skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Why is Facebook so hellbent on being an advertising and marketing company? Nobody wants to see ads when they're reading up on their friends' lives, and people will leave in droves if they feel like their private info is being overly exploited, or if they're constantly bothered to participate in stupid marketing surveys.

People spend money in social contexts, why not try to take a cut? Let event planners set a price for events, and take a small cut. A group of friends wants to go to a movie or a concert? Make it trivially easy to set up the time and place and take a cut of the ticket sales. Someone's birthday coming up? Let groups of their friends make a group purchase from their Amazon wish list and take the sales commission (then gradually phase out Amazon). Where's Facebook's version of Paypal, OpenTable, etc?
don't do something you are ashamed of

but maybe you can use your need for privacy to invent something new for the web. everyday services are getting better and better at finding out more about the consumers visiting their sites.

a lot of people may not be ashamed of their porn, but they may just want to keep it private.
What kind of meta discussion is harmful? I'd say none of it. If people don't like a meta discussion, they'll not vote it up, and it thus won't consume the top reading spots.

A tricky issue is that threads are elevated based on the originator's score. But, there are a number of threads where the originator may have a low or negative score, and follow ups have enormous scores. Where should these go?
Google says Dogpile is the best
They're mistaking correlation with causation.

Here's the basic breakdown:
Teenagers who spend 5 hours watching TV aren't spending that time exercising... FACT.

You'd also be surprised that watching TV actually increases mental activity, and I'd hazard a $100 bet that those kids are also playing video games and such. All of these boost mental activity, which increases the brains demand for glucose (even though it doesn't use up nearly as much as it makes us take in).

Could it be that these teenagers are eating sugary foods because their body demands it?

Those teenagers not spending 5 hours a day watching TV are likely getting much more exercise, which means they're spending less time using mental skills and thus their brains are likely demanding less glucose than the non-exercising teens.

Advertising works extremely well... when I'm trying to decide between PS3 and Xbox, Pepsi and Coke (to some degree), etc. However I see lots of advertisements for pregnancy tests, pantyhose and lots of other products that as a man I'm simply not interested in.

Edit: Occam's Razor stipulates the simplest explanation is often the correct one. If I spent 5+ hours a day not exercising, I'm likely to be over weight. In one week I managed to eat 4 big macs, 4 large fries, 4 large cokes and a ton of other crap foods and I lost weight. I work construction and despite eating up to 4000 calories in a day I still lose weight, because I do a shit load of exercise. I love junk food, however if I worked in an office I'd be seriously overweight.

Well technically I am seriously overweight, however that's because the BMI is a load of crap. Put it this way, overweight people are usually at risk of fast pulse (tachycardia) and high blood pressure, my doctor was concerned because I was bradycardic, my rest pulse got down to 47 at one point, however I'm good because I wasn't suffering from lethargy, I mean working 12 hour days isn't exactly the norm for someone with bradycardia. Thankfully I also have perfect blood pressure even though I'm like a 31 on the BMI scale (morbidly obese).
(I'm simply too curious to listen to some convincing argument against my poor expositions... is there really no really convinced atheist out there willing to contrast my poor opinion? If it is really this way: poor poor poor atheism...)
Have a link? I've been (idly) wondering about creating something like that.

I suppose StumbleUpon would work as a recommendation engine.
Sorry, I meant it's $45 for a semester.
Sounds like a nice app, sort of like RescueTime.
Not bad. Clean design and easy to use. A great copy of craigslist.
That is quite the URL.
I created a simple erotic game (http://3boobs.de) - when we started, we had no idea where to get the pictures. In the end it was easy to get them from established sites. However, I kind of miss hanging out with the models (we don't know any of the models on our site) ;-) Just saying, I think going the route of actually taking the photographs and all would probably be more fun...
System Correction:
Sure you can try to go in and fix a system, but a lot of people disagree with how you are going to do it. Central planning doesn't work due to information problems (lack of prices), and freedom issues. So any change you make to the system will be short lived, but then open up a can of worms as people are free to take risks and not worry about the downside. Second, a lot of people object to forcing people to do things at the point of a gun.

Productivity & Wage Increase
I think you are missing a fundamental point, when productivity increases it is normally the result of a capital investment. The person who makes that investment is the one who profits, not normally the person whose productivity has increased. For instance if I'm making shoes, and my boss buys a machine that allows me to increase my productivity 10 fold, well he will see most of that reward while I may see a small increase in my wages. He took the risk of investing in that machine, and thus should see the reward.

2500 years of banking:
As for you last post I don't know if that is true or not, how much actual money have the banks lost -- not lost for their clients, but lost themselves.
> I would dream that one day my company would have full page ads right along side the other big players.

I think that explains his desire to run Superbowl ads more than anything.
Not to defend the US but an interesting way to look at the broadband problem:

South Korea: total road network: 102,062 km, Population: 48,379,392
~475 people per km of road. GDP - per capita: $27,100 (2008 est.)

Japan: total road network: 1,196,999 km Population: 127,288,416
~106 people per km of road. GDP - per capita: $35,300

United States: total road network: 6,433,272km (2004); Population: 303,824,640
~47 people per km of road. GDP - per capita: $48,000

Data from: https://www.cia.gov/library/publications/the-world-factbook/

PS: I still think our network is pathetic.
Every idea is a "frat-boy idea" until it succeeds. Ignoring the naysayers is one of the necessities for being successful (I think, from my unsuccessful perspective...).
Oh wow! I totally didn't realize there was that option. I always git fetch'ed and then rebased manually. Thanks!
"Availability of such high-speed connections has allowed Korea to emerge as a leader in the MMO and online gaming industries."

What came first, the faster Internet connections (chicken), or the emergence as a leader in the MMO and online gaming industries (egg)?

I've always been under the impression that the popularity of gaming (everything from Starcraft to CS to MMOs) in Korea has helped drive faster and faster Internet connections in Korea. If there's any reliable evidence to suggest either way, I'd love to hear it.
Problems with Linux
When I was talking to one of the local luminaries in the startup scene he said something that seemed really "on":

"It's uncertain what the worth of your startup will be. However, you can be certain that your personal worth will grow enormously."

If you approach your first startup as one of the foundational personal education experiments that you'll go through it's a win-win. Before starting a company I thought I knew something about business. A year in it's amazing how much I've had to learn just to keep things functioning. If you approach it with that mindset, and keep your cash-flow tight, I think you'll find that as a personal investment it's an extremely worthwhile experience -- even if it's just to realize that the startup game isn't for you.
For every argument that states that something will "Never" happen there will always be exceptions to blow their theories out of the water.

Here is one such case.

In the 3D modelling software world, Maya by Autodesk is arguably the "best" 3D modelling program out there for the Film and Gaming industries. It also ranks as one of the most expensive (the base version costs about $2k, and the complete is around $7k)

It comes in a linux flavour.

That's not to say theres no good alternative open source solution - Blender is one. While it doesn't have the depth of features that Maya has, producing animations in Blender is typically a faster process due to its unique nature.

I've also (due to the nature of the open source of linux/blender) been able to integrate Amazon's EC2 directly with my computer so that it becomes a virtual render farm which I can dedicate as many machines to rendering meshes/animations as I like, quickly and easily with little outlay in capital.

This is just too damn difficult to do under the other OS's (I will be attempting it under OSX soonish though)

Generalisations just don't work IMO.
You should add pictures. When people are selling their stuff, pictures can help a lot. And add a thumbnail beside listings that have pictures.

I also find the table layout a bit information overloadish. You should list cities and then give categories. Like this website: http://www.usedvictoria.com/
Personal files shouldn't be on a company computer, simple as. I know ebaum's situation is slightly different being a startup and all, however in reality there should never be personal files on a company computer even if you own the company.
Ask HN: Why don't you use email encryption?
For a number of years people have assumed that public key encryption would catch on as soon as it was easy to use and people understood the benefits of encrypting/signing messages. One could argue that it's relatively easy to use email encryption nowadays, but very few people use it.

Besides the obvious answer that no one else uses email encryption, why don't you use it? What would it take to get you to use it? What do you think are the major adoption hurdles?
They should have read "The E Myth Revisited" first, about the "turnkey revolution".

I think it is still possible too succeed with coffeehouses, but one shouldn't be romantic about it...
Another great Winston Churchill quote: "If you are going through hell, keep going."
Because they add 50 parked subdomains to every domain you register? Because they spam you mercilessly to renew your domains every week? Because to make a simple DNS change you have to wander through 10 pages cluttered with cross promotional links? After using GoDaddy I feel like I need a bath and a full virus scan.
We are expecting our first child in April - so this hits home hard.
If the unthinkable did happen to our child, I think that I would definetely love to have photos to capture those few precious moments.
Google's probably so dominant/de facto that no one asks or answers with this kind of "best" language for it?
Second link in the result is kind of interesting, I've never heard of some of those specialized sites:

http://www.noodletools.com/debbie/literacies/information/5lo...
meter is an important aspect of public speaking. if you vary your meter at inappropriate times your speech doesn't come off as natural and flowing. OTOH if you maintain a rigid meter the whole time you sound robotic.
Does anyone else think that Eye of the Tiger actually sounded pretty good? >_> awaits criticism of musical taste
I spent most of my youth in front of the TV and did previously have a real serious junk food habit. This article makes sense to me.

I have a hard time conceiving of any other kind of food at times mostly because junk food (and store bought equivalents) are was all that there was for me.
6 years ago I was at a crossroads in my life...wondering if I should pursue a career in IT. Ultimately, I decided not to, since I realized that anybody anywhere in the world could learn all the programing and development skills needed to be an IT professional. Instead, I went into the health sciences and now have a shot at a decent career. I still love tech and am trying to find the time to learn LISP, hopefully I can leverage that into a new practical application in my field. I completely empathize with the frustration the author of this craigslist posting has. Unfortunately, there are so many poor and intelligent people around the world who are willing to work their butts off for relatively little. US citizens who work in tech would be helped out if the government stopped renewing H1-B Visas. It is not fair to the tech workers here to compete with third world labor. And it is not fair to developing nations who lose their biggest talents.
Not at all.

The worry is that if you try to partner with big entertainment properties like Disney or WB and they find out you have a porn programmer on staff, they may nix the deal. Because you can bet that some gossip rag like Valleywag will eventually run a story like "Is Disney sponsoring porn?" all about how a company that Disney does business with has some lead developer whose side project is a porn site. Elsewhere on the thread I say that reasonable people "decay" relationships by social distance. Well, tabloids are not reasonable people.

IIRC we had an issue with this at FictionAlley. We had a sister site called RestrictedSection.org that was for NC-17 HP fanfiction. It was a separate organization but had many of the same people involved, and we'd help each other with technical stuff and such. When FA got Warner Brother's blessing, part of the condition was that there would never be anything more than R-rated on the site, and we needed a warning for anything more than PG-13. And concurrent with that, a wall went up between FA and RS.org - you had to pick one to be involved in, and we didn't help each other out so much any more. WB actually had a great relationship with FA but a somewhat antagonistic one with RS.org.
I suspect people that watch 5 hours of TV a night as teens make a lot less money on average. People that make less money eat more fast food because it's cheep.
a) There do not seem to be any sarcasm markers, so this shouldn't be that hard of a call.

b) Unpopular opinions should not be downmodded on this site merely for being unpopular. (I don't even know if this one is unpopular -- it merely is thought to be unpopular, like expressing a moral judgment on something is verboten in polite society, which is of course a moral judgment in itself. There are approximately 47 people here who said some variation of "Ick, I don't want to be associated with porn" without being censored, so I see no particular reason to bust the chops of someone who doesn't like porn qua porn rather than merely not liking porn qua job opportunity.)
Reasons I don't use it:

1) I'm not terribly concerned with anyone reading what I send, because I've never personally observed any negative consequences from that happening, so that concern is external to me, even if real.

2) It's another complexity added to my life that I don't need.

3) Since others don't use it, I don't have the time or the inclination to explain to them why they should bother to deal with my encrypted messages.

4) If the government, etc., wants to get something out of me, they will.

5) Too many different ways to do it, none of them universal (chick and egg problem, yep, but....)
Try those:

"... whatever the costs are now." or "... whatever the costs to society."
Also, if you have start having a lot of posts in jobs or housing (where people start posting a lot to stay fresh) you can charge for those in areas that are heavily trafficked -- that's how CL does it.
Thats why the server gets tipped. (Generally, the polite thing is to tip more if they do more work for you.)
Japan already has 1Gbps:
http://www.japantoday.com/category/technology/view/kddi-to-l...
Interesting, but the main problem with Linux (and mainly the distros) is that until you have someone making someone else or many someones do the unsexy, janitorial tasks that no one enjoys doing, then there will always be exceptionally shoddy, underdeveloped part of any distro based on it.

As the model stands now, I don't see any way around this, and I say that as someone who uses Linxu on my boxes exclusively.
Role of luck in Social Media
Last Updated: February 2nd, 2009

Wikipedia defines serendipity as “the effect by which one accidentally discovers something fortunate, especially while looking for something else entirely”. This accidental discovery or lucky finding phenomena has actually been one of the most important happenings in the history as very many discoveries and inventions have happenned by chance ( the invention of vulcanized rubber or microwave) and this has been going on in the recent times as well in the business world especially in the pharma sector. One of the most popular ones at the top of the mind is that of viagra.
You're right. Now that I think about it. Someone else mentioned that it doesn't test for unconnected nodes, or nodes connected only via back links.

However, figuring out how to find them will depend heavily on your implementation.
You're right. Now that I think about it. Someone else mentioned that it doesn't test for unconnected nodes, or nodes connected only via back links.

However, figuring out how to find them will depend heavily on your implementation. Most likely you store all of them in an array and perform the search on each of them. I wish I could find my data structures and algorithms textbook. I lent it out and I really wish I still had it...
I think this kind of thing is exactly where Flash is really good. http://www.25lines.com/
Didn't mean to get on this pricing quibble... as someone who modeled an H atom ab initio in solid-state physics class using Mathematica, I really like it, too. However, it is my firm belief that unless they make a free version available eventually [1], only a select few will get to play with it and use it to make new discoveries/progress.

1. Or someone makes an ad-supported web2.0 social-network version of it :~).
It wasn't meant as a straw man. Better software is only going to happen in addition to software that exists already - i.e. more software, leading to (I suggest) more complexity.

Filesystems work. At least, Windows simple filesystems work, Linux's mess is less pleasant. People who want to can learn to put files in My Documents and find them later - it's not massively complex, there's a place for shared documents, a place for your documents, a place for Programs and a place for Windows. That's about all you need to care about.

At some point I object to the "Why should people learn anything? It's all the failings of the computer!!!!" attitude of your comment - there's always a trade off - any alternative will come with alternative problems. A more complex system (e.g. context awareness) will have more complex problems with it.

I often wish for more context awareness in software, but when I stop and try to visualise it in detail, it seems much less desirable.
Accept my apologies -- I honestly didn't intend that reply to come across as mean-spirited, but I guess it did. I just feel like judging a person just because they use a particular turn of phrase is kind of awful, especially when, as the article explains, they are actually using the phrase in a highly subtle and expressive way, which the entire speech community implicitly agrees on (and has agreed on for hundreds of years, in this case).

I don't see how it's any more insulting for me to say that my pet peeve is people like you than it is for you to say that your pet peeve is people who say 'literally'. In any event I'm not proclaiming you ignorant as an insult or name-calling -- I'm simply stating that I believe it's ignorant to think less of a person because you don't think their usage makes 'logical' sense. Language is a locus of communicative intent and its purpose is being achieved marvelously by this usage: otherwise people would not be using it.
This article is deeply flawed.

People do pay for linux, and sometimes more than other OS's. So yes, you do get what you pay for.

Most commercial applications run just fine on linux.
This is because most commercial applications are written for the web these days. Most of these web applications work fine on linux.

You can't compare the 20,000+ included, and free applications that linux comes with out of the box to a bunch of crappy legacy windows commercial desktop applications.

"Linux supports more different types of devices than any other operating system ever has in the history of computing." -- Microsoft even agrees with this statement, and MS research confirmed it.

Linux has way more drivers than windows. Out of the box, it includes many more drivers... and going forward, many of the drivers will still be available in 2-5 years than with windows. You often don't need to search random websites for your drivers either... they come with linux.
Lisp, Smalltalk, Graphel?
Midnight Cowboy received Best Picture in 1970 according to imdb. This movie can hardly be considered pornography by today's standards, but it was about a male prostitute and rated X.
Simple Features that Set Emacs Apart
dude, downmodded on your own post.

you have my sincere apologies, that's silly.
Microsoft? What kind of 'big trouble' are they in? The last I checked, they were still quite profitable?
Eh, lots of software costs that much.

Maybe a better question is whether Mathematica can pay for itself. An even better consideration for this site might be whether Mathematica could be useful at a startup.
>People who are not risk takers (this pretty much includes over 95% of the population) cannot fathom taking a chance to make a business work, and not having it immediately take off. They especially cannot understand being involved in something that fails repeatedly, and instead of giving up, trying to make it work (while risking all of one’s financial worth) again and again.

I think something like this happens to a lot of people who do startups:

"Why on earth are you leaving a 50-100k job per year, with benefits, to do a startup?"
Agreed, and the upsetting part is there's nothing really better out there. The market is wide open for someone to do it right (ICANN red tape aside).
Mafia business equivalent to 9% of Italian GDP
Your brain uses very little energy while watching TV, as compared to studying physics. Keep in mind your brain can account for 20-30% of your caloric intake. So...the people that watch TV are saving calories (which to me is an appealing explanation of why people watch TV at all) and eat fast food for the same reason; they're poor.