skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Related: when people ask me if I'd like "A or B" I wonder if people mean "A || B", to which I'd reply with true/false, or "max(A, B)", to which I'd reply with A (if I have higher preference for A) or B (if I have higher preference for B).

Here are two unambiguous examples:

"Are you a US citizen or permanent resident? Yes [ ] No [ ]"

versus:

"Would you like coffee or tea?"

In some settings, when they ask "A or B", it's hard to know which of the following set are valid answers: {{}, {A}, {B}, {A,B}}
hey micah -- is there a reason why the demo video on obsidian portal's homepage is an image and not the actual embeddable?
You more or less just described 4chan.org, which does in fact get an absurd amount of traffic.
I think it took me to get to 50 before I could downvote, although it's possible I've misremembered.
The current prototype is built with php. It is possible that it could be rebuilt with ruby in a later version.

For now I am really looking to complete the beta and start testing with users as soon as possible.

To summarize without giving too much away, the site is a music app built for music fans as well as music artists.

I am ultimately looking at trying to create a new model for the music industry, as I believe the current one is broken. Eventually I would like to think of us as the 'Apple' of the Internet Music Technology Industry ;)

We can explore the opportunity of equity distribution on a 'vested' basis. I am willing to talk about it with those who are interested after exploring the opportunity further.

You can visit the public site for now and watch a video presentation that I put together at:
http://www.jambuzzer.com
Kathy's Weight Loss Diary
A personal diary about how i lost 51 lbs in a month, from exercise, diet and supplements.
How does crap like this end up on the front page of HN, and why are people upmodding it but not commenting?

(I assume the people upmodding are not commenting because the comments are mostly negative (8 out of 10, at present).)

Is there a shortage of impressive hacks to submit and upmod? Is there something particularly pleasant about this place vs. Reddit or Digg? Are the words "Hacker News" only appearing for me?
english logic
------- -----
and AND
or XOR
/ OR

Actually, since (A XOR B) and (A AND B) are mutually exclusive, (A XOR B) XOR (A AND B) also equals (A OR B), so "/" could be "XOR" too.
I wonder how much a hit Craiglists would take if it removed, "Random encounters," and such themed categories.

It's the Internet's porn for females; all text!
What's a more efficient way to financial freedom than creating and selling a startup? Probably the only other realistic alternative was becoming an investment banker, but I don't think anyone is going to argue for that one right now.
Other: to be a part of creating something.
That's a very unique but good application of version control.

It takes a special kind of person to think, "I'm going to take this thing meant for code and use it for what is basically an OS."
I'd be surprised if the Craigslist team doesn't "..give a shit about their own site". On the contrary, I'm quite sure they care about it very much. Perhaps they're not interested in doing more via features and would rather spend their time doing things like setup the Craigslist Foundation (http://craigslistfoundation.org/). The thing about Craigslist is that it's dead simple, which is appealing to most people who use the web and don't want to understand what's going on under the hood. Something like an API might entertain you and I but I doubt it would serve their larger user base.

Still as others have posted, nothing is stopping someone else from coming along and creating CL service that's just better than CL itself. I would welcome one, especially one that handled rental listings better, but I'm not going to hold my breath.
I think it balances it out. People have a need to express their 'dark side' because so much of what we would normally say or do is suppressed by fear of what others would think of us or other types of social mores. Often we learn where the lines are by crossing them and either feeling shitty about it or being reprimanded for it. But if things were opposite, if we lived in a world of dark ugliness, there'd be the same longing for an escape into beauty, peace, and politeness.

Have you read about T-Shirt Hell shutting down? ( http://bit.ly/YkX4 ) Is it unfortunate that they existed to begin with, or unfortunate that they're closing? Some of us may have strong opinions about it, but I'd be most of us would say that as a whole, most people would find the issue ambiguous... that the lines aren't clear.

In some cases, the lines are clear. Spitting on someone is unacceptable. Maliciously harming someone is unacceptable. But in other cases, let's say humor, the lines aren't clear at all. And it's because we, as a society, don't make our opinions heard, clearly or even through signals like frown power ( http://www.urbandictionary.com/define.php?term=Frown%20Power ). We need to tell people doing something offensive that it's offensive, and why. We need to tell people telling someone that things that _aren't_ offensive are offensive are wrong, and why.

Otherwise, people are going to continue to repress things they'd like to do/say, and it will continue to be spewed forth in concentrated venom.
It’s the Economy, Girlfriend
I often found meditation easy to transition into after yoga. If you don't feel like going to a pure meditation course, try a yoga class at your local gym, and ask the instructor if they allocate any time toward meditation.
Putin-Dell slapdown at Davos
"A sense of TRUE ownership."

"Doing a startup isn't a sensible CAREER decision... It's a largely emotional lifestyle decision."

Both of these come from the comment below by webwright. After all the reasons and explanations I had read before, they really nailed it for me and have always stuck in my mind.

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=302548
and people call me a troll. :-p

casual sex is awesome. although it does get old. but even then it's awesome. I'd rather have casual sex than a meaningful cheeseburger.
Do any experienced programmers agree with this advice regarding scripting languages?
The trick to making marketing work as the inventor/creator is to make something you think is awesome.

I've had the hardest time selling even my best friends on some of the things I've made because my heart just wasn't in it. When you make something you use yourself, it's not marketing, it's doing the other person a favor.
So this could be adapted for generating said generic pieces:
http://pdos.csail.mit.edu/scigen/
But making death threats is not a right. It's a crime.

I really don't understand all the apologizing for law enforcement that refuses to enforce the law in this case. The victim was harmed a lot, and still no one wants to see the crook stopped?
Because the people who have made bigger and better things show us those things, rather than just the initial complaining blog post they made.
I would like to point out going to grad school is a great way to live like that and be around creative types.

Edit: Wow that's an old post NM.
I'm an Arrington fan, so just wanted to get that out of the way.. but.. petty assault is really, really common in Europe. Well, at least here in the UK.

Only Michael can really know what the score was on the day, but I wouldn't be surprised if random Americans get petty attacks quite often while they're in Europe. What with all the chavs and all nowadays..

Anyway, shame on whoever did it. Showing the disturbing old European spirit yet again.
Interesting question, but it's complicated by the fact that an even more polite society, Japan, is said to have an even more polite internet. More anonymity, more group bonding, more political deference, when your theory would predict the exact opposite.
Sun will Rock in 2009
Is there a site that isn't elance, rentacoder, or stuff like that, where you can genuinely hook up with people who are looking for "odd job" type Internet work? Such as, write a press release, design a logo, help me with a business plan, yada yada.

If all these people are falling out of work and earning a pittance (that article claims she's now making $20k), then surely there are some pretty qualified people we could be paying $25 an hour to do stuff for us (who would have previously cost $100+).

You might think that'd be "taking advantage" of the recession, and sure, it is, but money in the pocket is better than no money.
Engine Yard Solo goes live on AWS
Laziness

Invest a few years working your ass off to be able to afford to sit on your ass later on in life.
The more I use git the more impressed I am with it. We now use git to control access and distribution of distributed files. Previously we did that via NFS, but git was cleaner and simpler to manage access restrictions.
I always get the sense that Markus is full of B.S. and not being truthful with how he got started, how many visitors he has and where he makes his money.

Craig on the other hand, is an American hero.
When things get translated, they can acquire unexpected meanings. In English even, consider "help" vs "aid".
Exactly, which is why if you drop down to 1/4X you need to move out of that $1500 apartment. If someone ignores the problem until your car is repossesed and you get evicted, there are people more deserving of sympathy.

Also, I think $1515 a month in Detroit gets you a castle with a moat around it.
I would recommend a different m-word ending in "-ation."
Intel releases Linux-based Moblin 2 Alpha for Netbooks
Freedom.

Not that I'd ever stop working entirely...just that I'd be free to work & do whatever I want, when I want without any money constraints (within reason).
Smart email figures out who should get messages
For that niggling little feeling that you just might be onto something.
Where apprehension clashes with excitement and the rush of it buries the worry that is sinking to the pit of your stomach.
And you know the odds, and you know the stake:
you place a bet on yourself.
spend 14 hours a day at the office

What's that got to do with hard work?

The fact is, fellow hackers, as much as we'd all hate to admit it, hardly anyone here knows squat about hard work.

Go ahead and haul those 300 barrels up to the loading dock. Or hot tar that roof when it's 100 degrees out. Or open the restaurant every morning at 6:00 am and feed 2,000 people every day (yes, 7 days per week). And never miss a day or you don't eat. How about painting every room in every school building all day every day until you die. With nothing to look forward to except that maybe, just maybe, someday your grandchildren might go to college.

Don't get me wrong: I'm grateful that I sit at a desk in a heated/air conditioned office making something out of nothing. This was possible at no other time in history.

But please don't confuse long hours with hard work. Too many others really worked hard so that we wouldn't have to.
Telstra: Android phones not robust
I have a meditation hack that works real well for me.

Imagine a sine wave, a real smooth one (or a circle, with a revolving point on the circumference). Breath as a sine wave, very slowly and gently reversing the direction of your breathing. Reverse so gently, that there is no clicking or jerking. It is actually quite hard and requires a lot of patience and focus. It is incredibly relaxing.... give it a try.

In contrast to the majority of the rest of the posts, I have found meditation to be very valuable to relieve work related stress.
Craiglist is a text-only site. What on earth would you do with an API? You can access everything on the site using RSS feeds. People have done many creative things with those feeds: Google maps mashups which display apartment listings on top of crime maps, for example.

The only thing I could imagine an API being used for would be to allow postings from software outside of craigslist. You want to know what 99% of people would use it for? Spamming Craigslist.
Can Viral Videos Be Repeated?
PR spam - flagged
Having had one personal interaction with him, I'd have to agree - he's a nice enough guy. It seems some people prefer the unthinking cheerleaders that are as thick as flies in Norcal. Techcrunch's articles might be uninformed sometimes, but they are generally fair.
Training wheels for aspiring meditators:

http://www.mindfold.com/

(Don't laugh, nothing has ever worked better for me.)
Means experience learning somthing or having fun. For me it is the latter.
News flash: Nobody gives a damn about global warming
Bringing Microsoft To VMware
Ex-Microsoft veterans are now in charge at VMware, but they insist the virtualization specialist won't become a Microsoft clone.
I choose Freedom.

Being able to work the hours I want to work. I can come into work at 10 instead of 8. I can leave work at 3 if I wanted to. As long as my work gets done.

Not having a boss micromanage me. Not having to worry about office politics (for the most part). Also the freedom to run with great ideas and not have the bureaucracy of some corp jobs.

Also Being able to work on a wide range of technologies and work with people from many different verticals and experience levels is a great experience and keeps my job (programming) fresh.

Finally startups generally only last a couple years. This allows me to change jobs every few years and lets me do something else. This is really beneficial as I'm able to feel refreshed and not trapped in a grind.
woah, this karma thing is worse than I thought. downmodding my opinion, I hope you all die.

anyway, for what it's worth, because I'm thinking out loud, the thing w/both Arrington and Sierra is it's live by the sword, die by the sword. especially with Arrington. you can't set up a system where your income depends on fame and then be surprised by the fact that people project things onto you. that's what fame is. it's not the only thing fame is, but it's a huge part of what fame is. there's a whole lot of people who don't need to know who Arrington is, but know who he is anyway. Arrington created that deliberately, because building your fame builds your ad revenue.

interesting thing about neurology, if you hear about a celebrity often enough, you actually end up with a neuron dedicated to that specific individual. so he literally invaded our brains because it would make him money. that's fine; wasting our time for his selfish purposes isn't a problem in his book. but when it bites him in the ass, it's not fine?

I'm not saying this is how fame should work, but it's how fame does work, and if he's not realistic about that, that's nobody's problem but his. you can't help yourself to all the upsides of fame and then literally go running home to Mommy (as he himself says he did) when the downsides enter the picture. that's just not going to work.
Try progressive muscle relaxation. That works better for me than meditation because I'm doing something to keep my mind from wandering.

After you get used to it, you can do it by yourself, but starting out I find it better to do it along with a recording. I have rhapsody, so I use the tracks on this album. Both of them are good, but I think the progressive one is better.

http://www.rhapsody.com/phd-edward-a-charlesworth/relaxation...

If you don't have rhapsody, you can listen to them with the trial, or maybe try to get them from iTunes or Amazon or something.
Ruby is dying -- and the graph to prove it.
Knoppix 6.0 / Adriane 1.1 - Live CD Released
Great job!
Awesome!
you know it!
How to tell when your site should be put out of its misery?
That is a good point, but not really what the article is about. I probably should have changed the title. It's not so much working hard as working hard on things without good reason.

It is good to work hard to provide for a family.

It is good to work hard to pursue a dream and further human progress.

It is not good to work hard just to gain unused material possessions, especially at the expense of my family.
I'm not going to presume if vetting-by-karma is true, but I know that the text you pasted above says nothing about karma except to point out how it is tangential.

But we will be more likely to fund people we know are smart from their submissions and comments.

I might be wrong, but it seems since the partners of YC are demonstrably rational human beings that they would do more than determine someone's smartness based on a score that could represent one of dozens of different things. It's like determining someone's contribution to humanity based on their savings account balance. I think they know better.
Remote control software comes to iPhone with LogMein Ignition
You know they disembowelled him at the end of that movie.
A bit scary, since startups are statistically an inferior way of accumulating wealth and they offer "freedom" only at the expense of consuming your life.

This poll forgot "masochism", which is my +1.
Sense of purpose
It works well for this poll.
Launching a successful startup is hard. Becoming financially free is even harder.
But can't anything and everything be hard? Isn't hard/easy subjective? If everything is hard then nothing is hard.
It just is.

I think clocking in from 9-5 and being told what to do is hard. Never mind how many green pieces of paper I get for it. But we all need money as a survival tool. So where do we draw the line? How do we balance security, survivial, freedom, joy, work, and responsibility...

Each answer is our own. I want to build a successful business because I put it in my brain a long time ago that I could. There is nothing stopping me from doing it.
I want to prove myself, to myself and reap the benefits while I do it.

From my perspective, it is better than any and all alternatives I have regarding financial and life freedom/security etc...
That goes under freedom.
ezmobius, wycats: Please tell your friends/coworkers to stop spamming this story.
Top 7 New Firefox Extensions
Basically a blog post was written, http://www.horsepigcow.com/2007/02/04/more-on-higher-purpose... and there was a pretty big argument started in the comment section. Kathy compared some commenters as mean kids.

Chris Locke started a website called mean kids in response to this to attack people.

Kathy received death threats. She skips a conference, and the police get involved. Soon the media picks up on the story.

part1:http://www.onebyonemedia.com/the-sierra-saga-part-1-dissecti...
part2:http://www.onebyonemedia.com/the-sierra-saga-part-2-big-bad-...
part3:http://www.onebyonemedia.com/the-sierra-saga-part-3-who-are-...
people involved:http://www.wired.com/techbiz/people/news/2007/04/kathysierra
AWSM!
Relative to all commits tracked by whatever random website this is. Click "values" to see a slightly different story.
If SEO is anywhere in your strategy, getting a link from TC and the dozens of secondary blogs that parrot their posts is golden. Bloggers read TC.

If fundraising is in your future, it's valuable.

If credibility is important, it probably helps a touch, too.
Yeah, startups are known to not be a very dependable route to financial freedom. On the other hand, it doesn't cost too much to live overseas or in certain places in the US. Most here are programmers or other creative types, and it does not cost much to pursue such interests either. It comes down to standard of living and relationships.
Thanks for mentioning Ghostery, http://www.ghostery.com/.

Good list and keep up the good work at Mozilla.

DC
While I'm sure there is a difference between 5 and 20 minutes, I do find a five minute meditation break useful. It's a nice break between classes, and I end up feeling more focused.
Biggest problem I have: Years of finding surprising bottlenecks and bugs where you least expect it has lead me to question every line of reasoning\anecdote people say unless they are able to back it up with something sufficient.

Maybe it's the correct thing to do, but it also annoys the shit out of people when I ask them if its possible that their single data point could have been an outlier or just a complete misinterpretation.
Congrats are definitely in order, they are not easy to please. I love PA but they still haven't linked to us at Kongregate...
Google Introduces A New Weapon In The Fight For Net Neutrality: Measurement Labs
they sometimes have that sort of thing in the gigs section of craigslist
180m Chinese internet users, more than any other country
Postmaster General: Mail days may need to be cut
It is your last point I am getting at. You seem to agree that the reason people are interested in startups is for freedom. Specifically financial freedom, meaning freedom to devote work to things other than the financial bottom line for living.

So, what I am saying is that since we want freedom, we need to think about the best ways for becoming free. Everyone assumes best = startups, but no one has really discussed the issue to see if this is right. Startups are notoriously undependable vessels of financial freedom, so that doesn't make sense to me. Why accept the status quo?

I'll put together a plan in a month or so and post it, hopefully generate more discussion.
Fight and you may die.
Techmeme’s newest human contributor: You
Fence-post error. Are you counting the floors themselves or the distance from the ground?
I think the values graph has a bug at the end point... It looks like it is displaying half a month or something -- for every language. For values it still shows a drop for ruby, apart from the bug at the end.

ohloh is a website which tracks lots of open source projects. 266,149 projects was the count at the time of writing.
Yes, hence the other post I link to at the top of the page. People are not thinking carefully about what they want. Obviously, they want freedom most of all, but there are 0 discussions here at HN about the best ways to achieve freedom. You'd think, as a bunch of hackers, we'd be able to come up with something pretty good.
I should have put wealth instead of money. My mistake.
>And somehow I hope our industry is special, that we're less likely to do crazy things in general. We're trained in science and reasoning after all.

As an astronaut, I have the same hope for my industry. Puts on diaper
The issue I want to get at with this poll and my other post is that of financial freedom. Is it truly hard, or only hard because of preset ideas of what it means/takes to be financially free?
1981 TV report on "electronic newspapers"
Scotland is also still a part of the United Kingdom. =)
You do actually have to run the Garbage Collection thread/function every so often. The key is to not use mark and sweep, but rather to time stamp everything when you use it. Get rid of the emotional attachment. If you have not used something in a while but your caching algorithm for the item says you might need it again, swap it out (to a box in the garage, get it out of your sight). Otherwise get rid of it. Periodically, throw out everything in the slow-to-access storage (the box in the garage).

The problem with using mark and sweep when trying to garbage collect your life is that the default method is just to mark everything and never actually sweep.
Interesting story for sure, but I don't see anything wrong with it on several levels (seems implied, but I may be wrong).

1) It was an acquisition. Didn't Google also have C# when they acquired Writely? Don't think it was advertised much either.

2) Python is a language. Eventually that get's compiled down to probably native C instructions at that time, right? Probably not like it was an open-source module distributed in violation of a license?

What I like though was how the author and Microsoft did to "get it shipped."
where is here?
> With a mad sprint starting in July, we shipped Microsoft Merchant Server 1.0 in October, 1996.

Sounds like it was a direct competitor to Viaweb.