the vendor. This has happened with consumer products but could go to services etc.

-automobile disrupted by cars from asia - oh shit happened!

-book industry disrupted by self published electronic books

-shipping industry disrupted by automation - happening

-pcs industry by netbooks with no moving parts/cellphones

-Windows/Office by Ubuntu/Openoffice (outside of USA)

-power industry by cheap solar cells - pipedream

-housing industry by prefab homes - pipedream

-newspapers by online media - happening

-drug industry by Indian made generic drugs - legislation won't let it happen

-all driving trades (taxis, truck driver etc) by automated DARPA style cars - pipedream

-most manufacturing jobs by cheap chinese/korean robots - happening

-most farming jobs by automation (eg AutoFarm - gps/AI driven tractors) - happening

-Californian/Arizona farming by cheaper farms in Mexico, Guatamala etc - happening

-drive through order takers by voice recognition
-Long distance by skype, calling card & SIP providers - happening

-Business travel by HD Video conferencing systems - happening (Cisco + HP)

-Telecom equipment by Huawei

-Oil furnaces by alternative pellet combustion system (see Jon Udell) -??

-Military soldiers by remote controlled robots - happening

-billboards by gps aware ads

-interbroker dealers by cheaper competitors (ITG - etc) - happening

- speeding ticket writing by RFID tag reading systems (UK)
-various industries by the rental business (Netflicks, Zipcar etc)

Candidates that will not be disrupted

- Governments - always political and loath change

- Unions

- Near monopolies (Heathcare, Cell phone)

- Religion to an extent
The forgot about Encyclopedia Britannica.
It's called mirroring - a psychology process in building rapport. We all do it when comfortable with a friend / family member. You can use this to your advantage to win people over to your side. Just try not to be too obvious or they might spot you! ;)
You mean like 3jam, Limbo, sms.ac, Zemble, Google's Dodgeball, Yahoo's ill-fated "Mixd," and a dozen others who are no longer around and I forgot about?

Jeez, I truly do wish you guys luck, but group/social SMS is a pretty tough nut to crack.

(I used to cover the mobile industry for a trade publication.)
There is an open source competitor - Moodle (moodle.org)

My university currently uses Blackboard. Some of the computing subjects are trialling moodle to see whether the whole university could switch from Blackboard.

Moodle is simpler to use and less buggy.
It's another experiment :-(. I've been here 400 days, and made 60 submissions. None of which have been "Ask HN," "Tell HN," or polls. A tip for building karma here -- spend less time here and go do something notable.
I'm not sure about the 550 billion number, but there was a run on the markets that week. On September 19th, the US Treasury put in a guarantee on money market funds [1]. The commercial paper market froze that week as well. That alone put the US economy near complete collapse. Figures such as 3 hours are somewhat arbitrary, but don't dismiss the seriousness of financial crisis that week in September.

[1] http://www.ustreas.gov/press/releases/hp1147.htm
When news reports were first brought to television, they often consisted of an anchor at a desk simply "speaking" the news to the viewers. Now, television news has taken on its own format that's very different from the printed format -- events are relayed as they unfold, reporters are on site, etc.

So far, news on the Web hasn't matured in the same way. Most news is still delivered as straightforward text (newspaper model), or else video (television model).

What's an example of something that truly uses the Web medium? Here's a piece in which the (UK) Guardian uses Flash to show the history of the Arab-Isreali conflict:
http://www.guardian.co.uk/flash/0,5860,720353,00.html