skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
You are mixing up whether he did X, or not, with whether you agree with X or not. I said the former; you argued about the later. (Note also that I did stop posting in that thread, too, when he asked.)

I am not the only one who remembers some of these things. pg does too; he linked back to a time he punished me for having fun. Personally, I find it interesting, and I enjoyed this thread. I have an ongoing debate with a friend about how email lists should be moderated, and this stuff is relevant. And I got to see interesting attitudes like SwellJoe's. I didn't predict a reply like that.
Am I the only confused as to how they can continue to run those ads? Didn't the founders of that company get indicted?
wow, was not ready for that. Just made it look cluttered
I'm not sure that I can answer that (not familiar enough with the gaming population). So I certainly wasn't trying to suggest that you are expressing it enough. For that matter, I think that sometimes such expressions get laid on too heavily/preachy. That's part of why I think it's powerful (for sits on whose opinions I depend) to "show not tell" And the criteria a site uses for karma/reputation is a strong way of "showing."
It does work well for MetaFilter, but voting seems to work okay here. What exactly would you describe as "a lot of problems"? What problems need to be solved?

What if you could buy 5 whuffies (or whatever points on here are called) for $5, but could only post comments if your score remained above zero? Or maybe something in the stackoverflow type scheme, where the points are correlated with privileges?
Agree, I liked/enjoyed those comments as well, was even wondering if they were talking about houses for a minute and not comment prices:-) I come here to exchange ideas. I'd be open to the experiment, besides if it doesn't work we can always put it back....
Sorry then; no offense.
Maybe it should get progressively more grey then as you get longer and longer.
This Car Runs on Code (100 million lines of it)
I think that's true for B2C, but if you sell to businesses, they probably don't have an Amazon account with their business CC on record. It also looks more "professional" to have the whole payment process contained in your site.
So he wants to use PHP, then. Uh, I mean, the way PHP used to be written, with code and HTML mixed.

I'm dumbfounded that he does not notice the circular nature of his proposal.
You said: I think of college as a luxury item. The formal education (in the US) that is guaranteed to everyone ends with high school. Why should it extend indefinitely?

I said: It should extend to all because we all benefit from a more educated population.

Now you say: but someone has to end up working at McDonald's - and I think it'd probably be better if that person hadn't wasted $80k getting a degree they will never use in a subject they may not even like or really understand and have almost no hope of paying back the loan.

I think you're arguing against a strawman. I didn't say people should be shoved into university whether they want it or not. I said people should all have the opportunity to go there, and in a way that won't bankrupt them.

College costs should not be the device by which we filter university admissions. University entrance exams and interviews are a much better tool for that job.
Unfortunately most people aren't in college to learn, at least in the places I have been. I was the one of a tiny minority who was in the library during the holidays for example, or to research non-class materials of interest. Likewise, few if any others stayed to discuss with the lecturer the finer points of the lecture material - often times there are vast simplifications and sometimes gross errors especially in undergraduate life sciences.

Perhaps it's better at places like MIT.
Is happening to me too (Firefox 3.05 on Ubuntu 8.10). Unfortunately, I'm on a very old laptop and can't go past 1024x768.
Parent is trolling, but there is an interesting slippery slope here that should be explored.

If a government shuts down GoDaddy's web ads, that's censorship.

Writing a law as a member of the Senate to shut down Godaddy's web ads is probably censorship.

Is organizing a lobby to campaign to shut down their web ads censorship?

Is writing a blog post asking people to vote for a law in which Godaddy's web ads are shut down censorship?

Is voting for such a law censorship?

Is saying "we should have such a law" censorship?

In a democracy, at what point do we go from saying "Godaddy should shut up", which is a first amendment right, to full-on censorship? A government is full of people; there's nothing fundamentally different about a group of people executing their rights in a boycott and a group of people exercising their voting rights to accomplish some goal.
From the article, kind of amazing:

- "The avionics system in the F-22 Raptor, the current U.S. Air Force frontline jet fighter, consists of about 1.7 million lines of software code."

- "The F-35 Joint Strike Fighter, scheduled to become operational in 2010, will require about 5.7 million lines of code to operate its onboard systems."

- "And Boeing’s new 787 Dreamliner, scheduled to be delivered to customers in 2010, requires about 6.5 million lines of software code to operate its avionics and onboard support systems."

- "These are impressive amounts of software, yet if you bought a premium-class automobile recently, 'it probably contains close to 100 million lines of software code'"
"...which consists of real-time instant messaging with service reps in the Philippines"

Whoa. Chat-based outsourced tech support is premature optimization. That's not support that's a bad joke. You have to have to spend the money on either a) making the product have fewer problems or b) a few dozen trained live humans on a phone bank. Even if it means charging $45 for the device.

I mean, come on -- it's a VOIP company that allows cheap calls, but they are too cheap to take support calls?
google "clay shirky micropayments", kids.
Always nice to see people try to reduce incredibly complex phenomenon --- like Roman and Orthodox Catholic canon law and its relationship to modern Christianity in all its forms, from Unitarianism to Mormonism --- to a single cherry-picked Wikipedia article. Well played, sir!
I'm co-founder of www.airbnb.com, a website that let's you find locals with whom you can stay while spending less money and having more fun. Our coverage in Boston right now is relatively sparse, but there are some places you might like.

Here's one:
http://www.airbnb.com/airbeds/show/1130?nights=2&lng=-71...

You can sort by distance, price, recommended, etc.
Agreed. My finger was hovering over the Follow button at twitter.com/commandlinefu, but then I saw the tweet timestamps. Firehouse indeed.
I think you're on point, here. We should take advantage of overlapping interests and resources.
I bet is not about the money he might not be getting, but the fact he wont build the product.
The more you give, the more you receive.
By the way, I'd like to know more about what you're doing.
Vixenart - Friendster Layouts and Photo Effects
I like this part, regarding "100 million lines of code":

"Such complexity brings with it reliability issues."

I can't even imagine.
orange name == massive design flaw
To be perfectly honest, I don't see why that should matter. Studying history is no less honourable than studying physics. We need both in our world.

A historian obviously isn't going to be making lots of money later in life, but that doesn't make them worthless. A good education system should allow historians to come out of poor backgrounds too, not force everyone int apparently productive degrees. Hard sciences aren't everything in life.
Yeah, but college didn't teach them about basic finance!!! Clearly its not their fault.

On a more serious note: It would be nice if some finance education was mandatory. Ex: there is no good reason for having any credit card debt and yet people still have tons. It shows that they don't know how to manage their income even if they have lots to go around.
Ask HN: Quick & Easy Mini-funnel Sites?
I'm advising Non-profit's/NGO's/Charities to use mini-funnel sites to increase the reach of their message.

These organizations are always of limited resources, are there any web services I can recommend to them? Sometimes these groups have a little cash but zero skills, sometimes they have even less cash but enthusiastic volunteers who might have limited Hacking abilities. Are all mini-funnel sites custom made? Do templates exist? Does anyone out there have any suggestions for me so we can help them with their cause(s)? Thanks in advance.. Actually, the whole world thanks you!
I'm posting this comment only to find out what color I am.
How to Buy an IT Product
How does fulfilling a need not add value?
For firefox, put this in your user stylesheet

@-moz-document url-prefix(http://news.ycombinator.com/){
td { color: #000000 !important; }
td.subtext { color: #828282 !important; }
}

see http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=467680 for more info.
Black. Bummer.
It's not about what _I_ feel sensible about caring about. We're talking about a hypothetical individual who cares only about versions of himself that share a common ancestor or descendant state.

If such an individual were given advanced knowledge of an irreversable amnesia, then logically he would commit acts that benefit him and cost the individual inhabiting his body in a day's time. So yes, it makes perfect sense.

But given the same circumstances, I'd behave differently, as I'm not a sociopath.
Entrepreneurship Tips at Stanford Campus
I speak only for myself, but I would say the following: The real key is fully automated testing, no matter how it is done. The finer the grain, the better, generally. Matching an actual business case is near ideal.

Fully automated is necessary so you can run them frequently, automatically, near-continuously.

But beyond that, I think you get into religious territory, and I think people getting dogmatic about the definition of "unit test" tends to mistake definition for virtue (a common failing). If you've got automated testing, great! You win. Doesn't matter how it works.

Or, rather, it does matter, but only within your context, which nobody else is really competent to judge you on.
What can be very frustrating in a corporate environment is the unrelenting "one size fits all" attitude. Your workspace. Your toolset (not just what language to use, where I can understand a need to standardize, but what editor and utilities and such). Your flexibility is limited to what pictures you put on your desk.

For me, the distraction in an open space environment kills my productivity. I don't want to be disconnected from my coworkers, but I can't take the constant noise and immediate presence. I get along much worse in such a situation. Give me a little separation, and I'm much more relaxed and focused in face to face meetings, on the phone, in email and IM.

When things are like this, I do quite well. Then something will change and the work environment will suck again. I'll tell my management exactly what has happened and why my productivity has declined. But there is nothing they can do. "But we all work in cubes" is one response I received.

One size fits all. If we do it for you, everyone will want it. We must treat everyone "equally". In the name of "fairness", they force department management to turn a blind eye to individual variances and differing needs.

At least working from home seems to provide some disconnect, in the company's mind. The home environment is not their jurisdiction, and your performance is measured more in terms of results rather than conformity.

One suggestion I have with regard to open space: If you insist on it for your employees, then let them self segregate to some extent. There is always a subset that wants a quieter work environment, but they are spread throughout the organization. Let them colocate in a designated quiet area, akin to the "quiet floor / quiet hall" arrangement at some colleges and universities.

I suppose this would be viewed as overly burdensome in terms of management. Further, I've observed a continued strong drive to physically colocate team members whenever they are at the same facility. But it would take no more physical space, and it would make that portion of the population much happier and more productive.

Next step, let them use decent tools. Don't force them to do finger gymnastics because you keep them on the 5-releases-past version of some commercial editor that has been "blessed". But now I'm just dreaming...
The lawyer mentioned was clearly a dope. The story said he accepted a loan for over $100K without knowing what the interest rate was or who he was borrowing from. Sure, they might have pressured him (like car dealerships do), but you'd have to be moron to get suckered that bad.
Motorola EM35 - The phone rocks
Motorola EM35 has been introduced into the market with a mission to provide superb communication features combined with par excellence audio features. Motorola EM35 accompanies virtual stereo surround sound, listen to your favorite music.
Ask HN: What content do you pay for online?
This morning alexandros asked if HN readers would pay $5 to use HN. (http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=467825)

That made me wonder if any of you pay for ANY content.

Here's the content I pay for:
Netflix
Audible
iTunes
What if your data contains html entities, newlines, unicode etc etc etc.
HTML is a hornets nest, whilst js is pretty sane.
I would never advocate sprinkling script tags everywhere :/ 1 is enough usually. (I would obviously in this case, have 1 script tag at the end of the body, with the data structure, and the function to initialize the span tags).
Yes! HN is my main source of aggregated news.
Apple Co-founder Steve Wozniak Rejoins the Workforce
I really hope this doesn't start a trend of not using templates. Templates may not be perfect, but they're the best we've done so far (Seaside aside).
Wow, that's rather harsh. You must had some really bad luck with Metafilter, or it must have had changed significantly since I frequented it more often.

I remember Ask Metafilter as an excellent resource for questions on many topics with many thoughtful responses (especially from people that knew a lot about what was being asked [1], not just the internet-usual - "I'm clever so I think X is the answer").

Indeed, it was usually worth to start your search on some particular problem on Ask Metafilter before turning to more general Google search.

Metafilter also has much less transient feeling than HN. There is a strong culture of not repeating yourself, so people detect duplicates and link to previous instances of similar questions/answers.

This leads to answers have more "archival" feeling to them. You know that it's worth to spend a lot of time on your answer, because if anybody in the future will ask a similar question, there is a very high chance that somebody from the community will remember your answer and link to it.

[1] As an example, here is Steven Wozniak paying $5 just to post one comment:

http://ask.metafilter.com/47835/Woz-More-like-Was-am-I-rite#...

Or Adam Savage looking for inspiration for the MythBusters episodes:

http://ask.metafilter.com/55694/Old-west-Mythbusters

http://ask.metafilter.com/111253/Movies-where-someone-hangs-...
ok, I had a - brief - look at it, here is my impression:

- first of I really don't understand why but the map feature does not work for me, it just leaves me with a blank screen.
edit: that seems to work for some but not for others, most of the times it works, this could simply be google maps being slow for me right now.

- The site is targeted to an Indian demographic but is listing everything in English, who is your target demographic ?

- in your 'advertise with us' section you state tht you have 'thousands of users', but I can not find any evidence of that

- even if I search for appartements from Rs 200k to 1.7M I get 0 results from the search.

- quite a few spelling errors

If this is for real and you're going to turn this into a commercial venture I would suggest you spend some more time on it.

that's just my $0.02 though...
who didn't see this coming? it all goes tribal. all of it. read "here comes everybody" and "snow crash."
One of the simplest but most complex religious concepts is hats. Christians say no hats for men, hats for women, but special men can wear special hats. Jews say no hats for women, but hats for men.

That is the tip of the iceberg, hats play a major role in many forms of worship.

I don't think a single Wikipedia article could contain the hat concept alone, let alone your example.
Sorry, but I disagree. The death of digg is squarely at the hands of the trolls, spammers, and morons that flocked to the site like locusts.
If my January adsense income is any indication then I'm definitely with you on that one. It's the worst month to date since I've been using adsense (about 2 years).
Uh, even for two people with six-figure salaries --- and speaking from experience here --- two thousand eight hundred dollars a month is a shitload of money. It's a second full-sized house in a nice neighborhood, or the rent on two apartments, or (wait for it) seven BMW 315i car payments.
"and you're not focused on monetization of web traffic"

If you are, perhaps you don't need VC though...
Yes; I do this to discourage people from making too many such posts, and making them too long. I don't want HN to turn into a blogging platform. Also, I wanted to make it easy to tell these posts from comments. If I made the text black I'd have to make it smaller, and then it would look just like a comment.

But I'm not wedded to the current way of doing things. I'd be open to alternatives.
I can't down mod ANY comments. I don't mind, really. I'm a pretty positive guy.
I don't know about "lower middle class", but in Manhattan and San Francisco, $110k is definitely "bachelor-class". You might not be able to comfortably raise a child, commute from Jersey to Manhattan, and make student loan payments on $110k/yr.

Then you say, "well then don't live in Manhattan", which is probably true-but-not-obvious, but also implies you're going to take a wage cut to work somewhere else. And not everyone is as geographically mobile as a 25 year old hacker.
Did you switch on the TV on shabbos?
Easily. I'd pay more depending on what kind of content is shown. If there was a way to block 37signals, joel's blog, and some others then I'd be up to $10/month ;)
No. I'm too cheap.
This is a neat idea but it's no good for me because I read HN from several places and I don't want to manually create a user style sheet in each one.
The fact that you have things like "In[5]" and "Out[8]" makes it look like you've used the computer to perform your calculations. Whether you did or not is moot - you are giving the wrong impression. (Unless you did use the computer, in which case you are giving the right impression and the grader is right anyway).

It's not going to be the typing of your solutions, it's the impression that you've used something other than paper and approved calculator. And now you've created that impression, it may be too late to correct it.

It's your responsibility to make it absolutely obvious.
100%. It is my main source of news :)
Unitarians don't care what hats you wear. It's the word "christians" in these sentences that gets us into trouble.
Follow directions. When you're the one establishing them you'll appreciate compliance.
Surprising to me to see how many would pay $5 per annum.
Personally I believe in open communication!

"Stopping" anonymous users can be done with a little bit of design in the sign-up process.

If money is required adding some ads down the RHS of the screen would easily make that much ...

just my 2 cents...
great comments below.

You could separate it into 2 segments. One portion of users not having used a website in a particular category and the other bucket being folks that had used such websites before. Let's take online travel websites as an example.

In both cases people had a good experience using the website which in turn was a combination of great design including crispness & information architecture, variable font sizes, great presentation of the most important information, a lot of user empathy, generally not making the user think and not surprising the user, heat maps of which areas of a webpage users are likely to look at, etc.

The technical aspects of it included, smaller webpage sizes, tons of caching by abstracting away personalized portions of the webpage, and thereby caching close to 70-95% of the webpage in the browser, using a CDN, compression, reducing RTT, using distributed dns, not accessing the database for requests if possible, having as many static components as possible, use of persistent connections, caching url query strings, and all the things mentioned in Y! performance guidelines.

For folks that had never used an online travel website, they compared the speed of a website to the ones they regularly used like google, rediff, yahoo, etc. For folks that had used an online travel website, the comparison was with the competition and how much better you were with the above aspects.
There's nothing wrong with snappy one-liners getting modded up. It's just that there are so many thoughtful, intelligent comments that get ignored and buried, or even worse, modded down because their viewpoint is against the common belief of the people participating in the thread.

There are so many arguments that would not get improperly modded down if votes were public and subject to scrutiny. It only happens now because people know that they can anonymously get away with it.
Great idea! Have added this to the uservoice suggestions and will have a look at how to implement. As NearlyFreeSpeech doesn't supper cron as yet - it might be easier to only tweet commands once they get more than 5 votes say.
I agree with this hypothesis. Furthermore, advances in computers and communication and electronic record keeping should have allowed fewer people to be employed in the industry, shuffling much larger amounts of money.

I think much of the current economic "crisis" is actually a necessary shift or adjustment from certain industries to others. It was the veiw of many that the "panics" that occurred at the end of the 1800s railroad building boom were simply a necessary adjustment, society had employed many in building railroads, which were done now, so period of unemployment might be necessary as lots of people shifted to doing other things.

I think the collapse of the housing market had that as a factor. The number of bedrooms, bathrooms, and square footage per capita had increased a lot, as people's standards increased. It may be that many people feel they have enough house, or maybe even too much, and are shifting to other things. Such a shift of course exposes the shakiest business practices first, such as sub-prime mortgages and so on.

I believe that there are two other industries that are also due for some shrinkage, and they are education and health care. Both of these are, like housing, heavily intertwined with the financial industry through loans and insurance.
One way to help is to optimize the website; load less resources and make them more compressed. Your users will have a much better experience and you will save money. Take a look at rockstarapps.com for some tools to help out with this.

Also the site doesn't display well on a 1024 monitor the left panel is displayed below the right.
No probs. Once the storm's over, I'll blog about the set-up.