skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Universities are selling certificates that the buyer expects will get them a well paying job. Employers believe that the certificate indicates something about its owners abilities. Universities can just start selling grades, but that's sort of like selling baking soda and calling it crack. People will figure it out eventually, and then the commodity will become worthless.

That's actually a lot like what's happened with the credit rating agencies that were giving AAA ratings to trash.
XMPP FTW!

I wonder whether my bot will go offline if reaches quota? If no quota is set to XMPP then we could build a p2p file sharing network (NNTP-like using XMPP s2s federation) on top of GAE!
I realize you're targeting small towns and neighborhoods, but I live in LA and travel between numerous zip codes every day (and wouldn't mind stopping in any of them).
Alan Kay has been asking this question for a long time now. His "Viewpoints Research Institute" is doing some interesting work in this direction.

http://vpri.org/

One of their projects is to see if they can build a complete software stack -- from the OS through the GUI and networking/graphics libraries to end-user software -- all in 20,000 lines of code total.

They have already made some major progress in the past few years. I highly recommend reading (or skimming) their progress report from last year. In addition to being quite impressive, it also has several cool ideas that I had not seen directly before:

http://www.vpri.org/pdf/tr2007008_steps.pdf
I realized only later that my statement needed an extra qualification: entrepreneurship is killing (non-entrepreneurship related) genius

Certainly Ron Popeil is some kind of genius...George Foreman too. But I'd challenge anyone to hand me a business model that could be formed around General Relativity! If we had demanded a business plan from Einstein before we let him continue working on his ideas, he'd probably have died a patent clerk.
Practical implementations of languages based on lambda calculus and graph-reduction.

KRC, SASL, Miranda. Simon Peyton-Jones was a key driver of some of this work, and obviously he's still a major force behind Haskell.
"type inferencing as used in haskell et al, that's a fairly recent development - early 90's/late 80's?"

According to the wikipedia page (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Type_inference#Hindley.E2.80.93...), it dates back to 1978
Fuck off.

Every declaration you make about how great your magical business background was is hedged with qualifiers and exceptions. Tech and design are riddled with lazy entitled assholes, granted, but that's because lazy entitled assholes are everywhere. It is apparent you got fucked over in some fashion. I do have empathy for that, but I didn't piss in your corn flakes so stay the hell out of mine.
Funny how much I'm reading about this problem right after reading Siracusa's piece: http://arstechnica.com/gadgets/news/2009/02/the-once-and-fut...

I, for one, can say that I was inspired to download "Stanza" after reading that, and have already finished H.G. Wells' "The Time Machine" thanks to it!

"Never doubt that a small group of thoughtful, committed citizens can change the world. Indeed, it's the only thing that ever has." --Margaret Mead
what does the value of the house and improvements even has to do with this situation anyways? You get a mortgage payment as a fixed cost...it doesn't fluctuate if your house goes up in value or if it falls.

So the whole sob story can be pretty much boiled down to "my income is dwindling", give me free money! Her mortgage company would have given her the 4.2% rate. But it'll be very hard for them to forgive 50K for someone with "excellent" credit.

How about asking her family to help you out? Thats what they are there for. If you are 65 and have a daughter, she must be 40 years old. And if she can afford to live in an area where there are 700K houses, surely she can afford to throw a few bucks to her mother, until she can get through it.

Its not like its a huge amount. Her house only dropped 50K in value, so that means she is looking for about $700/mo. So get a family to scrimp together the $700, or sell your car, or bust out some credit cards, or open an equity line or get a second job(doing consulting or hell working at Walmart).

The situation is far from helpless.
This is a classic troll, don't bother, people.
Steve Ballmer Bubble-Pops at Democratic Policy Confab: The Full Speech
Purported Kindle 2 images and price leaked
I still remember machine codes for PDP-11 instructions. I used clone of PDP-11 in my school: cheap school computer with two processors and 192KB of both main and video memory (UKNС). Computer has built-in console debugger, so it was lot of fun to plug computer in and start typing programs in machine code, explore registers, co-processor memory, alter various tables, like font table to draw sprites instead of letters, etc. :-)
I wonder if your score is an all time high on HN.
Anyone know of any higher ranked comment?
Book review: Introduction to Information Retrieval
When I invented the Web, I didn't have to ask anyone's permission (2006)
Projects like this make me love Mozilla even more. This type of extension is beyond useful and is outright intuitive. Can't wait to try this out!
Inversion Of Control principle and Dependency Injection - 2002-2005. That is single possible answer.
If he wants to teach his students that grades "poison our educational environment", why is the solution to give everyone an A+? He's just using grades as currency to buy his students' support for his experiment in anarchy. I wonder how many of them would have still participated in his class if he had announced on the first day that everyone would get a C, a D, or an F?
So then don't wait:
https://ubiquity.mozilla.com/xpi/ubiquity-latest.xpi
But what is the functionality? Nothing happened when I followed the wikipedia link.
It looks great on my mobile device (iPhone). What device are you looking at it through?
One-para summary: Tim Berners-Lee, in mid-2006, arguing for network neutrality, pointing out that it isn't the same thing as "you shouldn't be able to pay more for better internet service" and that regulation is not always a bad thing (e.g., a market economy wouldn't work so well if there weren't laws against forging currency).

(His one-sentence summary of the network neutrality principle: if A and B both pay for access to the net with at least a certain quality of service, then they should be able to communicate with at least that quality of service.)
Play-by-play on the phpbb.com hack
How do we provide an incentive for users to post on our site when we have very few buyers browsing the site?

That's the big question that none of us probably have an answer to. Like PG said about auctions: "a startup that wants to do this has to expend more effort on their strategy for cracking the monopoly than on how their auction site will work" and like he said about dating sites "if you want to do a dating startup, don't focus on the novel take on dating that you're going to offer. That's the easy half. Focus on novel ways to get around the chicken and egg problem."

Building a better CL isn't such a hard thing. The hard part is overcoming the momentum that CL has or in your case (since you want to go for people in rural areas) figuring out how to get people using it before there's a reason to use it (i.e. other people using it).

So, the chances that your site will succeed aren't wonderful. It's not that it isn't a worthy site, it's that there's a high level of random chance involved in whether a site like this succeeds. Success for a web office suite will be based on features, polish and the like. Success for your site will be (mostly) determined by whether other people use it since the majority of the value will be the user contributed content and not your code.

But, in terms of the code:

* Better search. CL only matches whole words as far as I can tell and it's just not great. Do it better. Get people to what they want more easily.

* Logins. I don't like having to create logins and until you're big don't put that hurdle in front of people. When your site has a million users, they will see the value of an account. Right now, an account is another reason not to use your site. Why should I register for a site with no one on it? However, if I can just post without registering, well, I might. Maybe offer the option of either ala CL.
The original (first person) story is here, but the erratasec post adds a lot: http://hackedphpbb.blogspot.com/2009/01/place-holder.html
I'm going to be overly harsh on you simply because you called this a Craigslist killer ;-)

- Your site does not work with Javascript turned off. If you're trying to get the small towns and such, you need to be careful on this.

- At first entrance of your site, it looks like a typical domain parked page with some ads. Make it more clear your site is about small towns and neighbourhoods. Display your top cities up front, or at the very least use some simple ip location to grab where I am and display relevant content.

- You want to make me register to contact someone. Not going to happen

- All the AJAX you are using is totally unnecessary.

- Stop calling yourself a Craigslist killer and focus on a single niche, in a few small towns and do it well. Dominate those towns and that niche, then expand.

That, along with everyone elses comments should start you off .. good luck
Well, I just tried to sign up for FB and failed in every attempt. I allow session cookies, and that's what their privacy policy says they only use. So they are excluding at least some of their potential market.
That is the best photo of a piece of bacon ever. I just ate breakfast 2 hours ago and it's making me really hungry.
Actually (someone can correct me if I'm wrong here), I believe in her situation her payments probably will change.

Her main loan was a 5 year, interest only loan, probably at an adjustable rate. What that means is that for the first 5 years, she ONLY paid interest...that is to say, she did not pay down the principal. At the end of the first 5 years, you start paying down the principal and interest, only that's now compressed into 25 years instead of 30. In short, your payments increase.

People took these loans out because they assume that in 5 years there house would be worth much more than it was when they bought it (of course, because housing always goes up, right?). So the idea was, in 5 years, when my house is worth a lot more, I can just refinance it.

If it sounds foolish now...well truthfully it sounded just as foolish at the time (as I recall when I learned about this stuff back in 2003). It sickens me that my tax dollars are bailing people like this out (directly or indirectly).
Ask HN: How could FeedBurner be better?
We are getting close to launching a new analytics tool for bloggers that measures attention to both web and feed attention (http://statzen.com).

I have heard quite a bit of griping about FeedBurner lately and I am curious about how the HN community thinks we might be able to better meet the needs of those who are dissatisfied.

Thanks in advance!
I know it's vogue to summarize articles in comments, though I'm not sure why, but this is ridiculous. His article is 11 short paragraphs - each one shorter than one of your two paragraphs. It fits on a single page even if you have a small screen and a narrow web browser. Why is a summary at all necessary?
Wow! That was insightful. Good for you.

Yes, this post was prompted by a team member who screwed us over royally, but it's happened enough over the last year to indicate a certain set of principles that are common amongst the people we've worked with.

I think it would be interesting to hear how the community balances passion for a project vs. commitment. For example, I think it's great that you are able to take on only those projects that you really enjoy or have passion for. But, in my experience, this has been taken way too far.

For example, after months of vetting and working together as a team, and much sacrifice made by all team members, we've had programmers pull out on us at crucial periods. Not because of technology disputes or personal issues or disagreements about money, but simply because they've decided that they're really "not passionate" about this particular project.

I can understand choosing a project based on enjoyment and passion, but once you a make a commitment, you need to man up and come through with your side of the bargain, especially if everybody else contributes as agreed. In a business world where nobody lives up to their word, there's going to be an awful lot of chaos.

I've seen enough programmers flake out and blame it on "lack of enjoyment" to know that this thread is obviously running through the community.

Rather than being instilled with a sense of responsibility, independent programmers are encouraged by this community to simply follow their passion and do absolutely nothing that they don't consider "enjoyable" at all times. This approach, in the extreme, is counter productive for our society. There is no situation where good things happen without some level of sacrifice.

In my experience, the coder community has convinced itself that anything hard or structured in any way, is not worth the time. That's troubling.
Well, do you see the large slab of bacon that has been transposed over the site?
Am I the only one utterly shocked by the fact that this woman is supposed to be some sort of small business mentor?

From the front page of their site:
"Companies that are accepted into the Stealthmode Partners portfolio receive coaching, consulting, and connections to the people and resources they need to reach success."

I really don't think this person is in a position to be handing out advice and counseling.

My wife and I have 2 properties, our regular house and a lake house in a nice community on Winnipesaukee. In both cases when we purchased these properties we "qualified" for far larger loans than what we actually took out. We did some "worst case scenario" math to make sure if one of us lost an income we wouldn't end up crying on the Interwebs about the unfairness of the world. We also made sure to put enough down that if we had to we could unload the properties fairly quickly (yeah, it would be a huge loss, but we wouldn't get backed into a financial corner).

Personally, I have no sympathy for this person or the majority of other people in this situation. ESPECIALLY when you consider that, like many of us, she should have lived through the whole .com boom/bust and had some inkling of how things can turn on a dime.

I'd like to ask for the government to magically remortgage my properties for what they're now worth, except that through some logical forethought and planning my properties are worth much more than the loan amount.
Looks very cool.

One bit of feedback:

A surprisingly large number of people (10.5 million in the US, or about 7.5% of the population) have some form of red/green colorblindness. (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Color_blindness#Prevalence)

I am one of those people... On domainpidgeon.com it is extremely hard to tell light green from pink, and therefore to know which domains are available and which are not.

I would suggest some other visual indication... maybe strike out the names which are unavailable (http://www.htmlcodetutorial.com/_STRIKE.html), or make the text gray?
Not only that, but that many authorization attempts would immediately trigger fraud filters and the account would be locked.
free karma
Can the all-seeing, all-knowing Google be trusted to rule the world?
XSLT. Hahahahahaha!
Don't be too fooled by marketing. Just because pure research doesn't come with all the glitter and flash of applied research doesn't mean it's not there. Remember: Every Macbook sold is an advertisement for the transistor, but there's no product that advertises Andrew Wiles, apart from a few math books. But that doesn't mean the genius isn't out there. He may be sitting at the table right next to you!

The secret to doing pure research in the modern era is to hype up the applied aspects for grant-hunting purposes. Developmental biologists and geneticists don't do "pure research": They do "cancer research" or "stem cell research aimed at curing Alzheimers". Even when someone who hasn't read certain paragraphs of the grant proposal would have a lot of trouble telling the difference. ("Are you sure you're not just having fun trying to make the fruit fly grow new eyes in embarrassing places?" "No, I'm studying the regulation of this very important oncogene, implicated in 36% of human cancers, that also happens to make fruit files see out of their feet." The beauty of it is: None of this is untrue. [1])

And a lot of that vice-Provost stuff is for show. Most professors couldn't actually make money in the market if it fell on their head. They're filing patents, collecting letters of collaboration from captains of industry, and talking big about "entrepreneurship" because it's cheap talk that impresses funding agencies. (A lot of funding applications have a section for listing such things.)

Finally, it's important to remember why there used to be a lot of industry money for "pure" research [2]: Monopolies. The public paid for that research via what amounted to a set of not-particularly-progressive sales taxes on phones (Bell Labs), photocopiers (Xerox PARC), and computer equipment (IBM labs). I don't have a study or anything, but it seems to me that soon after each of these big companies started seeing significant market competition, their pure research started to dry up, despite its world-class quality. It may be that pure research can't survive in a competitive market: The only way to sustain it is via tax-supported public funding. Hopefully with more intelligently-designed taxes than, say, a tax on all our phones.

---

[1] Except that I made this oncogene up. ;) What I'm trying to say is: It's true that understanding cancer requires us to understand apparently unconnected facts about eye development in fruit flies. There's little about growth and development that doesn't have implications for cancer.

[2] It's also possible to argue that the industrially-funded "pure" research of old wasn't particularly pure. It was all intended to be applied or sold... just on a time scale more suited for a monopoly than a startup. Of course, it turned out that, even given a long-enough time, such a plan often doesn't work: For example, Xerox turned out to be well equipped to prototype the Alto, but was very ill equipped to manufacture and market it. It took a much younger and less mature company to do that.
You think? What about it makes it weak?

It has access to an online Amazon store. It has free wireless Internet from anywhere. It's owned by the largest online book store on the planet and it integrates into their products. If you need to convert to a format that works for them, they give you a free email address that converts instantly, or for ten cents you can send it right to their book. Physically it's beautiful: the form is one of the best I've come across for any device.

The iLiad looks ugly. It looks clunky and generic and the interface looks just as bad. If you want good press make something that's a joy to use.
Most people read the comments first.
Same for posting here things already in the top of proggit.

Here is one that might get to the top too, and it doesn't seem to be submitted to HN already. Quick!

http://www.reddit.com/r/programming/comments/7vkmc/father_of...

http://www.theregister.co.uk/2007/01/18/kahn_net_neutrality_...
Oy man, I'm not used to people getting this fired up over a back of the envelope calculation! I'm sorry if my post sounded arrogant - I'm just trying to have some fun here.

I don't think I can really comprehend what any of your objections are, but I can certainly think of some major flaws in the toy argument I gave, and maybe these are what you were getting at even if you couldn't really articulate them.

first, just saying the state of a brain is the state of each synapse assumes a fixed topology of the brain. This is obviously false - there is a lot of evidence that the topology of the brain is changed by experience e.g. the occular dominance columns. Okay, so how much extra space would we need to deal with this - not that much actually: how much space do we need to store an arbitrary weighted directed graph with 10^11 nodes and 10^15 edges? Well for each edge we need to know the two vertices and the weight. Give each neuron a unique id and this requires about 10-12 bytes per synapse instead of 1. This is only one order of magnitude difference between a fixed and arbitrary topology! And this is probably a gross overestimate of the storage space required because the topology of the nervous system is far from arbitrary - after all the thing is generated by a genetic code of very modest size. See my posts on why the large search space doesn't kill attempts to solve protein folding.

Obviously I ignore the functioning of the glia - I know for a fact that these are very important for the growth and development of the brain but I'm not sure they are the critical part of its computational function. If you know otherwise please point me to some references, I would love to know!

The reason that I mentioned the speed difference of electronics and neurons is that this is what makes it possible to update the state of those 10^15 synapses in real time. Of course it would be wasteful to use the standard PC architechture for this process, but still.

Hope this helps clear things up.
That's interesting. I'd like to see a machine that uses continuous rather than discrete logic. I think there would be less of an impedance mismatch with humans.
That reminds me of Pascal's Wager (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pascal%27s_wager).
not exactly. After all thats the whole point behind a site like this. To submit articles that other people would find interesting.
I really miss my Blackberry Pearl. Currently I have an HTC from work, and it's complete crap. It's bulky and constantly restarting. Having to slide out the keyboard and wait for the screen to turn is also annoying when you want to send a text or respond to an email. I also never warmed up to the idea of the iPhone's virtual keyboard or the inability to run apps in the background.
I actually enjoyed the essay... it was well written if nothing else.

I just couldn't resist the opportunity to by cynical about the media... sorry about that!
<captain style="obvious">I just found it ironic you pointed the "free karma" finger.</captain>
China has far, far more 2nd language speakers than the US does. Outside of Dongbei, it's a good bet that most over 50 speak Mandarin as a second language if at all. A lack of capitalism held China back, not its writing system. A fair comparison would be India, also a large country that's very divided linguistically. Three decades ago, the average Indian was significantly wealthier than the average Chinese. Both countries put a strong focus on education and both have been trying hard to modernize. Now, China is far wealthier and has far higher literacy.

Also, consider Taiwan and Hong Kong. Both went from being destitute to having higher per capita GDPs than Australia or many European states within the past generation or two. The idea that characters "hold" people back is ridiculous. Elementary school children here in Taiwan can read their native language as well if not better than their peers back in the states. It would take quite a bit of evidence to make a strong case against characters. Even MacArthur's misled experiment in Japan failed. Simplifications were forced through and kanji were reduced, but people never stopped using them. In fact, the Japanese have been using more kanji in general publication each decade since the end of the occupation.

As for the statistics, here they are:

CIA World Factbook
https://www.cia.gov/library/publications/the-world-factbook/
China- literacy 90.9%, PPP GDP/person $6,100
Brazil- literacy 88.6% PPP GDP/person $10,300
India- literacy 61% PPP GDP/person $2,900

Unicef gives similar rates.