skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
For a list of intelligent discussions that quickly go libertarian apeshit, merely find any Reddit.com/r/politics or reddit.com/r/economics dicussion regarding the bank bailout or the Obama-planned economic stimulus (which, according to some dicussions has already failed, will never work, or is proof that non-libertarian governments are inherently socialist.)
You can search SO, you can see the dozens of other answers to similar questions and you can see other answers by the person answering you.
Realtime works for some set of easy quick answers - if the answerers are in your time zone.
Study Suggests Why Gut Instincts Work
ok, so how about this then ?

http://oasis.sourceforge.net/
Why SEM is a service and Not a product.
Why do People Buy Virtual Goods?
It seems that this works for complex decisions where there are many choices, or for small unimportant rescission. But there is also another article that says for normal decision (like buying a car, or renting a place), deliberate decision process is the best.
http://www.livescience.com/culture/080811-decision-making.ht...

.....

In all experiments, there was some evidence that conscious deliberation can lead to better choices and little evidence for superiority of choices made "unconsciously," the researchers said.

Faced with making decisions such as choosing a rental apartment or buying a car, most participants made choices predicted by their individual preferences for certain features (for example, safety, security, color or price), regardless of the mode of thinking employed.

Unconscious decision-making was thought to be best in certain situations because it is not limited by how much stuff can be shuffled through the mind — a limitation thought to hobble conscious thought. And so, scientists had said the benefits of unconscious thinking are greatest when a decision is complex, with multiple options and attributes.

"Our research suggests that unconscious thought is more susceptible to irrelevant factors, such as how recently information has been seen rather than how important it is," Newell said. "If conscious thinkers are given adequate time to encode material, or are allowed to consult material while they deliberate, their choices are at least as good as those made 'unconsciously.'"
List of air-filtering house plants compiled by NASA for space station
Ada was the first language I learned in college. Our CS professor at junior college was a DOD programmer by day (most of our CS courses at the JC were at night).

Looking back, I think it was a good language to start with at the time (this was '94). Plus, it was nice having a professor who actually had current, real-world experience as a software engineer.
Pay Per Post: Google Uses Every Trick To Beat Yahoo In Japan
Why Small Payments Won’t Save Publishers
For the life of me, I don't know why. I have never bought anybody a 'digital gift', and I probably never will.

I'll be at your door at 3am in the morning with a bunch of flowers or a cake if the mood catches me but to express myself digitally by spending money on something that you can not even use other than to know that 'I spent money on you' is pointless.

I remember the time when there was that court case about virtual goods being stolen and I thought that was the greatest abuse of the legal system. That some idiot pays money for something does not mean it has value.
Alex Payne on the problem with email clients
http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=473921
The fix is correct. I was there at the time, but not directly involved. There was a competition to design a language to replace the large number of languages and variants used by the military. Pascal was in vogue at the time and 3 of the 4 proposals were Pascal derivatives. OO pretty much didn't exist. Simula and Smalltalk were there but nobody in the competition was paying any attention. The requirements documents were a laundry list of things from every language but Cobol, including a number of ideas that had never been implemented in a production language. Rendezvous comes to mind. The compiler for language turned out to be extremely difficult to implement and it took much longer than expected, not a first for the military. The colonel in charge was insistent that there be no subsets. When it finally arrived, the world had passed it by.
There is an enormous opportunity here. Agriculture is a huge vertical which is operating inefficiently in India today. One short of finances and second directions.

Micropayment startups like Dhanax are really enabling farmers on #1 and now with broader reach if someone can enable #2 more effectively, it can essentially improve lives of one of a billion people.

Vision problem in Indian agriculture is a more complex issue.
This is on the front page right now:

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=472784
Straight Banker Talk: DeSilva + Philips Media DealMakers Conference 2009
Google's water-based data center
Related to synchronisation with Google, I bought an Android Dev Phone a couple of days ago and one of the things that annoyed me was you have to sync your contacts and calendar with Google Contacts and Google Calendar respectively.

I'm using a Mac and getting Address Book to sync with Google Contacts was simple, but while Google Calendar offers 2-way sync with iCal, what it does is Google Calendar is the master copy. Now that totally turned me off. Because I'm using iCal and not Google Calendar, it means that right after I do my first sync, my calenders will be empty (the existing events on iCal will not be sync-ed over) and when if I ever decide to stop using the G phone and Google Calendar, it means that I will start with an empty Calendar again.

On top of that, I'm actually using an iPhone as my main phone. The G phone is for development purposes, but I like to switch to the G phone for short periods of time so that I get to use it and have a feel of how it works and to use my own apps. What this means is that I'm doing a 3-way sync and I'm am rather concern that a single point of failure will wipe everything out.

I also disliked the fact that I can't sync my photos and music over to the G phone automatically.

I'm not sure if there's a good solution for this, but maybe a synchronising problem like this is begging for a startup to solve (something like MobileMe but platform-agnostic with hooks into different platforms and apps?)
(Reply to Zack who's comment is dead):

You can tell even by the smell. Perhaps you think I'm lying, but when served a brown fizzy drink in a cup, I can tell with 100% accuracy wether it is Coke, Pepsi, Diet Pepsi, or Pepsi Max.
Compete tends to be fairly good at viewing the traffic trends for a site

No it doesn't. Their graphs for Justin.TV traffic aren't even usually the same shape as the real thing.
These are the B players that hire C players: in work as in family.

My advice? Surround yourself with brilliance, talent, drive and passion in all aspects of your life.

Career people in some of the most demanding careers are B players. I'm talking about investment bankers and white-shoe "biglaw" attorneys. These are people who are "ambitious" in the sense of having strong (and indiscriminate, the image of a garbage disposal coming to mind) work ethics, but the content of whose ambitions are base and regrettable.

I agree, though, that a hard-working startup entrepreneur (regardless of gender) is a desirable mate. The same is true of a successful academic, doctor, writer, artist or teacher.

When people use "career women" pejoratively, they're usually talking about corporate and banker girls, the alpha chicks who are "in it to win it" but haven't reflected for a second on whether the prize holds any value whatsoever, much less whether or not it justifies the Pyrrhic nature of any victory attained.
I'm not a frequent SO poster, but I've asked and answered a couple of questions. Personally, it's a combination of:

1) I find IRC completely unusable - I've been on the net since 1994, I've tried IRC multiple times, and it just doesn't gel with my head, sorry.

2) I don't use SO when I need an immediate answer. At the very least I'll put a query in, then wander off and google some more in the hope of finding an answer, then come back in half an hour. More usually I'll leave it overnight while i get on with something I do know how to do. It feels like the same sort of dialogue timescale as a mailing list query, but for where there isn't an appropriate mailing list.

But I may not be typical.
Questions your financially unprepared friends fear
The state of developer testing
Is developer testing just a fairy tale after all?
A more accurate formula would be, if 5% of the people who currently come to our site for free pay $5 a month we would have X amount of dollars. His assumption that 100% of the people viewing now paying subscribers is obviously false.
Naive question: Why is the immediate switchover necessary? Can't you run the same site on foo.net and foo.com, and turn on redirecting from .net to .com AFTER google updates its index?
I actually don't like forced readability like the python whitespace as I think it stifles creativity, and the only way it makes code better to read is by forced formatting (the forced white space) while your code can still have hard to read logical loops, blocks, variables.

In a way, it stiffles creativity just for a small gain of formating/readibility.

Plus, with modern IDEs it is very simple to format the code the way you want. In eclipse you have RightClick -> Source -> Format then viola, your code looks the way you want.

Having worked with both python and java, I have enountered more hard to read code in python than in java, (maybe this is due to the superior tools/IDEs in java).

As for ada, i thought it was a great language to start learning programming. Exceptions are verbose, and it is an easy language to pick up, as it looks a lot like Pascal.
I learned it my freshman year, but I never used it in a production capacity and I wouldn't consider doing anything serious with it right now.
Because it's far away, oh, what?
Applications open for summer 2009 YC funding
Can you get your husband to take a couple of days off from work and watch the kids himself, while you are out of the house? This will educate him better than any words you could ever say.

You might look around for more sympathetic listeners, too. Staying home with kids is hard work. There are SAHM support groups out there, perhaps you can find one in your area.
Top Ten Attributes of Good Clients
Capitalism Should Return to Its Roots
Finding Large Primes by calculating n^2-2, Checking Validity with Legendre
No. Actually, it's quite easy.

Just put a GSM/GPRS/EDGE/whatever3G modem inside and let the user pay for the bandwidth. That would also make the device cheaper (you don't have to pay for the lifelong bandwidth usage of the device) and available in just about every human settlement on the surface of Earth that has phone coverage. Most carriers have an unlimited data plan available.

Going EVDO-only is remarkably dumb.
> I'll be at your door at 3am in the morning with a bunch of flowers or a cake

I think I would have a problem with that. I don't know you and I'm fairly sure you're not my type. ;-)

> That some idiot pays money for something does not mean it has value.

Au Contraire. The value of anything is precisely determined by what you can get some idiot to pay for it.

The category mistake that everyone seems to make in this case is to regard virtual goods as 'goods' when in fact what is being provided is a service. The persistence storage and access rights to manipulate the object in question are services that cost some money to provide; and they are what is being provided.
Hmmm... I love investigative reporting - but it will completely die out when good newspapers come along.

The problem is that 80% of the news newspapers sell are commodities. Go to news.google.com and you get 10 articles from different papers on the same subject.

90% of people will not pay anything to read the 10% of investigative stories.
I would only be willing to pay if there is a "no advertisements" option.
To the average reader, the average story on the NYT is not nearly as valuable as the synopses written by those whose point of view the reader values. However, to the writers of those synposes and editorials, who drive the New York Times articles to the top of TechMeme and Hacker News, the articles are quite valuable, as they provide a launching point for their own writing. Perhaps there's a business model there.
Plastic Logic - Kindle competitor
CustomizeGoogle, a free Firefox extension, lets you block certain sites from appearing in your Google results.
I'm sorry, but enough is enough... The original comment (not mine) I just replied to does not deserve to be down modded. Its one thing if the user is trolling, another if you dont agree. Please read the site guidelines.
Quantifying Age and Gender Stereotypes
Sites like Alexa and Compete provide valuable data - you just need to know how to use it.

The number 1 thing you need to remember is that the data is not useful as an absolute measure - it's only good to compare sites.

The number 2 thing to know is that if you compare similar sites, the comparisons are more accurate. So if you compare trailbehind.com, everytrail.com, and backpacker.com, the comparison will be a lot more accurate than if you compare cnn.com, stackoverflow.com, and myspace.com.

Number 3 is these sites are more useful if you have benchmark data. For example, if you want to know the traffic for a magazine type site, go download their media kit (usually available as a PDF on their site), and it will tell you their traffic. Then you can use this data for understanding Alexa better.
It's No Joke: Real Time Search is a Big Deal.
Managing a simple database with Python, SQLite and wxPython, 1
Dear HN: You need to run faster. If you continue to be so slow, I'm going to stop coming.
This site is going to go the way of Friendster soon. It's soooooo slow these days.

This is particularly embarrassing since the site is run by a famous hacker. How hard is it to serve up some text?
The PDF conversion is pretty mediocre for some things. It's not really a problem with the conversion service but rather with the PDF format itself.

I converted my PDF copy of Programming Clojure. It's mostly readable, but the code examples are not indented properly. Things like that are pretty much a show stopper for a programming book, but other books may work well enough. A fairly plain text document without many images or diagrams should work fine.

Not all PDF documents can be converted, though. If the document is a scan then you're out of luck. Text in images won't work either.

The bottom line is PDF is excellent for when you want a digital copy that will look the same as a print copy, but it is an absolutely terrible format for ebooks. The problem is the format and not the Kindle or the conversion service. Trying to use PDF on an ebook reader instead of one of the ebook formats is akin to littering the web with Word docs.
Quotes From Great Business People
Ticketmaster Sued in Canada for Scalping Tickets to Shows
This is perhaps one of my favorite talks from TED. Fantastic stuff and 100% true - keep doing your dance, whether divine or not.
Yes, that's exactly what I mean. Yahoo search results on a Google webpage were considered more relevant than Google search results on the Yahoo webpage!

Google is a brand. Some people automatically think it's better.
I'm not sure which creeps me out more, the name or the stock photo. I think both need to go.

Unlike other misadventures in naming, with a dating site your users must trust you. It's sudden death there if you mess that up. Even something which registers subconsciously or ambiguously as, "This site is for creeps." will make you dead in the water, which really, in the grand scheme of the amount of work that goes into setting something up, would be a silly reason to do poorly.
> I find it profoundly disturbing that if every other search engine in the world shut down tomorrow, our website's traffic would be effectively unchanged.

Jeff missed a major point here.

What is ACTUALLY a disturbing thought is that if Google decided for any reason to de-list stackoverflow.com they would lose 83% of their traffic. Like that, in an instant.

Worse, they would be left with little or no recourse. Joel is probably enough of a big-wig that he could place a few calls in to Google or raise hell about it on his blog, but otherwise there is no one to talk to at Google or nothing to be done. I've read horror stories about this kind of thing here and there, and it's terrifying.

The comparisons to Micrsoft miss the mark, because Google is a different kind of monopoly and poses a different set of problems to a different group of people.
A friend, who is currently attending Harvard Business, had as his Facebook status recently, "hoping that Obama's financial bailout includes a golden parachute from his MBA program." He was a consultant at a Big 4 consulting firm before going to school, but now even his former company isn't hiring.

People are pounding at the door to get into the top schools, and hardly anyone can find a way to get out (into a job).
Care to tell us how you managed to get that first wave of traffic? I'm guessing that having a popular blog helps, but who were the first adopters, and how did you get them?
Job losses in six recessions: Percent decline in payroll employment from peak month
Fast forward to Windows 8 starter edition, where windows limits you to 3 browser tabs.
Terrific! Knowing that the actually number looks much better is mind-blowing growth.

Please tell us Joel, what do you think really mattered in order of preference or apprx credit (say)?

- a much cleaner, better product than anything that exists out there ?

- market need.

- Seed traffic (hence contributed content, satisfying experience and stronger word of mouth)

- High profile startup in relevant space.

- SEO

- word of mouth and viral effect because of satisfying experience
I do wish that, but not Experts-Exchange (yet) - if you get to a page on there via a Google search, scroll down past all the list-of-forums waffle, and the answers are in plain text at the end.
PS: Video Applications now required, interesting: http://ycombinator.com/video.html

> In the video please introduce yourselves, explain what you're doing and why, and tell us anything else you want to about the founders or the project.
It'd be interesting to see how many applications YC gets compared to this time last year (as a % change).

On one hand, people might be pretty worried about taking a risk like this now that the economic turmoil has really started to hit the labour market and not apply as much. OTOH, recently laid-off people might flood YC with applications, even if they would not consider it before.
apple's mobileme service suddenly lost a lot of flair (and probably a few paid subscribers)
my list of least favorite languages:

Pascal, Ada, Mumps in that order, but mumps has a few saving graces, it's quirky enough that you get some insights that you would otherwise never have.

To me ada is like esperanto, it's designed to be universal but in the end that means it fits nowhere really well and it doesn't feel natural to anybody.
Good points. So, no cake for you then ;)
I am ABD in economics, and I use the following rule of thumb: If you think you understand macroeconomics, you are hopelessly lost. If you are thoroughly confused, you are beginning to understand.

By the way, since people seem to be interested, I think the best macro book is Snowdon and Vane's Modern Macroeconomics.

http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/1845422082/elidourado...
From a personal anecdote, it's much easier to start a business than it is finding a job. Less hassle, only have to grovel half as much for money.
A couple new things this cycle:

It's going to be in Silicon Valley, not Boston, in case anyone still hasn't heard about that (http://ycombinator.com/ycca.html). Fortunately the Mountain View office is much bigger. We were pretty much at the limit in Cambridge.

Also, we're asking applicants to submit videos introducing themselves this time. Thanks for Posterous for saving me from having to write code to deal with submitted videos!
Development to Deployment in Django
Looks like I stand corrected.

Either way, my MacBook Pro doesn't have a TPM though. There's no way for Apple to use the TPM since not all their shipping computers have it.
I am pretty sure its the opposite, a complicated questions needs a feedback mechanism, you say X is wrong, I ask well what happens with Y, whats the output of Z. this really works better in realtime.

I find a lot of application / language / library developers are in irc reasonably often, whereas the questions on forums are a bit more of run of the mill how do I do types
"(c) Half or more of your group can't move to the Bay Area for the winter. (d) One or more founders will keep their current jobs during the winter."

Shouldn't this be summer?
Lesson from The Flip: Do less and you get to print less
John Resig: Drop-in JavaScript Performance
At first I went wow another dating site, then I looked at the concept: Original even though it is closer to hot or not. I think the challenge is now to sell your brand and a bit of luck. Congratulation on a lot of hard work and good luck!
I'm not sure you understand how to critique an essay.

There's a premise, a thesis, and examples. You can take issue with any of these. For instance, you can claim the examples don't support the thesis. Or you can say the thesis doesn't follow from the premise. Or you can claim the premise is incorrect. etc

Instead you seem to make your comment personal "Nice stories and pictures, though, as long as nobody reads them and thinks they're true." You also assume the thesis "interested in whether addictive technology would have a good or bad effect" -- by definition addictive things have a deleterious effect. Then you run along the lines of the productive, good uses of technology, which was never in question and doesn't have an impact on the argument in question.

Just to be clear:

Premise: society has a difficult time dealing with technologies that have mixed effects and can lead to addictive behaviors. Especially when such conditions have not been seen before

Thesis: Modern technology is evolving to actively take more and more of our time and make us happy, which to some degree is the same thing that drugs do (except drugs are inert while technology is ever-evolving)

Examples: (of society having a hard time) drug prohibition in the late 19th century. (of technology actively competing for time) phonograph, television, video games, internet, MMORPGS

Thanks for the comment. I appreciate your reading the essay this time instead of just commenting without reading it. I think we're done here.
Can the Internet destroy the University?
We'd been meaning to do this, but it required me to add support for uploading videos. Fortunately Posterous appeared and solved the problem way more thoroughly than I would have.
I'm not sure how you could even measure "perfectly", since the market is the measurement device. :)
This is why you're fat.
For a substantiative account of how to proceed when these issues arise, see the Harvard Negotiation Project's book "Difficult Conversations". Their thesis in a nutshell is that difficult conversations are made up of three simultaneous conversations: The Facts conversation, the Feelings conversation, and the Identity conversation. They give advice based on that framework.