skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
so, to be clear, you noticed that pandora's box is closed and you figure it would be good to open it?
Absolutely. This is a common misconception of Christianity. Unfortunately, Christians themselves can be just as prone to this misconception as others.
Regulation that maintains the status quo...

...is almost always a bad idea. We need new services, new investment, new entrants.

Opnnness can defend itself -- it got this far. If any of the alleged 'abuses' truly became 'serious' that would give a marketing coup to competitors and spur to new entrants.

The idea that regulating the existing monopolies is 'easier to achieve' than true competition is a self-fulfilling prophecy. New regulations entrench present-day services, and flatter regulators into thinking only they, and not competition, can protect customers.

If a shortage of competition is the real problem -- and it is -- policies should address that, not enshrine the current lack of competition in regulations.
I'm not sure it's a good idea to be making 100 year investments: many such investments will turn out to be investments in a 100 year buggy whip factory. Consider, for instance, passenger rail to Detroit, Gary or Buffalo (in 1900).

Note: I'm not expressing an opinion on whether basic science qualifies, I'm too biased (my salary comes from an NSF grant). I'm just questioning the assumptions.
Very interesting.

I think the web game for general apps has shifted up a gear. However I believe this down turn in the economy is going to drive more 'less tech savy' users to try and make a buck on the web.

To Jo Bloggs the web is an income stream he should be using to get through this economic downturn.
As an entrepreneur this is a market worth tackling?
What do you think?
I'd say it gets "attacked", but maybe in a more reasoned and sensible way than on the other sites.

(Or is this another one of those "I wonder what this does to my karma, can it be used to hack the system?" posts?)
I'll Give You My Template When You Pry It From My Cold Dead Hands
It's probably not a good idea not to copy other companies, rather analyze what's working them and see if you can make it work for you as well.

37Signals gives a ton of good advice when it comes to running a web service, and some not so good advice.

Here a gem 37Signals provided:

Ask 37signals: How do you process credit cards?
http://www.37signals.com/svn/posts/753-ask-37signals-how-do-...

It was so good, that the CEO of Braintree Payment Solutions referenced it when talking about the same subject:

http://www.braintreepaymentsolutions.com/blog/annual-credit-...

Now that it's tough to raise money, "copying" 37 Signals and charging for your products on a monthly recurring basis is spot on for most new web services. I don't listen to everything they say, but every now and then they have it figured out.
I'm not quite sure what you mean by innovation:

http://www.procmail.org/procmail.HISTORY.html
Yep git rocks and I think yours is a useful recipe. For my needs I prefer herokugarden to running my own server. Cname with them was a snap plus everything is free and if the need arises I can upgrade to heroku (rejiggered, currently in private beta). One thing that had me concerned at first was that I'd be stuck with a banner ad at the bottom of every page - but that's just their config/.yml scaffolding. Also their text editor is beautiful but I find I don't use it, for me TextMate and git gitter done. Their post yesterday on the future of deployment I thought was prescient: http://blog.heroku.com/archives/2009/2/6/future_of_deploymen...
Newsflash:
"Almost all Americans have sex before marrying, according to premarital sex research that shows such behavior is the norm in the U.S. and has been for the past 50 years.

The new study shows that by age 20, 75% of Americans have had premarital sex. That number rises to 95% by age 44."

Source: http://www.webmd.com/sex-relationships/news/20061220/premari...

It's just that the doctrine isn't working, and it never has. Teaching people about condoms doesn't increase non-monogamous sex ratio's (those are high already), but it does increase condom usage. The guilt and exceptionally "sex-negative" culture that's been fostered in Western Culture, a large part due to Christianity, has caused us tremendous problems through sheer ignorance of human sexuality.

Unfortunately, it's often the women who are at the most at risk, even those in monogamous relationships (women are at a much higher risk of AIDS infection) as it's statistically the male who cheats and in many societies the ability to divorce is limited. This doesn't even touch on the power birth control and condom usage has given women in fully monogamous relationships to properly and effectively plan their pregnancies.

Oh, and should this even be hackernews?
This is my first post on HN (waved reddit good bye today).

The problem is not religious arguments - the problem is ranting and not reasoned debates (recently Reddit's Palestinian / Atheism / GOP bashing / Obama posts became intolerable).

This discussion seems civil and well thought out. A good example is dominik's post above – it is pretty well reasoned and factual post and is non-inflammatory it is a good post (even though I am not Catholic).

It is not the nature of the argument that destroyed Reddit it is the way in which it was done. And this can happen with any topic not just Religion.
As a few other people here have suggested, standardized test scores are a pretty narrow measure of education quality. Bill Gates mentioned that everyone in the room had probably had a few great teachers to get them to where they are now. When I think about the great teachers I have had, I certainly don't think they were great because they raised my standardized test scores. They were great because they gave me a much deeper understanding of a topic, or opened my eyes to something I hadn't seen before.

Yes, the best teachers I had may have increased my standardized test scores some as a side effect, but it would be an insult to them if that's why I admired them so much as teachers.

Test prep can be done in a factory, but not education.
Someone named Robert Shields documented every 5 minutes of his life for 25 years... The nutbar typed 37.5 million words:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robert_Shields_(diarist)

http://www.nytimes.com/2007/10/29/us/29shields.html?_r=2&...
The future of deployment
I think it is because we realize the futility of arguing about religion and stay clear. Also, news.yc tends to be more respectful of people in general; just as you won't attack a person on their beliefs in the real world, you won't do so here.

edit: Not to mention such discussion is actually off-topic.
Posters here tend to be a little more reserved. Reddit can be a bit like tabloid newspapers. G-d kills millions, Noah unavailable for comment! Atheist saves boy from well; Christians baffled.

The discussion here just tends to be less absolute about things and considers more viewpoints. Nuanced thought is more highly regarded and rewarded (in terms of voting) and people who post with comments that one would never say to another person in real life tend to get down-voted. So, it stays more cordial. I doubt that the demographics on religion are that much different, but I guess we'll see if more people vote. I think it's that it's a smaller community, we recognize people's usernames more often, and you don't have to shout to be heard.
No matter what you do and how you do it: most likely it will work for some people and won't work for others. If you do what just works for you, that's probably sufficient to be successful.

As merrick33 pointed out, it will not hurt to listen to people like 37signals or Joel Spolsky and be inspired by their best ideas. Just don't blame them if goes wrong for you.
I'm up to about a dozen full notebooks. I've settled in on the Eureka Lab Books, gridded, of course. Now that I've discovered jetpens.com, I can get really nice micro-fine point gel pens, so they look great. When someone new drops by my office the notebooks are noticed right away.

I don't seem to have enough discipline these days to fill in the TOC, or have important events countersigned. I do manage to fill the pages and date 'em, which does come in handy in patent depositions.

Biggest downside is the lack of backup and no way to do a text search. I'm too lazy to scan and OCR, but maybe someday!
Hypothesis: Your opinion of friend based social networks is a direct reflection on the people you surround yourself with, and thus a reflection of your opinion of yourself. I rather like Twitter...
Higher Order PHP
You're probably thinking about this NYT article: http://www.nytimes.com/2009/02/01/fashion/01generationb.html

An important point is that the teachers in the 100k range have been teachers for 30 years. Starting salaries are much different.
Exploring Windows 7 on the Mac: the Taskbar
> Majoring in subjects that lead to careers with more job seekers than jobs and taking out student loans is are bad ideas.

Too many people think of college as just career preparation. But an education can be useful during the hours of your life when you are not in the office, too. Someone with a degree in history might not be able to get a job as a historian, but I'll bet you they will be more interesting at parties than someone who majored in accounting, works as an accountant, and spends his idle hours watching cable TV.

By the way, history majors learn all sorts of skills that are useful in other fields; these people synthesize conclusions from large bodies of contradictory facts. If I were hiring intelligence analysts, or investigators, I would look seriously at a historian.
Thanks, enjoyed the first part, and I'll look forward to reading the rest later.
The Drag drop Upload add-on takes care of that quite nicely.

https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/2190
Googling around to find out if the logo is in fact a real Game of Life (it seems to be), I run into this description of the hashlife algorithm which enables high performance Game of Life simulations:

http://www.ddj.com/hpc-high-performance-computing/184406478

(DDJ article found in this reddit thread: http://www.reddit.com/r/programming/comments/7t97o/golly_a_c...)
If they are going to commit suicide, I'd of course try to convince them not to and provide them all the help they can get. It's not really a proper analogy as there is a healthier way to have sex (even if you think it is immoral) and it's hard to find a healthy way to commit suicide as it involves the termination of your health.

However, if they do commit suicide, and they proposed that they wanted to do it by blowing themselves up on a schoolbus; or doing it peacefully alone at their house; I'd be much more against the schoolbus example as it takes other lives with it (and thus is less healthy to society). I'd say I think suicide is a terrible thing, do everything I could to help or convince them otherwise, but ultimately if someone really wants to kill themselves they can and will. I'd advise them that if they are going to do it, they should hurt as little people in the process as possible. I think not telling them that suicide bombing is worse than suicide alone in your home would be rather immoral. As much as I need to convince them not to commit suicide, I need to convince them almost more they shouldn't commit suicide and in the process kill other people.

To make the analogy fit a bit better we are going to assume that the person having sex and the person who wants to commit suicide aren't suffering from some psychological disorder (which puts both situations on a bit different grounds).

Also remember having sex with condoms is equivalent of trying to commit suicide with a gun that has a very very very low percentage of killing you (I'd argue driving your car to work has a much higher percentage of killing you, than having safe sex, where you and your partners are responsible and get tested regularly for STD's) and sex brings with it pleasurable benefits that suicide does not.

So in review, poor analogy.
I'm surprised nobody mentioned that services like Salesforce that charge per user SaaS could easily not bill "idle" users that don't login, or possibly operate below some threshold.

I think swombat's point about balancing adoption and profit is a good one. For example the US pharmo-giants miss out on the market of millions of Africans who need really cheap drugs because they are seemingly too afraid of cheap imports. It's not the production cost it's their refusal to lower the "value price" to an appropriate level in that market.
Interesting and a worthwhile effort.
I'm with you. I still do the TOC, but often it's retrospectively (relaxing in the evening with not much going on, paging through and indexing). I prefer gridded, but don't want to fork over the extra $ so I'm with regular spiral notebooks now. Separate ones for separate endeavors.
From the Design of UKE to Google, Modular Innovation and More Portability
Why The $900 Billion Stimulus Won't Help Design
Implementing LINQ on the .NET Micro Framework
Well I once kept a notebook (I called it "White Noise Log") in which I recorded all the dilbertian stuff that went on in the company I was working for at the time, along with some supporting doodles and cartoons, all indexed by date and time. I get a good laugh out of it once in a while.
I don't think we get the actual HBO channel here in Canada, but The Movie Network (TMN) has a channel dedicated to HBO shows and you can get them On Demand for free. They also carry the On Demand for the Space (Sci-Fi) channel here. So we get HBO bundled into the movie package, which was a total of $35 a month IIRC, but with 5 people in the house we do get through a lot of movies so it actually has good value for money, especially as they get most of the recent movies and the actual movie rental costs ~$5, it only takes 7 rentals a month to get your moneys worth.
$1000 over break-even would be wonderful. I'm nowhere near that point and yet I've saved more than enough to buy a few new alternators or flights to Tucson.
The fringe protestant sects of the Southeast are the American animists, the lowest common denominator of populism and religion. Their practices are often used as examples by the anti-religious left because of their untempered boldness in opposition to some results of science. However, they do not represent the whole of religious experience, and they could not, given that the scientific advances of the last thousand years have coincided with a deeply religious world. And, it should be noted that the scientific knowledge of the rural poor is probably below average anyway, before taking religion into account.

I'm actually impressed at the reasonableness of the discussion so far on this thread. Geeks often bristle at the mention of religion, largely due to the anti-intellectualism mongered by some of those rural protestant sects. The last time there was a thread on an article mentioning religion, the discussion quickly turned hostile and the article was deaded. This time, things went better due to the early appearance of reasonable and calm voices. Color me impressed.

The ability to discuss a religious topic in a calm and rational manner is a hallmark of intellectual maturity, especially on the internet.

Edit: Nevermind. This article went dead too, despite the good quality of the discussion thread. It looks like there is no place for religion on Hacker News. Maybe that's a good thing.
37Signals and Joel's Fog Creek are well-known brands and cargo cults onto themselves. I think startups should consider following an emerging startup/marketing/entrepreneurial brand: Balsamiq/Peldi Guilizzoni (balsamiq on HN)

"Balsamiq Roadmap for 2009"
http://www.balsamiq.com/blog/?p=539

"A Look Back at 2008"
http://www.balsamiq.com/blog/?p=531

"Startup Marketing Advice from Balsamiq Studio"
http://www.balsamiq.com/blog/?p=198

"Profitable after 3 weeks"
http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=247720
Fogcreek has one good product and same with 37Signals, people seem to want to be like them believing that of would help them make sucessfull products. No matter how good a writer you are if you don't have useful products that solve some real problems you just won't be sucessful like them. Blogging, Twitted yeah they will help you but won't make your product an overnight sucess.
This guy has gone to the zoo and interviewed all the animals. The tiger says that the secret to success is to live alone, be well disguised, have sharp claws and know how to stalk. The snail says that the secret is to live inside a solid shell, stay small, hide under dead trees and move slowly around at night. The parrot says that success lies in eating fruit, being alert, packing light, moving fast by air when necessary, and always sticking by your friends.

His conclusion: These animals are giving contradictory advice! And that's because they're all "outliers".

But both of these points are subtly misleading. Yes, the advice is contradictory, but that's only a problem if you imagine that the animal kingdom is like a giant arena in which all the world's animals battle for the Animal Best Practices championship [1], after which all the losing animals will go extinct and the entire world will adopt the winning ways of the One True Best Animal. But, in fact, there are a hell of a lot of different ways to be a successful animal, and they coexist nicely. Indeed, they form an ecosystem in which all animals require other, much different animals to exist.

And it's insane to regard the tiger and the parrot and the snail as "outliers". Sure, they're unique, just as snowflakes are unique. But, in fact, there are a lot of different kinds of cats and birds and mollusks, not just these three. Indeed, there are creatures that employ some cat strategies and some bird strategies (lions: be a sharp-eyed predator with claws, but live in communal packs). The only way to argue that tigers and parrots and snails are "outliers" is to ignore the existence of all the other creatures in the world, the ones that bridge the gaps in animal-design space and that ultimately relate every known animal to every other known animal.

So, yes, it's insane to try to follow all the advice on the Internet simultaneously. But that doesn't mean it's insane to listen to 37signals advice, or Godin's advice, or some other company's advice. You just have to figure out which part of the animal kingdom you're in, and seek out the best practices which apply to creatures like you. If you want to be a stalker, you could do worse than to ask the tiger for some advice.

---

[1] The ants are gonna win. Hölldobler and Wilson told me so.
AWESOME-O !
Nice, concise cheat sheet. Wish I'd had this 12 months ago. Thanks for sharing.
http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=469831
"Giorgio, I'm not aware of any particular issues, but no one has released bug-free code yet, and I'll bet my career that NoScript is no different. Every security protection product falls under the same security threats and problems as any other software, sometimes more so."

Saying something poses "risks" without quantifying those risks or weighing them against the benefits of the software is a bit disingenuous. It's as if a food critic said, "Chez jgfoot's food tastes good, at the same time it comes with health dangers," and then when pressed protested that all he was saying was that the perfect food has not been invented yet.
This is killer. Such a simple (and sharp) tool written for PHP is ideal for managing/debugging bloated framework/CMS X while also automating redundant-administrative operations from the bottom-up. Thanks for sharing; considering the potential of something this + Kohana could inspire some top-notch web apps, if not, at least some elegant back-to-the-basics way to code. EDIT: I think the expression I'm looking for is, straight-forward code control helps control project chaos, which is an inevitable side-effect for anything ambitious in PHP.
Morality is an evolved adaptation. The ultimate purpose of morality is to maximize your own utility. There is no reason why any human being would care about a bunch of crystalline insect-like aliens. Practically, human empathy circuits would never span to such alien aliens considering how easy it is to turn it off for other humans whom we consider to be an out-group. From a game theoretical perspective there is no utility gained from sacrificing humans so that some crystal bugs conform to our social values. The correct move from a game theoretic perspective is to ally with the Babyeaters since they are friendly and could be of use in trade.

This is going to sound like an ad hominem attack, but it seems to me that a majority of the singularity/futurist crowd are more concerned with impressing others with shows of intelligence than any other goal. They sound more like a bunch of male apes strutting around vying for alpha status, perhaps not surprising given that they are almost all male. A comment very much like mine (about the pointlessness of feeling compassion for crystal bugs) was posted on the overcoming bias blog but it received no replies/rebuttals. Rather the comments over there simply accepted the premises of the story without question. I have a great deal of respect for Elizer but his followers are frighteningly cult like.
I don't have a problem with this bill one bit.

There is a time to look good and there is a time to put on the work clothes and get busy and right now is one of those times.

We've been relishing in our own gluttony for years now, building huge homes, pimped out SUVs, getting plastic surgery, and wearing designer clothes on debt.

Now it's time to pay it off without worrying so much about who we are richer than.
JQuery, PHP & Ajax with the Twitter API
"Almost all Americans have sex before marrying, according to premarital sex research that shows such behavior is the norm in the U.S. and has been for the past 50 years."

I do not think the Catholic Church is unaware of this information nor does it dispute its veracity. I don't think you really believe that the Catholic Church is "sex negative," either. They strongly favor the association of sex with procreation, which is different than being against sex altogether. It is a minority viewpoint, but aren't minority viewpoints valuable and worth examining to see if society has gone too far in the opposite direction?

I also find it odd you see Western Culture as "sex negative." I would be surprised if you could name more than a couple popular Western TV shows or movies that endorse anything like the Catholic viewpoint on sex. Or did you mean something else by "sex negative?"
Yes, as a matter of fact $100 per month is a lot of money. Start saving even a little bit now and you'll be surprised at how it adds up. Your college loan payment is so huge that even 3% of it would have a big effect.

By the way, my dentist charges less than $100 per filling. Does the nitrous oxide cost an extra $700? (Ah, I miss getting fillings as a kid.)
Then miss it no more: Both Chrome and Safari support dragging files onto "Choose File" controls :)
Please Solve the Information Redundancy Problem
How is the Church "ignoring science"?

Well how about the continual opposition of safe practises (condom use) even when they've been scientifically proven to help increase the quality of life for the general population (prevention of STD transmission).

I'm not against the church in general, I think people should be allowed to believe in whichever deity they want too, but not at the expense of people's health - which is essentially what they're doing.
Online video's new model - Hulu who?
When I broke my right hand last year I couldn't really use my hands for any sort of typing and spent a lot of time doing code reviews and reading up on libraries/books/languages. Pretty much anything that didn't involve using my hands much. I also took a ton of notes and after the cast was off I then put them all together in a fun blog entry.

http://benjamin-meyer.blogspot.com/2008/07/cast-off.html