skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I mean practical scarcity of energy, which would drive us towards a reputational economy. See Doctorow's Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom.
That's certainly an option. That renders it roughly equivalent to grabbing a jottit.com subdomain, keeping it open. Quite convenient---but of course being totally open in both directions is its own restriction.
Scalability for web applications has -nothing to do with the programming language-. PHP, Ruby, Python, ASP.net, they all use the same strategies to scale. Three things: cache religiously, index well, and refactor your database queries.

Take it from me: I've worked on a Java site with over 2 million monthly uniques. I built a Ruby on Rails app from the ground up that grew to over 15 million pageviews a day. I also helped build a PHP-backed api the handled a few million hits a month.

I'm sick and tired of the "X scales better than Y" debate. It's pointless.
Some people's relationship with their employer is so transactional that they will do only the bare minimum to not get fired. This is a good site for them.
Particularly when it is available online for free at http://mitpress.mit.edu/sicp/full-text/book/book.html
What about Jottit? http://jottit.com

I'm absolutely in love with it, using it as a simple personal wiki.

After you create one the first time you can make it private/password-protected if you wish. Just dump info in, hit submit, done.
I am confused. This differs from any other pastebin, how? And how does it apply to twitter any more or less than any other?
Except that you don't use the full MD5 sum, so it's not a simple matter of brute-forcing it.
Slashdot used to be (reasonably) well-informed discussion. Digg at the beginning too. And reddit as well. rec.sports.baseball.bos-redsox, too.

All successful forums grow big and become worthless. The Y C kids need to learn this.

Never gonna' give you up
Never gonna' let you down.
Never gonna run around and desert you.
eBaum has a reputation for plagiarism and copyright infringement-- what goes around comes around I guess.
Attack of the trolls!
It's cool to keep a few around for novelty purposes. Also, if it seems humans are responsible, it is a source of guilt. Although, there is the trend of caring about some species over others, hence campaigns such as "sea kittens".
Particularly because it is available online for free.

For a normal book, you have cheapstake buyers, and then buyers who will pay a premium for a nicer book (hardcover, newer, etc). Now take the cheapstake buyers out of the market because they're all accessing it online for free. Economic magic does its thing, and the market price is now much higher.
Yeah, as I had mentioned above that's my best lead right now. It's true that if you make a new one, you can just drop your text in and lock it up after the fact. unfortunately if you want to use it more than once you're back to the problem of authorizing before use.
It's interesting, after you commented I looked up NLP on Wikipedia and was honestly surprised at it's debunking.

I've read a few NLP books: NLP for Dummies, NLP for the modern manager and a range of literature from people like Tony Robbins, Christopher Howard, etc.

Some of the material sucked, NLP for the modern manager especially. I have been frustrated by the wishy washy nature of much of the material.

However the thing that really struck me was when I'd just finished a Tony Robbin's seminar and had a meeting with my boss at the time who I barely got on with. I did the technique called "matching and mirroring" where you gently copy what the other person is doing. I was amazed it was the best meeting we'd had that I could remember.

Since then I've used a number of the "basic" NLP techniques to do with body language to help me communicate better with people. I guess I'm not sure what to advise. Reading the Wikipedia article though makes me wonder how much of it is a crock. Quite a lot of material I've read seems to be unhelpful, unspecific or "self-help snake oil".

I'm curious what the real science is behind the practical body language techniques I've been able to pull out of NLP if the rest of it is hokum.
How about an input box at the secret URL that sends an email. Someone at work uses that trick for a quick, anonymous documentation feedback option on each doc page footer.
A crawling/spidering/scraping framework inspired by Django
See: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=411733
So Eric Bauman makes a site that profits from stealing other people's content. A song is written insulting him. An entire website blames their mayhem on him in revenge. He is caught altering watermarks and removing citations. He gets enough money to buy an apartment building and sponsor a boxer. His father writes insulting emails. Then suddenly another shady company buys him out and ruins his company, and it's proof that capitalism is bad? On the contrary. This is excellent evidence that the system regulates itself.
Overall agree with the article: use individual apps that do well what they're designed to do, and use the file system to organize your stuff. Unfortunately, a tremendous number of users cannot make heads or tales out of the file system.

I believe the chief causes of the confusion are (1) different apps save newly created/edited files to different places (2) many users are clueless about navigating the file system within the Save As dialog (3) many users rely on an app's Recent list (4) many users don't know how to search their own file systems.

(1) Some apps always want to Save As to the Documents folder. Some always want to Save As to wherever you finished off your previous Save As. Some always want to Save As to the folder of the file you most recently opened in that app. Etc. No one can remember each app's convention.

(2) People don't realize they can navigate within Save As to someplace other than wherever the app feels like plopping the file by default at that moment. True even when shown over and over and over how to do this.

(3) Once you move a file, its entry in an app's Recent listing is probably borked. This sends people who rely on Recent for finding and opening files into a panic.

(4) They don't know how to click on the desktop and hit cmd-F or to click on Start->Find. And once they do, the Find window looks nothing like Google or a web browser. They don't understand what the various search criteria are or how to enter them. They don't know how to read the results.
Yes, please. It took me a while to figure out how to indent code.

FYI, text surrounded by asterisks (*) will be intended. Begin a new line with two spaces, and you have code indentation.
As far as I know, new users can't downmod.
From the article:
Police and others say it could stop terrorists from coordinating during an attack, prevent suspects from erasing evidence on wireless devices, simplify arrests and keep inmates from using contraband phones.

Now how in the heck is an RF jammer going to prevent the erasing of evidence? I guess if the evidence is stored remotely, you can't send the kill signal or something, but that falls so far into movie-plot terrorism that it isn't even funny. If the police asking for these kinds of new sweeping powers can't even get such a simple technical point right, then why should we trust that crime prevention is the true objective or that they are competent enough to have these powers?

Now don't get me wrong-- there's a lot of good cops out there. I think that these kinds of problems are systematic and not individual.
Google’s Deep-Web Crawl [pdf]
Not only pointless but willfully ignorant. Think about it, people who say one language is more scalable than another don't even understand scaling means. Only slightly better are the religious rants about some framework or another.

In reality, the most a language or framework can provide is a slight head start in terms of absolute performance. The dominant factor will always be nature of the application.
You want Mac OS 9 or earlier. :-) Well, maybe not quite. You could attach text comments to a file, but I can't remember if the comments were searchable. And before OS 8 or so, the comments disappeared whenever you decided to "rebuild the Desktop." You could assign a searchable, color-coded category to a file, but you were limited to one category per file and something like six or eight categories altogether. Still, though, the earlier Mac OSs were very handy (except for the crashing...)
New Symbol of Elite Access - E-Mail to the Chief
Don't freak out about it. This is not like getting married.

First the easy advice: If you have friends pulling you toward Ruby and Rails... learn Ruby and Rails. Momentum is a good thing. Comradeship is a good thing. Don't worry: If it turns out in two years that we'd all rather be using Python and/or Django, we can switch. It will still be there.

Now we begin to edge toward personal opinion: I'd avoid sticking with PHP. Not merely because PHP is often like a parody of a programming language, but because variety is the spice of life. Learn something different. Take a look at how other languages do things.

Now, if you really want to stay out of a language war, ignore anyone who goes on about the "scalability" of their chosen language. Most of those claims are just posturing, backed up with no relevant data. [1] If your PHP friends won't shut up about their language's unbeatable super speed, show them the first fifteen minutes or so of Yehuda Katz's Merbcamp keynote:

http://www.merbcamp.com/video/katz3.mp4

... and once they're done rending their garments and throwing things at the screen tell them to take some data and go argue with someone who cares. You've got better things to do.

---

[1] Why do most language scalability arguments have such dubious data to back them up? Because, as others have taken pains to point out, languages don't scale: application architectures scale. If your webapp is much more complex than "Hello, World" its efficiency will depends on a host of factors, of which the speed of any particular language construct is usually a tiny one.
cf. http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=459719
Dropbox is web-based? Because I have to install a program for it. In that case, Outlook is web-based.
Lelong Malaysia - Online Shopping Auction
At one point, I created an Everything Bucket program of my own. It was called Nodepad, and was simply a tree on the left and an HTML-rendered-display with editing controls on the right. However, it didn't keep anything in a proprietary database; it literally was just a guzzied-up view of the filesystem.

You opened a "document" by pointing the program at a directory. It then spidered downward and found all directories whose names ended in .node, and added them to the tree. When you selected one, what was displayed on the right was the content of the file "[name].node/[name].txt". (The files themselves weren't rich-text; each file was actually stored in Markdown, and styled by a "document.css" file at the root of the tree. This was to discourage playing with styles while working in favor of getting in, doing your work, and getting out.) It was autosaved when you stopped editing for a few moments or navigated away from the node.

It had no other functionality beyond that. For example, to search for something in the document, you'd just press Ctrl+L to get a "Run command on current subtree" dialog and type "grep foo". I've since stopped maintaining the program, and thus it no longer even runs on my computer, but I still use the "documents" I created with it, simply browsing them in Explorer or in a shell and editing files the old-fashioned way.

If anyone's interested, I might put out a new version. Apparently I'd have to change the name if I wanted to find it on Google, though :)
Except, I'd think, for the bit where Eric Bauman makes even more money in the sale and faces no charges for a decade of illegal business that funneled capital away from the creators who deserved it.

Dear lord, I think I just gave myself enough cognitive dissonance to stop using Bittorrent for hours.

But my point is that Bauman hasn't really repaid his debt to society. He's been shamed, and a lot of us are glad for that, but only by yet another corporate raider who will likely not redeem Ebaum's World the way College Humor redeemed itself after the IAC purchase.
"This is excellent evidence that the system regulates itself."

As it regulated itself with the current financial and economic crisis?

Like AIG regulated itself?

Like Lehman Brothers, Bear Stearns, et al.?
Every language has its own pros and cons. So, there is always no one solution that can solve all the problems.

Anyway, you cannot compare Rails(Ruby) and Django(Python) to PHP. Rails and Django are both frameworks. But, PHP is a language. Maybe you can try Codeigniter if you want to use PHP.
TrackMeNot Firefox add-on protects search privacy by generating noise
Calculus Video Lectures (just published)
If only this textbook was given every student taking "intro to computer science"
5 Things I Hate About USA – Part 3. Airport Security
Exactly!

Removing the moral implications, rape is really bad PHYSICALLY unless the act is lubricated (the point the article makes). So a woman needs to be PHYSICALLY ready for sex, even if not EMOTIONALLY or MENTALLY willing.

That leads to a decoupling of mental and sexual desire from physical response.

Call me unPC, but that seems to fit the evidence they present!
It runs on Wordpress? It's also not working to any degree at this moment.
Wow, for some reason I thought I could actually be the first to crack that one.
Please submit the original source. If a blog post reports on something they found on another site, submit the latter. </quote> http://ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
are people still seriously thinking that this economic crises was because of greedy CEOs and capitalism?

Jesus Christ. :|
Maybe I have some magical copy of Outlook 2007. It's never crashed on me once. It's not speedy, by any means, but it stays loaded all the time, and once loaded (which isn't that much slower than firing up Firefox and loading Gmail) it's pretty responsive. Search is good now too, though I'd still give Gmail the win in that category.

Organizing by folders is a clear win for organization. Note that it is the #1 gripe about Gmail by far. Searching is well and good, but humans are visual animals. Clicking through your tree and simply seeing what you have there allows you to use it, to some extent, like a to-do list (especially combined with marking for followup) while keeping your inbox clean. If you polled all power-emailers, I'd guess at least 9 in 10 would tell you they want folders.

Rules on Gmail are incredibly limited relative to the ones on Outlook. You can only do a few basic things (which granted, covers 80% of what you want to do).

I don't want to have to Google around for various contact sync applications which may or may not be up to date, have to be maintained, etc. I want it to just work trivially, out of the box, the way ActiveSync and Blackberry do.

The difference between IMAP/POP on a phone and push+Exchange is like the difference between masturbation and sex.

Outlook has unlimited storage, as does Exchange server. You can't criticize it for storage simply because some corporations limit it. It's vastly superior there.

My Exchange account has a Barracuda spam filter, which despite it's hideous UI does the job better than my Gmail account. Gmail generates way too many false positives.

So no, I think I had it just right, which is exactly why Outlook costs money but people continue to pay it.
I have an idea: it might be interesting to have a "pinned articles" section at the top of HN, similar to announcement threads in forums. It would only display for logged-in users (so it wouldn't bother anyone who was just anonymously browsing the site) and, once you were logged-in, you could simply close the div displaying them. The prime candidate for a pinned article would be the HN guidelines; this would probably be another.

Closing the div would actually just mark all the pinned items currently in it as done-with for you, so any newly pinned items would still appear. If you closed the div when you didn't mean to, you could also check the new "pinned" section on the top banner, which would display all pinned links regardless of done-with status.
Interestingly, this is in no way twitter specific. I think the twitter connection is either for marketing reasons, or the developer didn't know about other pastebins out there before they set out to build their own.

In terms of differences, Snipt seems to be focused more on building a community around pasted code (rating snippets, searching across them etc.)

But it's really just another pastebin.
Clay Shirky: A Group Is Its Own Worst Enemy - Social Software Design
It was submitted before (~600 days ago):

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7354

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24992

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=122189

I find it to be relevant to the recent discussions on HN.

Here's a summary of the essay by Jon Stahl http://blogs.onenw.org/jon/archives/2003/10/21/a-group-is-it...
I personally don't think it was caused by those things, though I am sure that there are those who do. I think the five major factors that contributed to it, in rough order of importance:

1) Too much leverage, without understanding the risks.

2) Trade imbalances causing capital flow imbalances.

3) Complete lack of regulation and lack of enforcement of existing regulation.

4) A culture of "gotta have it now."

5) Productivity surge that couldn't last.

As for greedy CEOs, many of them were non-productive parasites on the system (John Thain, etc.), but it wasn't their fault.

And as for capitalism, my observation was that it's going to change drastically, not that it was at fault.
Aware of that and agreed, but it already made the front page and discussion started there. I said "cf" not "dup" on purpose.
From an article about Shotput some time ago:

http://www.bizjournals.com/atlanta/stories/2009/01/05/daily9...

"If we don’t understand the idea or the space, Cummings said, we’re not going to [invest in it.]"

Look forward to a lot of mediocre ideas, then. I'm glad early investors didn't say this about things like the gasoline engine. But of course that effort was probably bootstrapped.

Why is it called Shotput?
"Google generates its own list of badware URLs, and no data that we generate is supposed to affect the warnings in Google’s search listings"

So what does their cooperation with Google even mean if stopbadware does not provide them with the list?
Study: Learning Science Facts Doesn't Boost Science Reasoning
Ask HN: Don't show points?
I was thinking about group think and how to keep it out of HN. And I ran into a fundamental problem/cause:

Psychologically, people naturally follow groupthink. No matter how much you stress not following it, they'll still be inclined to follow the herd.

So just saying "try not to follow groupthink" isn't good enough. Instead, why not make it less possible to follow groupthink?

So here's my suggestion: stop displaying the points. Maybe still gray out downvoted comments, but I think even that is unnecessary. They'll float down to the bottom of the thread anyway. And I know that when I see a downvoted thread, I read it differently. I don't say "maybe a couple people just didn't like what they said, and it was actually ok" coming into it, I say "what did this person do wrong? What stupid thing did they say?" I come into it biased because of the points it has.

Same goes for a comment with a lot of points. I say, "what great wisdom does this person have for me?" and thus am naturally more inclined to upvote it or at least like it.

The rankings would still work the same, so the good comments would still float to the top, but there wouldn't be an absolute number to tell you "this is amazing" or "this sucks." High posts might just be very new. Low posts might just have gone unnoticed or been overshadowed by more amazing ones.

I realize that the points serve many positive purposes too, and it's just an idea, but I think if individual, unprejudiced discussions are what we want, eliminating the display of points would help a lot.
The system was trying to regulate itself. Thats why the economic crisis is happening. The companies that are in trouble are ones that can not be maintained that either need to restructure them selves or die. In the infinite wisdom of our leaders they decided to stray from the theory of capitalism and interfere.

Everyone likes to think that capitalism means that everything is happy daisy, but its not. If things go wrong in capitalism, then life can get hard but it will eventually self correct if you allow it.
greedy CEOs, no, not really. they're more a byproduct, i think.

not all of capitalism, but some aspects of capitalism definitely did play into the problem, yes.
The way it works on Perlmonks(.org) is that you don't see points on a comment/submission until after you've voted. If you want to see the score you can do a "null vote". I definitely think this is a better way to handle it. I really can't think of any reason why you'd want to show score before voting.
Parent Company Lets Go Of Original eBaum's World Team
I would agree with most of your reasons, but for each of them you need to ask "why" until you get to the real source of the problem.

For the most part, the greediness of people is why we had such ridiculously leveraged financial securities and special-purpose vehicles etc. designed to stuff as many fistfuls of cash as possible into the pockets of those who could game the system the best.

Greed was the cause, and insane levels of leverage were the flimsy supports for this recent collapse of the financial house of cards.

Of course, that's not to say leverage is inherently bad, but in excess it clearly points the way to financial ruin.
This is the article that inspired me to do my PhD thesis.
Yeah, that would work too. Didn't think of that, but that sorta gets the best of one world and a good part of the other. You still get to see the points eventually, but it doesn't influence the voting.

The reason that you would want to show the score before voting is that HN isn't all about voting and karma. If someone were to just want to read the best answers to a question, they might just scan by score for the highest ones.

Maybe there could be a manual-override for one page. But it would make you be conscious of the fact that you're going to bias yourself by doing it. It would be for people wanting to read but not really vote.
I agree with you. Well-stated.

And that's why I feel that even if regulation isn't perfect, and even if it sometimes is counterproductive (which it is!), it can often help to stave off such things as this.
For an opposing opinion in reply to this post: http://blog.mendix.com/?p=138
What's nice about this is that living cells can heal to an extent, which is more than we can say for silicon.
He didn't say each player would regulate itself, but that the system as a whole would regulate itself. The system did regulate the companies you mentioned--they went out of business. Unfortunately, the federal government threw the taxpayers under the bus in order to keep the system from working like it's supposed to.