skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I started dieting with small meals recently and found the same thing happening. The co-founder I worked for at my last job was well-known for being a well-focused hacker as well as skipping lunch. He seemed to run on tea alone.

There may be something to the hungry hacker hypothesis... perhaps it's another reason for startup productivity!
Apache to include a mod_lua by default in next stable release
I don't always believe everything he says but he does sometimes make some good points. He says he makes his money entirely off google ads but then again he said everything runs off varying numbers of servers (it varies according to which article you're reading, sometimes it's "it's only 2!", sometimes more and on articles like this one: http://highscalability.com/plentyoffish-architecture mail servers and such aren't even mentioned) so I find that very fishy.

These assumptions he makes about free vs paid are reasonable but it's probably just a gut feeling guess.

If you actually look at pof it looks like garbage. No one would want to pay to have their photo resized so terribly and have basically no features. When you're paying for a service you have an entirely different set of expectations. pof works because it has a very large user base. That's all you need for a free site to work. For a paid site you need quality and he's famously very lazy so that's why he's looking to buy one instead of actually getting to work to build one on his own.

It's possible for a dating site to work on the freemium model. It's isn't for pof though, not without a lot of work he isn't willing to put into it.

I think he's going to find that the only ones he'd want to buy are the ones that aren't selling.
Reductive Project Management
Um, according to standard economic theory in the long-run equilibrium the unemployment rate is the rate of frictional unemployment and that is more-or-less of a constant. What we have is cyclical unemployment, which is temporary. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unemployment_types

Look, someone who doesn't have a job will lower his/her price until he/she gets a job. If you are really on the verge of starvation you will become willing to work for $1, and someone will probably become willing to hire you for that little. Just like any other market, price will fluctuate and equilibrate supply and demand, clearing the market. It's just that in the short run there is price inflexibility, so the market temporarily goes out of whack. In the long-run wage is only determined by worker productivity (which is function of amount of capital and technology level), and anyone who wants a job can have one, though it may not be as high paying as she wants.
Essential tool. If you use Firefox and want something like this, http://flashblock.mozdev.org
Why I do open source
Hi subbu, here's how you can do templates/master pages today in Mockups: http://www.balsamiq.com/products/mockups/help#templates - it's a bit of a hack, but it keeps the app really simple...and we're all hackers here anyways right? :)
The crux of the article is this: "So the bottom line for me is that the venture capital business is not going to solve this problem we are in. We are going to play a role, possibly an important role, but we'll need more forms of job creation to get everyone back to work."

That, I wholeheartedly agree with. Unfortunately, it seems that it will take a while for housing prices to deflate enough and for people's wage expectation to decrease enough that utilizing American workers becomes cost effective again. Will there be enough capital around to finance the shift of production back home? Will other countries continue to underbid domestic goods? Are we in fact heading to a more "normal" level of unemployment (we have usually had a comparatively low rate, globally speaking) ?
Care to explain in more detail?
The price inflexibility is deeply ingrained in housing prices, and the regulation by the state. No matter how desperate you are, you cannot legally work for as little as someone in many foreign lands.
Artists Create Scenes For Google Maps Users
He is also pointing out that the Obama inaugural address sounded very similar themes. I'm not sure which labels apply and where.
US Military Shuns EC2, Building Its Own Cloud
This was possible using SafariStand for a long time already. This is now a plugin and not an InputManager (which is layed on unstable ground (as Apple wants to disable them in the next OS X version)).

The killer feature (and what sets it apart from SafariStand) actually is the whitelist. Option-click a Flash object and you can tell it to always load all flash on the current domain. Sweet!
so match.com starts a free site and a month later, plentyoffish wants to start a paid site. odd.
This also reminds me of a Robert Heinlein quote I recently read:

A human being should be able to change a diaper, plan an invasion, butcher a hog, conn a ship, design a building, write a sonnet, balance accounts, build a wall, set a bone, comfort the dying, take orders, give orders, cooperate, act alone, solve equations, analyze a new problem, pitch manure, program a computer, cook a tasty meal, fight efficiently, die gallantly. Specialization is for insects.
Get your startup company listed fast on KillerStartups.com
It's an interesting thread. Historically organizations faced these same challenges getting people to consult a website and use E-mail, both of which are now viewed as the default. The problems you are facing do not come from the fact that non-techies are stupid. And learning how to solve them is good practice for working with normal prospects (vs. early adopters).

One specific suggestion: pick one thing that will reliably be in the wiki and get people used to checking it just for that. Then branch out. Two good places to start: meeting agenda page becomes meeting minutes that any attendee can modify; internal or product specifications that would benefit from a wiki's ability to branch to background and related pages.

I don't think it's a technology barrier at all (unless you are forcing them to use Wiki markup instead of a WYSIWYG editor) it's force of habit.
Would Sandberg have been so dedicated to the institution had he not made millions in it? Maybe. But baseball is far too respected given its spotted history of cheats and over-paid egomaniacs.

Important and meaningful institutions like teaching and medicine are filled with individuals who will not be getting a bailout or make millions like baseball players or bankers. Most true adherents to vaulted institutions are individualist chiefly educated in the "liberal" studies that Brooks pans.

In fact, JP Morgan (a liberal individualist), is seen as the savior of US 19th century banking after a crisis that is eerily similar to today's. Brooks' claim that "there is another, older way of living" rings hollow because educated liberals did not destroy even older institutions like the Magna Carta or the Enlightenment over the last eight years.

A nation in crisis should ask where have all the liberal individuals gone and not lament the status of institutional group think.
I think he's going to keep his current site and create another one separate from his current. Am I wrong?

Really he just wants to keep users that come to his site and aren't happy with the free type dating site. Instead of them going to match.com or w/e they'll go to his pay site.
We are not even close to there yet. If that does become a problem, if min-wage causes 30%+ of the workforce to be unemployed, the government will lower it. They are stupid, but not that stupid. Besides, housing prices are also shaped by supply and demand. If unemployment becomes very high, housing prices will drop. Essentially what you are talking about is short-run price inflexibility.
Your title is invalid. Non-techies get Wikipedia.

Additionally, your real question does not belong on Hacker News. You're dealing with the problem of how to accomodate the uselessness of mediocre people whom you're obligated to tolerate. The numbing pain of tolerating mediocrity has no place on a startup site.
Is it really kosher to post things to Hacker News that you can't read without signing a contract that runs to several thousand words?
I use a wiki to take notes. I run navyhpsp.net, which is a wiki for Navy Health Professions Scholarship students distributed all over the US and recently overtook the official Navy HPSP site on Google (google for "Navy HPSP")
I also set up a wiki for my med school (at the Dean's request).

I don't understand why there would be universal appeal to a corporate wiki, not unless it's searchable by google, in which case you at least have a chance of the information coming up when you go looking for "boilerplate" information in a search engine.

People inevitably choose different ways of doing things. If a group of you is using a wiki, then run with it. Don't force people to use it. If it's better, they'll get curious and ask about it. If not, don't worry about them. Every time you ask people to play with your toys, you are spending political capital. Conserve your capital. If you make them play with your toys, you can bet they'll cry and call for mom and dad, at best. At worst, they might try to break your toys.
That blog is a gold mine. Subscribed.
Carbonite employees gamed reviews of their products on Amazon
Regulation can generally be either simple or fair.
Dostoevsky Hunger
I so not disagree with you on any point other than perhaps the use of "short", which is a comparative term anyway.
AMD to let Geode line die without heirs
"They are stupid [ the government] , but not that stupid."

Don't count on it. There is something about government that attracts and concentrates stupidity. They discount reality, blank out unintended consequences, operate with stolen wealth, and shift blame AND cost for its failure onto its victims. In that environment its almost impossible not to be terminally stupid.
Stupid or negligent?
I am using RAID1 on my PC and RAID0 on some servers, all software raid with mdadm. I never had any problems temporarily removing one HDD from the array (when I needed some free space for a short time) and resyncing it again, but I always marked the drive as faulty (mdadm --manage /dev/md0 --fail /dev/sdb2) and then removed them (mdadm --manage /dev/md0 --remove /dev/sdb2) before re-using it.

Resyncing the array is just as simple: Partition the disk, create a partition that is the same size as the other RAID1 partition and re-add it to the array (mdadm --manage /dev/md0 --add /dev/sdb2)
Ideas without implementation aren't held in high regard around here. Pick a toy project and learn..
Wolf's awesome. Have his blog in my RSS feed and he always delivers quality info: http://rentzsch.com/

I have a love/hate relationship with Flash. On one end, it's awesome for audio & video and on the other hand, it has such a shitty implementation on a Mac. It takes 40% of CPU just to decode a video stream which installed video clients can do in less than 10%. (Incidentally, ever since Adobe purchased Macromedia, quality of Adobe's stuff has been going down.)

Flash also uses the old Netscape plugin architecture which has a horribly inefficient input & rendering loop that causes even background tabs to use a lot of CPU.
Yep, PKD is something special alright.
Sure, if you use MediaWiki that's true. As far as I know, nobody uses that for internal corporate wikis; that is what wikis like Socialtext are for.
New people are being born all the time!
...and he didn't even tell people to watch out for the Star Wars jokes.
.. or even for Ben himself ;)
Great episode of No Reservations, and I was thrilled to see this behind-the-scenes look at the team behind the cameras.
From the article:

Windows 7 provides an uninstall utility for all your apps, for easy system management (see image at left). The Mac OS has no such facility, and most apps don't provide their own uninstallers, so it's easy to end up with lots of deadwood app files on your Mac.

This has got to be a joke.
I don't think an ad model is that effective in a bad economy. So he is probably losing lots in revenue and trying to find ways to generate new revenue. Just like Google are way more aggressive with a freemium model for Google Apps...
I've always found the above troubling.

It seems obvious to me anything that gratifies one's intellectual curiosity will quickly transform the site into interesting news, but not hacker news.

Perhaps if it was a hacker's instead of one's?
"In the first study, researchers found detectable levels of mercury in nine of 20 samples of commercial HFCS."

Debatable and harmful can be widely separated. Without any real numbers I am going to assume that this is a tiny amount of contamination and hardly meaningful.

PS: I might be an environmentalist, but I hate bad science reporting.
Buddhist monks don't eat after midday. They also likely wake up earlier than programers, though ;)
With any luck I'll be able to backport it to 2.2 as well, once it is stable, itself. It would probably be backported as an external module though, as it was when we called it mod_wombat.
I made a comment on this more than a year ago. ;-)

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=78299
Technology is there to serve us and NOT vice versa.

If people are only comfortable with emails, well, techies should think of a way to scan and update the wiki with info in the email automatically.
IDG Tech Network Leave Adify and Move To DoubleClick
I think its best to write once to get the tests done right and to make sure the design works, then rewrite to get the code more readable. That way the tests will save you if you screw up the rewrite.
Muxtape relaunched
"Welcome to a preview of the new Muxtape, a minimalist platform for bands to promote their music and listeners to create mixes. We’ve invited 12 of our favorite artists to help test, and in the coming weeks we'll begin allowing bands to sign up themselves for free. Learn more."

http://muxtape.com/
This is very good news for Lua as a web development language. The avaialability of a high-quality deployment option for web applications will remove one of the primary obstacles to acceptance of Lua for web development. Lua’s small size could make it an appealing environment for use on small, cheap VPS systems from providers such as Dreamhost. Its performance should make it attractive for larger systems too.
The new Muxtape is live
PowerShell ABC's - X is for XML
match.com does not want to pay so much to bring traffic to their site, so their idea is to have a free site that can drive traffic to their paid site.

plentyoffish on the other hand does not get enough $ for driving users away to match.com, so he wants to drive traffic to his own paid site.

Not that odd, IMO.
Dead athletes' brains show damage from concussions
My feeling is we'll see another hotornot kind of development here. Markus will try to go with a paid model, fail - because his thinking wouldn't work in the new context, and either sell the site or leave things as they are now.
Scott McNealy: Hire Great People And Delegate
Except that most wide screen displays these days can be rotated 90 degrees into a vertical orientation. Problem solved.

Edit: Granted, that doesn't work for laptops, except for tablets.
"New generations don’t invent institutional practices. These practices are passed down and evolve."

This is simply incorrect. Institutions are made by people and can be changed by them. As said in the article institutions can be very important the lives of people, so people should think about them very critically and improve them continuously.
Don't accept the status quo!
Cisco goes green with EnergyWise upgrade
IBM confirms job cuts
Google Maps: Cheney's Veil Lifted on Vice President's Residence
"You will never create an amazing design in Drupal. You will never create a successful startup in Drupal. You will never write a lean and scalable site in Drupal."

Can you substantiate these claims? It sounds a bit as if you're generalizing based on a bad experience in trying to use Drupal. And to be fair, Drupal does take a while to get used to -- you won't build an awesome site in the first week after untarring the package on your server.

However, all of the following sites were built on Drupal -- and there is nothing intrinsically fixed about their designs or their ability to scale, etc.:

-The Onion: http://www.theonion.com/

-MTV UK: http://mtv.co.uk

-Yahoo Research: http://research.yahoo.com/

-Ozzy Osbourne: http://www.ozzy.com/

-Moby: http://moby.com/
There were certainly disruptions associated with past changes. Children working in factories come to mind. But maybe I'm biased because of the evolved social norms that increases in productivity enabled.

One reason I might be right is that there is a limit built into humans. We can only change so fast (unless new tech makes us more agile).

Workers changes industries on a regular basis. But could they do it yearly? Monthly?

Accelerating advances are bound to run into a wall of finite human abilities.
You were not supposed to analyze the words deeply. The words were shaped to elicit the emotions of safety, security, and familiarity that presumed to exist in the "good old days". On the surface it might feel good. Yet to live it as we approach the singularity of almost vertical rate of change, its all but impossible.

I agree with Heinlein: "Specialization is for insects." Humans are not indistinguishable and interchangeable hive creatures. We are competitive/cooperative individuals each with unique and changing combinations of capacities, skills, interests, drives, and dreams.
The problem is that 'standard economic theory' is not in complete agreement here. As the article you linked says, classical economists (whose argument about the market clearing is the one you put forward) do not believe in cyclical unemployment. Those who do believe in it don't believe that the employment market clears of its own accord.

A separate issue is that people can't lower their wage demands to any level. To get a job you must have a home, a means of commuting and the basic necessities of life. There are also costs associated with employing someone, so even if someone worked for free, the employer could not necessarily justify the cost of employing them.

These are theoretical issues though. The existence of unemployment benefit means that the only people who will reach these depths are the homeless.
First off I have to admit that I actually like Matrix Reloaded and Revolutions.

I appreciate those two essays and highly enjoyed reading them. But when interpreting such works I'm always cautious not to read too much into small details. I found the overview about philosophy refreshing but when the author begins to claim the movie got it wrong in some place but insists on some special philosophical trait I become suspicious.
Rather than referring people to sites like Match.com, he is going to refer them to his own paid site. It makes sense.
Yes he is.

Even worse, flash ignores its z-order on my box (firefox/solaris x86). Turns out lots of sites have flash on the front page, with dropdown menus above it.... ugh.
IMHO, solving the problem will be much harder than that. US is highly based on a plan of idealized life through media. A typical lifestyle of the suburbs:

* Multiple cars per family and doing heavy commuting.
* Huge houses with high bills and maintenance.
* Consumerism based on filling those houses and cars with non-essential disposable items.

All those millions living with that mindset apply those same rules at work. There are great exceptions, but their size is not relevant to the national bottom-line.

Now apply that to venture and you get what doesn't work. PG is on this problem often. Perhaps a bit too Socratic-style for my taste. (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Socratic_method)

I never understood how the economy worked in the US with so much waste. Now with this crisis I get it, it never did. US needs a culture shock urgently. (A bailout is more of the same, IMHO.)
Not non-sense,m actually. Quite the opposite. This is comapany and industry-ruining stuff. To continue on oblivious to the law and the effect that industry leaders like Carmack can have on the law is nonsense.
Google I/O 2009, Developer Conference
A voice for UK’s entrepreneurs
I'm not a big Brooks fan. We get on the rhetorical boat in this article thinking we're headed for deep water, a la Viktor Frankl, who saw people grapple with what life expected from them in a deeply personal and horrifying way in the Nazi death camps. Instead, Brooks takes us on a lightweight fun-filled harbor tour, telling us that working at the seafood house is its own reward. Lecturing us that traditions deserve to be respected and that personal desires minimized.

What life wants out of you is a deeply individualistic thing. Life is not the same as Baseball. It's not the same as reporting, or college. College might expect you to study and get good grades. Life expects you to continue to learn and grow. Life is anything but an institution. E-gad, man. Drop the poetry book and take a look around.

I don't know what he's smoking, but whatever it is, I'll pass. It sounds like the prelude to a call to arms to support tradition. This philosophy of the group or the tradition being greater than the individual is strangely narcissistic -- I'm very important because I'm part of a very important institution. Whatever it is, it's not American in origin. At least I hope not.

As a former service member, I'm deeply aware of tradition and the higher value of culture and civilization above the individual. But that only exists in the context of supporting the individual's right to reject, to reinvent, to be stubborn, ugly, and ornery. Without that, institutions become machines to eat people and their lives.

Thanks for the ride, David, but next time I'll stay home.
How old is your oldest working Mac?
Tories consider IT contract cap
The race is on to make better & cheaper electric car batteries at MIT Lab
Video of AMD Phenom II Overclocked to 6.5GHz
Apple Approves Podcaster App, Provides Another Ray of Hope
Perhaps, but I think that in general, people who search for things that satisfy their intellectual curiosity are very much overlapped with those who are hackers (even if their hacking is not necessarily applied to technology).

As long as the content is interesting and the discussion is respectful and intellectual (which it currently is), then I think it's fine. If the quality of the site begins to degrade with popularity, then it can always be made more restrictive.
Where do baby names come from?
I suspect that that if we could measure great teachers and great doctors to the extent that we measure great ballplayers, there would be orders of magnitude improvement in their salaries as well. Baseball is a market economy like any other.

If I had the skills to play professional baseball, I certainly would. The problem though isn't that the money isn't good in the minors. You can make 100k/year in AAA. It's that their careers are so short and their skills are highly in demand. Unless you make it to the big leagues and stick for more than six years, you still need to find another profession.
Ehy IE8, I Can Has Some Clickjacking Protection?
That's actually the fault of the developer for choosing a wmode which doesn't support z-sorting. Flash has no problem hiding behind HTML content.
Competing where you are strong - be different and be defendable
I removed mating in the end because it made the program converge slower.

I'm glad that got you interested in Clojure!
Exercise no danger for joints
Now with this crisis I get it, it never did

You're summing up 50 years of post WWII history into the last 10 years? Good luck with that.
The economy works just fine with hat you call "waste." Nothing humans do will ever be close to 100% efficient for any length of time. We're messy that way!
The bottom line is that most people the world over will generally live just within their means (or just over if there is sufficient credit) and you may as well get used to that. Living "efficiently" is normally done only by those who have little in the way of resources (in which case they're normally living barely within their means), or by the handwringing worriers who have plenty but feel guilty about it.