skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Apparently, I'm the one person on the planet who actually enjoyed the ads. If they had focused on their products I probably would have turned the channel. Nike doesn't have to talk about how great their gear performs, they simply create a mood. Now, you could argue the Seinfeld ads were a little too Mars Blackmon-SpikeLee-jokey and not enough Witness-Lebron-Inspiring, but at least they didn't hit you over the head with Vista. And it allowed them to poke fun at themselves a bit - break down the big corporate slow-moving behemoth image.
Three Worlds Collide: Great work of fiction by Eliezer Yudkowsky
"Here's an organically evolved thing that is really resonating with people. Clearly it's dumb." Sweet.
That's a good point. There is definitely some physics content in the interpretation of quantum mechanics---Bell's Theorem certainly took many physicists by surprise when it came out, since it proved people were arguing over more than words---but in any case it's all a tiny higher order term in the series expansion for 'physics'. (The 0th order term is "Newton", FWIW. ;-)
Great minds think alike. And so do ours. ;-)
Why innocent people confess to crimes they did not commit (2005)
I think Nadal actually differs from most players in that he 'plays the point'. Most of the great players are said to lift in important situations such as service break opportunities or tie breaks. Perhaps if you have such amazing stamina that you can go flat out all the time then this might be the best strategy. But for most mortals (including many greats) prioritising is an important skill that should be used.
This kind of suffering is for people who haven't yet figured out that "the red nipple" is the best pointing device bar none.
A crisis of confidence: the US scientific endeavour is increasingly losing its lustre as a career choice
In Paris, an anti-ad insurgency grows
We actually hadn't spent much time on Twitter prior to the show. Went in with about 60 follows, and left with roughly double.

We found what worked best was making some informative posts on the hashtag for the conference. In our case the conference hashtag was #LTNY.

We just requested that people DM us for a demo, etc., and the response was phenominal!

You can see the amount of traffic, as well as some of our posts at: http://search.twitter.com/search?q=%23LTNY
Shouldn't the US have learned a lesson about Japan's huge housing bubble and tried to prevent it from happening here in the first place?

During the rise of the US housing bubble, people pointed out similarities to Japan but the experts kept saying that it was "different" here.

In some ways, I feel like we are doomed to repeat many of the same mistakes.
especially since she got something like 40 million in her golden parachute after doing it
The core problem is that economics cannot use falsifiable experiments

I agree that falsifiable experiments are difficult in economics, which is why we must rely instead on logic and reason---a strategy seemingly abandoned by modern economists.

I remember the ridiculous (and since discredited) argument by Card & Krueger that increases in the minimum wage increased employment, at least according to their data. And yet, when you raise prices on normal goods, the quantity demanded falls; if you force companies to pay employees more, they will hire less. If the data say otherwise, the data are either wrong or too noisy to be trustworthy. (Unfortunately, their paper wasn't merely an academic curiosity---it gave Bill Clinton and Congress political cover to raise the minimum wage in 1996.)

And now we hear economists fret that Americans, who have been under-saving and over-spending for years, may yet ruin the economy---by saving too much and spending too little. Someone needs to tell them that wagging your finger and saying "liquidity trap" doesn't magically give the emperor clothes.
After multiple false starts, Microsoft figures out it must change Windows 7 UAC
Because when your local ISP does it, they are abusing their monopoly.

If it was actually an open market with real competition, then I wouldn't care about net neutrality, because there would be plenty of options for non-broken internet access. However, if I can only get access through one or two providers, then those providers have an incentive to extort money out of websites by threatening to degrade access to their sites.

I think the real fix to the net neutrality problem is to open up local access so that the phone/cable company only provides the wire, and an unlimited number of ISPs compete to provide the net access. The phone/cable company probably shouldn't be allowed to provide the internet access, since they will inevitably abuse their monopoly (and necessary monopolies should be kept as limited as possible).
Python Paradox. You whippersnappers need to read Paul Graham's best stuff!
Sony Ericsson K850 Velvet Blue Cyber-shot unlocked
The handset presented by the Sony Ericsson is the phone of the next generation which keeps you ahead in front of your friend circle. The Sony Ericsson K850 Velvet Blue Cyber-shot come with including many more features and glamorous and charming look.
The stuff on teaching was just amazing. His graph on what makes a good teacher was jaw dropping to me. Once he put it out there, it was really hard for me to avoid the question of why we are not focusing more on what makes good teacher performance.
pg discovered on implementation that this was unnecessarily slowing the site. So it's been rewound (hence, those who qualified for the orange name are back at the generic grey, and likely still posting.)

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=468599
Was the japanese housing bubble caused by repackaged high risk loans?
I love tennis and agree this method is "the way" to win at tennis. Its a good skill to leverage in other aspects of life as well.

However, I have seen this skill zealously applied to a startup and the person that uses it so well alienates others (internal and external to his company) by using it too religiously. It is just one skill and needs to be carefully balanced with the simple fact that in life and startups the overall score is many times more important than a particular point.

Be careful with applying a tennis stratagem to life. You will get burned.
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Eh, I don't really see the big deal about releasing some mosquitos into the crowd. I did enjoy his talk, though, pretty well thought out.
A little tough to understand at first. I didn't know what was being 'rotated'. Anyway, my highest score was only 640.
Four million jobs in two years? FDR did it in two months.
This seems to be the payoff of focus. Ever since they cut back on the number of fledgling products they're willing to spend time on, the ones that have traction seem to progress faster.
In my opinion teacher accountability is the most pressing social issue of our time. Gates has been all over this for a while now...
ObjectiveResource: ActiveResource for Objective-C
Same here with colemak... WASD becomes WARS
If integration is your metric, the MS stack allows you to be incredibly integrated. On top of Windows+Office, get Exchange Server & Sharepoint Server, and use Active Directory, and you've got a corporate IT department's dream. It all integrates really well.
Microsoft Songsmith creates an interesting song from just a voice recording
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What if its for a blub job, say, maintaining 20-year-old billing systems? There's no value proposition in doing a rewrite, and the Haskell guy would get bored silly, while the blub guy would be content, and plug away, doing solid work for years. He makes a career out of it. And he was cheap. Everyone wins. It happens all the time. It's perfectly reasonable to hire a blub programmer. Whether it's reasonable to be a blub programmer is a different story. :)
Ask HN: How do you vote a submission after you have read the page it linked to?
I often load the new submission page and then click through and open the links I am interested in in new tabs. I find that after reading each tab, I don't go back to vote it up unless I comment. How do you do it?
Those tiny terms matter when things go nonlinear! ;-)
Summary: Songsmith is "music" software that takes a voice recording, and from it builds chords, bass, drums, etc that fit with the melody. This example is Marvin Gaye singing "Heard It Through the Grapevine" and the result is quite interesting.

There are plenty of other redone classics on YouTube, most of them aren't that good, but they are all very, very interesting. The technology may not be that useful (sans for making pop music), but it certainly is impressive. Enjoy.
What you often see on TED presentations is that these people know how to make a single simple powerful argument. It's actually quite difficult. They get the right graph up there.The right numbers or facts that make the combination of reason & emotion click.
Where's the science here? The linked article talks about research, but doesn't actual describe any results. Instead we get stuff like:

The research demonstrates that variations in ceiling height can evoke concepts that, in turn, affect how consumers process information.

What on earth does that mean? How in the hell would you quantify the evocation of a concept? Look, either there is an experiment here or there isn't. This article uses the vocabulary of science to say, basically, that high ceilings are really pretty. Well, duh.
This is a wonderful idea, though it will require a good amount of tenacity.

My idea for the site was to essentially ape iusethis.com–let people find open source alternatives to closed source tools. Somehow slanting user comments towards "migration stories" would be even more useful.
From Melbourne Australia:

traceroute to a259.srip1.akasrip.net.a9502240.1.cn.akasripcn.net (59.167.187.149), 64 hops max, 40 byte packets
<snip>
12 64.34.60.28 (64.34.60.28) 248.487 ms !H 255.732 ms !H 257.461 ms !H

traceroute to web1copilot.fogcreek.com (64.34.80.167), 64 hops max, 40 byte packets
<snip>
19 64.34.60.28 (64.34.60.28) 291.594 ms !H 288.784 ms !H 289.873 ms !H

I'd guess that's still way too high for CoPilot to be comfortable to use but I'm impressed with the improvement none the less.
UK gambles with another Bank Bail-out Plan
Fresh efforts have come from the government to help banks recover from the effects of credit crunch and in turn kick start the British Economy. As part of the Bank Bail-out plan, insurance programs will be rolled out to banks to ensure they stop losing money on bad debts, which is seen as the starting point of the credit crunch.The government initiated insurance plans will protect banks against bad credit and bad mortgage debts.
that makes me happy. if everyone loved smart girls it would lower my chances of finding one even more.
I open in new tabs, read the articles closing each tab as I go. When I get back to the HN page I go top to bottom and vote up the articles I wish to. Then I go to next page or reload for newer stuff for as long as I'm reading.

Works better than going article by article for me, I find.
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Semantics Incorporated: How Semantic are Google, Calais and Linked Data?
Agreed 100% that local competition is the best fix, either by enforced sharing of the scarce last-hop wires, or introduction of new paths (new wires or wireless technology).

Enforced 'neutrality' could push real competition further away, by limiting the kinds of offerings and profits that attract new entrants.

Also, for a sense of proportion: even though local access in the US is usually a cable/dsl duopoly, and total speeds lag some other national markets, prices continue to fall and speeds continue to increase. No last-mile ISP has 'extorted' websites with threats of degraded access.

So there's no urgent need for legislators and regulators to start dictating how service is delivered, as if there will never be competition. If they want to help, they should adopt policies that spur new entrants, not tie the hands of current providers.
I tried keeping a notebook once. Then I wanted to Ctrl+F...

"Screw this."
I'm pretty sure I already said this last time meta-talk maddness came up.

Yup, here it is. http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=373992
Not only Gates, but Alan Kay and Seymour Papert have been gunning for constructivist ideas for longer than Gates I think.
Oh, at a technical level (ie. a corporate IT department as you mentioned) this is fairly true.

But what unalone was saying, it's not about the under-the-hood technical stuff in marketing, it's about a consistent story. If you can't join the dots with the user experience (and don't get me started about Powerpoint, Visio, Word and Excel in their 2008 iterations, with inconsistent look+feel, different behaviours, ribbon/menu inconsistencies) it's hard to sell this story.

Customer loyalty is a similar story - tactility, gorgeousness, smooth transitions from product to product (in an experiential sense, not how well COM+ interaction works) all trump weird unresponsiveness, beige-boxyness and uncomfortable mental transitions.

And perhaps this is one of the key issues for Microsoft - they're a technical organisation that has grown too big for obsessive and fanatical and consistent design to be implemented. MS Marketing must weep, unless they are too close to the issue too.
Amazon.com vs Borders.com email marketing strategy
I like this game a lot. There are very few original abstract / geometric games. Tetris is a classic because there is nothing like it in the real world (and because it's really fun). Kudos on creating a new kind of speed puzzle gameplay.
The 7 Deadly Sins of Startup Companies
I open a pageful of links in new tabs and then read all of them too. Wasn't too clear on that earlier.

Another thing I do is, I will also save some of the sites onto Instapaper to read on my iPhone. I almost never go back to vote those up, unfortunately.
One very interesting question he touched on but didn't really answer: If the market is heartless and government is incompetent, then how do we address issues such as these?

Is philanthropy really the only way?
Yea, it's a total SEO play. Just look at the way they interlink their pages and shamelessly promote high search volume queries like video games.
He's right about the importance of education and the poor state of it in the US, but I'm not convinced that the private sector can't handle it. Inside American Education (http://www.amazon.com/Inside-American-Education-Thomas-Sowel...) is a really interesting book on what our current system is like (although a bit dated, it's from 1992).
Scholarships, loans, and work is how I did it. The scholarships covered tuition, loans and earned income covered living, lab fees, and books. I lived in a small apartment complex and acted as an assistant manager in lieu of rent part of the time. I sold calligraphy (certificates, your name in calligraphy, mailboxes and street signs) and art (illuminated love poems/poison pen poems, decorated letterhead designs, wedding invitation designs) and did some studio portraiture photography. I also graded a billion papers, did odd jobs on and off campus--I.D. photos, repairs, hauling, cleanup, drafting home additions/remodels, writing short pieces for newspapers on events, selling cartoons to newsletter editors, stereo repairs, typewriter repairs.

I also got fed by friends in clubs (historical recreation group, astronomy club, computer club) when all I could afford for myself was a sack of potatoes (no margarine, just salt.) I checked out textbooks from multiple libraries to get through the quarter without buying (interlibrary loans make this work, along with reading ahead and study groups where you can get exercises from others during gaps.)

The loans were hard to swallow at the time, but I used the money carefully and it worked out.
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My notebooks do similar things. My trick to keeping it organized and "professional" is to skip a page and summarize your doodles. It's like an index to your brain.
I really love raganwald's writing and code, but something about his series on Smullyan's combinator birds is unsettling to me.

It's like _why's writing in that it is fanciful, but without the sustained authorial whimsy. I think it might be because Reg is not the original source of the oddness, he's performing it for a new audience.

I applaud his efforts, however unnerving, he's at the wild frontier of technical writing!
I think Joel's got the right idea. After about five years at a startup (that grew up a bit) I quit in January 2008. Just a couple weeks ago I signed on with a pre-funding company in SF. Most of the interval was spent hacking on my own projects and traveling. It's been one of the best years of my life and I'd recommend it to other readers.
Strategic concessions and strategic fights are the true key to success. If you're in the battle, be in it to win it.

I agree with you (I think) and disagree with the article. One of life's useful lessons is precisely that some battles are not worth fighting. If you've decided to fight the battle, then make all necessary effort to win it, but if you haven't, don't.

Perhaps the most obvious, immediate example of this is the old parable of the horse race. What if you have 3 horses (fast, medium and slow) and your opponent has 3 horses (all slightly faster than yours... i.e. fast + a little, medium + a little, slow + a little). To win the battle, you need to win at least 2/3 races. How do you play this?

The solution is to pitch your slowest horse against the opponent's faster horse, your fastest horse against the opponent's medium horse, and your medium horse against the opponent's slow horse. "Trying to win every point" is a losing strategy here - only high level, strategic thinking can win the day.

Life is full of those situations. Play the game, not the point.
Ask HN: Where to find used office furniture?
We're looking specifically for lots of big whiteboards, but we don't want to break the bank.

Does anyone know of any treasure troves in the valley housing motherloads of used office furniture?
I read somewhere that Chris Anderson was quoted as saying that the caption for this talk should be that "Bill gates releases more bugs into the world".
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I open both the links and the comments for each link at the same time in background tabs, so if I like an article, it's one tab away for an upvote after reading. Otherwise I'm in the habit of closing two tabs at once.
I've changed the way the fill speed is determined. Hopefully it's more playable now.
You've got the pigments and light wavelengths swapped.

(cyan, magenta, yellow, black) form a set of additive (pigment) colors.
The private sector could handle it. He points to private schools that are already succeeding with the poorest children. The problem is how to get the government and unions out of the way so successful ideas can be widely applied. I think a voucher system would quickly begin to solve many of Americas education problems. Such systems have already succeeded in Sweden and parts of the US.
So I started writing a reply that got longer and longer and I am going to turn it into a blog entry. Would you be willing to review it before I publish it?
Food @ $1000?! Maybe if you eat out every day...Most American families would laugh at this. If you cook at home and plan properly, you can easily feed a family on far less.
When it comes down to it, so called "big works" projects are no different from an other type of investing (save for the scale they're done on). When you're in recession is the best time to invest - if you're able to scrounge up the cash to do so and the government can do that through seinorage (printing money). Still, if you invest in crap, that money will still be lost. The government must be prudent to put the money toward projects that will be worthwhile in the long-run. For example, the interstate system was a big expense, but has offered vastly improved transportation yielding great gains in commerce.

The problem is identifying what will create a long-term healthy economic environment. Of course, that's hard to do. Investing is hard and it actually becomes harder when you have more money. It's comparatively easy to find an idea that will grow from $20,000 to $100,000 in a few years time compared to finding an idea that will grow from $50bn by 5-10% per year.

In many ways, I'm glad it isn't my job to figure that out and I do worry about what the government is going to get itself into, but I think we can all take solace that at least "big works" projects would see money spent in America. With the proposals sitting at about the cost of the War in Iraq, I think that we can safely say that we aren't looking at the scope of investment that Japan did and that it's an amount we have already absorbed as money down the drain.
I'm not sure they are either, and that's not necessarily a bad thing. I also lean towards the approach of learning from others and studying the ecology of existing designs, but I think that betrays a designer's bias:) The YC ethic seems to be more on the side of agile programming and prototyping in code and it's an alternative approach that can also work well, given an extremely capable set of coders.

By the way, I like your focus as a product incubator, that's a good differentiator. I recently changed my linkedin title to "an interaction designer specializing in early stage startups" and am slowly finding an underground culture of bay area designers in the same scene - it's good to see we're not all snapped up by ad agencies and big companies.
The semantic argument is what you get when graphic designers and web monkeys try to articulate separation of concerns. The only way they know to partition a system is at the CSS-HTML boundary, because that's what they were spoon fed. This mindset forces them them to viciously make all HTML human readable: it is their only tool for managing system complexity. They take things like the W3C's statement that tables ought to be for tabular data only as Revealed Truth, to be enforced without question. (Seriously. A lot of them consider violating these principles to be a career-ending move, and adjust their hiring policy accordingly.)

The engineers think that separation of concerns is something the system designer imposes. Does your fancy button use a squirrelly pile of implementation weirdness? No problem, just create a templating mini-language with a simple syntax for expressing a button; hive off the squirrelly stuff into its own module. In their minds, making a button with a 9-cell table is Baby's First Custom Widget, at least compared to frameworks like GTK+.

Naturally there is ... friction between these two schools.
OK, I give up. What's the binary joke?
I must be colour blind. I can't see any usernames in orange. :(
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One thing you can always try is "Here is the executive summary and presentation for my startup. We are trying to raise a small convertible debt round so we can continue working on it."

It works. http://new.ycombinator.com/item?id=73346