skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
You are referencing Rand like she is some sort of god.

I find the best perspective on any topic can be found by merging several different viewpoints.

The flaw in your argument is that often, there is no ISP 2. How does Rand feel about local monopolies? Even if there is an ISP 2, that is not a free market.
Take a look at the Craigslist message boards. You'll find all sorts of customer complaints about how Craigslist has been taken over by spam, in all sorts of areas, including the personals. Offer your site in those cities where the "overtaken by spam" complaints are the loudest and you'll provide a real alternative. There are lots of international destinations as well where you won't find Craigslist.
Wow, you need to find the right 100-year-old books. Literature was if anything better then than it is now.

On the iPhone you get blurbs. I have the same problem with Classics on the iPhone. It makes reading feel cramped. Stanza is even worse: it has awful margins, and it has no support for making paragraphs feel good. It's functional but unpleasant.
I'd rather have new site features than unnecessary iPhone improvements, to be honest.
Here's a little story about Amazon's efficieny from another perspective.

When I applied to Microsoft for a summer internship, the process was: go to info session, submit resume, wait a couple weeks, be asked to schedule an on-campus interview, wait a few days, be invited up to Redmond, schedule flights, fly up to Seattle. Pretty standard, but...

When I applied to Amazon, the process was: Go to career fair, hand them my resume, have my resume looked at for ~20 seconds, be asked to write a C-string function on the back, wait a few days, and be invited for a final round interview on campus.

The point is that they cut out an enormous amount of overhead by recruiting this way. They probably wouldn't get much information out of a typical first round interview or phone screen that they didn't get by asking me to write that function on my resume and keeping an eye on how long it took me. And rather than fly people up to Seattle, they probably just fly 2-4 interviews down here. Amazon strikes me as a very shrewd company in some ways.
Can't dig it up easily.

Gartner expects 80% of internet users will be involved in an online world by 20011 http://www.gartner.com/it/page.jsp?id=503861&format=prin...

Chinese Gold Farmers, a significant population of WoW, play an average of 12-14 hours per day http://www.techcrunch.com/2007/06/20/virtual-goods-the-next-...

I might be able to find the original for the 35-hour quote. If it's bugging you, email me and I'll take some extra time to dig it up.
You're right; that's frustrating. But have you looked at the proposal mockups? They're nothing like that -- they fix design issues with the original site that prevent it from scaling down well. An option to turn them off would be superfluous.
With only three varieties of plants, we can grow our own fresh air indoors, to keep us healthy.

After studying the effects these plants had on air quality for the past 15 years in a building in New Delhi, India it was found that there was a 42% probability of increasing blood oxygen by 1% simply by being in the building for one hour. Compared to other buildings in the city, eye irritation was reduced by 52%, respiratory symptoms down by 34%, headaches by 24%, lung impairment by 12%, and asthma by 9%.

They were also able to reduce the fresh air supplied to the building and still meet industry standards for healthy indoor air, netting a reduction of energy costs by greater than 15%. With buildings consuming 40% of the world’s energy, this is a big deal.
Already posted: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=466315

At least this has the merit of being posted by the author, even if it was posted to HN 3 days ago.
Madame Defarge Watch: Pay Disparity in US Exceeds France Under Its Last King
Gold Farmers are kind of the exception - and they use WoW as a business, so arguably they're not wasting time.

I would bet against Gartner aggressively. They don't understand the technologies they're talking about. Virtual worlds have less to offer than people think.
TCHO Operating Heuristics: You are an owner, act like an owner.
Disclaimer: this is intended as Helpful criticism :)

First off I 100% love the idea behind the site.

But am in agreement with the other posters here. You've ignored several basic design rules.

Firstly (and for me killer) the content is not centred on larger screens. In my experience this instantly puts users off.

Also, as people are saying, the typefaces are too mixed. You also dont highlight links particularly well (the [+] thing is a nice idea but a) doesn't work so well when done in text and b) doesn't seem standard enough).

I like how you've gone for minimal design: in fact I think it is almost perfect. Except on the main page (and probably other pages) the top sectuion (the one under the very top set of links and above the mian content) needs to contrast more. Some kind of "glossy" image style would work much better (especially on the main page). This example (http://codeigniter.com/) is the only one I can think of right now (and it is not the best one; but it suffices to illustrate what I mean).

I have some other thoughts/comments too but unfortunately don't have time (sorry) - others will definitely come up with them though :D
I have to disagree on all counts. In roughly reverse order:

focusing on code size is possibly misleading

It's not the best metric, but it's close enough in this case. The whole problem is that large commercial (and some open-source) systems are in the millions of lines of code. What is all that code doing?

code size does not exactly equal orthogonality

One implies the other, at least in the way they've phrased the problem. Their goal is to build everything using only 20,000 lines of code. This means they have a strict overall budget and therefore cannot afford any duplication anywhere.

They weren't required to change the stack

You can't go from millions of lines to 20,000 by making incremental changes. The whole system from the ground-up has to be rebuilt with the code budget in mind.

they should have waited until they hit beautiful enough technology that would require such a change

They would be waiting forever. At some point, you have to dive in. Nothing good ever gets built without several iterations. Combine this with the fact that frameworks and languages are best built simultaneously with the applications that will use them (so that the levels of abstraction are correctly tuned), and I think their approach is perfect. By being forced to consider all levels of the stack, they achieve all of these goals.

Incidentally, they're not hoping to get the system built in one go. They're "building [at least] one to throw away", as Brooks said. They are building a rough version of the system (over-budget on lines) to see where the problems are. Then, they will use this first system to build the real thing.

At its heart, this project seems like an ideal way to do research into computing systems. Take on a daring project which will require many innovative ideas -- some small, some large -- while making sure that you're always tied to reality by having concrete goals and need to have some sort of a working system at all times.
Sometimes denormalizing a database is okay. But when you get into programmatically mucking with CSV data in a field, you probably have pushed things a bit too far.
On Code - The plan to become a better social network
Simplistically, tail call optimisation is an automated way to convert recursion into iteration. You could do that by hand for any tail call recursive function, whether you do so is a function of style and the language you are using.
My, how ready we all are to give up our liberty.

Regulations on the behavior of companies reduces choice (only large companies can afford the legions of lawyers required to comply with them; small competitors go out of business). The only regulation we need is the regulation to tell the truth -- you don't tell the truth, you are sued out of business. The end. Yet, this is the only regulation we do not have, or that the government is unwilling to uphold.

If governments would concern themselves with enforcing the rule of law, and upholding the sanctity of contracts, we would all be better off. But, since large companies can buy political friends (through lobbying) and legal protection against fraudulently advertising services which they do not intend to deliver (through teams of lawyers) but small, efficient companies cannot, we therefore lose our freedom of choice -- by our own hand.
Ha, I knew that one would provoke a response. Click fraud is a very real problem with AdSense that I wish drew more attention.

I'm going to stop now because this is diverging into a pissing match of sorts, but I've been in the business of making money with online advertising myself long enough to feel qualified to comment and pay my bills.
is this really easier than face recognition? Or that retinal identification thing? I guess it's pretty hard to fake your eyes too. Perhaps brain pattern recognition would help keep out robert downey jr. in tropic thunder..
My first company was started back in 1996 and was acquired in 1998. It seems commonplace now, but we were the first company to create a service for web-based closed membership communities. The service we were developing had photo albums, calendaring, really advanced messaging boards, an app store, etc. The company (founded in Seattle) was called "Throw," but, most likely, you wouldn't have heard of it because it was acquired before we launched our service. We were one of the five on-stage companies at the Demo conference back in '98 and within days of being on-stage, after years of not being able to get anyone's attention, we (there were six of us) were suddenly being courted by both top-tier VCs and the top three search engines/portals at the time. We chose to be acquired by Excite.com (which is no longer the company that it was). Even though it was only two years from start to finish, it was a long psychological slog and the reason we made it through was because the team was 100% dedicated to our success no matter what the cost. One member of the team had over ten maxxed-out credit cards on the day we were acquired (I didn't find that out until afterwards -- no one ever complained about not getting paid). Before the Demo conference, I had to ask one of my very best friends for a substantial loan to keep the company afloat until the conference. He lent me the money without question. When we were acquired a couple of months later, I gave him double what I borrowed because, without that money, we would have shut down. There are dozens of war stories, but I won't bore you with the details.

The second company, NeoMeo, was also acquired before it launched. I co-founded that company back in 2000 (in New York City). It was doing Xobni-type things, but revolved more around making sense of message content. Our service could do things like recognize dates in emails (expressed in various ways), recognize phone numbers, create photo albums from your inbox, etc. We eventually sold the company to Postini which was eventually acquired by Google (for cash), so my friends who made investments in that company also did okay from a return-on-investment perspective.

What am I doing now? To be honest, I'm having issues locking onto a single idea. The fluid nature of the economy has given me pause and caused me to second-guess myself more often than I normally would. I have a few solid ideas but haven't committed to one of them yet. So, for now, I've become an architecture astronaut of sorts ( http://www.joelonsoftware.com/articles/fog0000000018.html ) and I'm just enjoying the thing I love to do the most: designing and implementing an architecture to keep my skills sharp.

For some reason, I'm reminded of the old joke which I will no-doubt butcher: Did you hear about the programmer who was found dead in the shower? He was holding a shampoo bottle that read "Wash. Rinse. Repeat."
How to accept OpenID in a popup without leaving the page
Amazing colored fluid photography
My daughter is 6 now and we approach her swearing EXACTLY the same way that you do. She is in 2nd grade now and knows that swearing is not appropriate at school. She also knows that it isn't appropriate at certain relatives' houses (one set of grandparents; at the other set, it's ok). At some relatives' places, it's perfectly ok. At some of her friends' houses it's no problem; at others' it would not go over well. Stephy (my daughter) knows that swearing is entirely and completely acceptable at home at all times, so she exercises that right with a full range of expletives, without punishment, at home. She has learned where it is appropriate and where it isn't from growing up with it from day one of learning to speak.So-called "swear words" have always just been normal words for her, with a healthy sprinkling of knowing when and where to use them properly (for example, she knows, even at home, that it isn't acceptable to swear AT someone; that is literally her only limitation on it. But "conversational swearing" is perfectly fine and normal at home all the time). She has never crossed the line or been inappropriate, and I don't suspect that she ever will. She is growing up with a full range of colorful words at her disposal, but also with the intelligence to know when to use them. To us, that is the way it should be and we are perfectly content with letting her swear to her heart's content anytime she wants at home.
Aaronson Reviews Princeton Companion to Mathematics
World of Warcraft is addicting for sure, but i think it's easy to miss the fact that the core of the game -- the combat -- is very well-designed. if it weren't, i don't think the game would be any where near as popular as it is

whenever i played it the only thing i did was play against other players, because the combat was "strategic" and "street smart"ish for lack of a better term. but it's easy to miss that as a noob or just looking at the game from the outside

WoW doesn't require too much thinking, but thinking will make a huge difference. some parts of the game (player vs player arena for example) are practically chess matches, with the caveat that your moves can fail you (for various reasons) which means being on your toes is just as important as strategy and "street smarts"
We didn't take anything too small because we were trying to keep the number of formal investors to a minimum. For smaller amounts, in the $1000 to $2000 range, I asked my friends to loan me the money. When friends of invested in a formal round, the sums were higher than that. I don't remember the exact numbers, but probably in the $5000 to $10,000 range -- and, at that, I only asked a few friends. Basically, I asked them to come up with an amount to where, if they lost it all, they wouldn't hate me. :-)

But, remember, if you're going to keep everything clean from a legal perspective, anyone who invests who is not an employee has to be an "accredited investor." See: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=373366
I guess we can disagree on the quality of old books. There are a lot of great classics. Don't get me wrong. I wouldn't argue that only new books are worth reading, but if there are 500,000 100+ year old books available, I would still argue that 499,100 wouldn't be interesting to almost anyone outside of maybe research purposes. But hey, that's 100 free interesting books, right?
The Superior Civilization: E.O. Wilson's latest book on ants
Ask HN: Perfect language to use for hopefully widespread Unix prog?
Imagine you need to write a program (script, if you like), which needs to run on as many *nix clones as possible out of the box.

Which language would you choose ?

Perl, Shell, C/C++ with binaries pre-compiled ?
I know less about popular music of a century ago. But in literature, at least, the market for fiction has shrunk enormously, and most people no longer read anything so challenging as they used to.

Worse, the market for challenging videogames is diminishing rapidly, as well. Decent simulation or strategy games get hardly any press. My cofounder (incidentally, the creator of the Tonk Hawk Pro Skater franchise), describes it as due to a market reality. There are more people out there who want largely prepackaged entertainment. There are vastly more avid Guitar Hero players than guitarists, or skateboard game playing people than skateboarders. I think it's kind of sad. I just hope that not every domain of experience will become trivialized in simulation, in future.
The only improvement I can think of is to set the pre areas to wrap. Right now they completely ruin browsing on the iphone, as they make the screen way too wide and this makes the font way too small.
RiderOfGiraffes, thank you. Couldn't find a "search box", hence the somewhat duplicate entry. The page posted today should be more useful to readers, as it has many more actionable details. The talk was given by my father.
I'm definately buying this one - here's the money quote

"Parallels between the ants and ourselves are striking for the light they shed on the nature of everyday human experiences. Some ants get forced into low-status jobs and are prevented from becoming upwardly mobile by other members of the colony. Garbage dump workers, for example, are confined to their humble and dangerous task of removing rubbish from the nest by other ants who respond aggressively to the odors that linger on the garbage workers' bodies."
The Lua way is to add a few meta-features to the language that let you extend it with other features as necessary, rather than building it in.* It keeps the core language small, fast, and easy to understand. You can build an object system, complete with an elaborate meta-object protocol or whatever, and then just shove in a library and take it for granted, if you want. (Where you felt an acute lack of an OO system, I was missing map, fold, and the maybe monad.) Besides, having the flexibility to reinvent means you can also invent.

Sometimes an object system is useful, but sometimes it just gets in the way, and I don't think such things should be in the core language.
false advertising is the oldest trick in the book for telecomms. http://www.newnetworks.com/tellthetruthverizon.htm

network neutrality is a lot more serious than any type of false advertising a telecomm can put out. as consumers, if we're smart enough to see that our service plans aren't 100mbps, ok no big deal. yes, they're both evil, but false advertising isn't really even part of network neutrality as a debate.

now if we have no say in how fast certain websites respond, depending on how much we're paying (or they're paying), that's an entirely different topic. i can walk away from a provider if they're lying through advertising. but who's going to stop them from throttling your connection based on which website you're visiting?

legislation is the only thing that can stop the big 3 from this type of thing. you'll notice that in the past, the FCC has actually punished traffic discrimination (like when comcast was shutting off bit torrent, a complete violation of neutrality rules). if there's no legislation, the duopolies can do whatever they want and all have a big orgy price gauging at the same time.
check out this demo too: http://openid-demo.appspot.com/
I have this book in my amazon wishlist: http://tinyurl.com/ag2gog :)
Everyone has access to RSS, but so what? Most people don't use RSS.
It depends - are you prototyping by making wireframes in an image editor or prototyping by coding up a rough working copy? If you're a designer and prefer mocking stuff up in Fireworks or Photoshop, then you should have the chops to build upon the gray boxes and text and layer in effects to add visual polish. If you're a coder and would rather create crude functional demos first, then you should have the html/css chops to layer in visual polish via background images or etc.

Either way, designer or coder, it helps to concentrate on the rough functionality first and then layer things in later, like typography, logos, icons, color schemes and other visual polish.

I'm giving a talk at Adobe in about a week and a half on the subject of rapid prototyping in Fireworks, I think there'll be a screencast or video going on, for anyone interested:

http://www.meetup.com/Fire-On-The-Bay/calendar/9583191/

And don't just take my word for it, Mark Boulton's got a great PDF book out with the same approach, if you're interested in improving your process as a designer:

http://www.fivesimplesteps.co.uk/
you can download the code for that demo:
http://subtextual.org/subtext2.zip
Eh... it's mediocre at best. Use mobile google reader on safari to see a great experience.
People use anything and everything to take advantage of other people. That was my point.

If I came on here and started saying how we need to get rid of computer networks because they just provide more mechanisms of control, I would be downvoted to oblivion.

Painting mysticism as bad because of how some people us it against the gullible is pretty poor reason to be "appalled" by it, but it's one that happens to appeal to the biases of the hacker mind. But if you want to do more than pay lip service to objectivity you ought to think it over a little more carefully.
Parallels between the ants and ourselves [...] Some ants get forced into low-status jobs and are prevented from becoming upwardly mobile by other members of the colony.

Is that what U.S. society is like?
From MIT OCW, here's some more material on DSP from a course taught by the illustrious Prof. Alan Oppenheim himself in Fall 2005:

Discrete-Time Signal Processing:
http://ocw.mit.edu/OcwWeb/Electrical-Engineering-and-Compute...
False analogy: Heroin does not have significant positive side-effects (at least not in a monetary sense). Ie. it cannot make you more productive. Technology on the other hand does.
No problem, I like the rough idea. It'd be great (for example) to revisit the same topic with the same screenshots and focus in on a specific UI element, like maybe the one sentence tagline that was there on the initial version and then came and went in later iterations.
Notice that she only believes that she deserves to be helped simply because the banks are being helped. I can understand her frustration: if I couldn't pay my mortgage because I lost my job and couldn't find work and at the same time I saw banks being bailed out with my tax dollars, I'd sure expect some help too.
"Video games aren't big mental exercises. Then again, neither is reading a book in and of itself, or watching a movie, or talking to somebody. You get what you want to out of it."

Agreed. Also, some books are stimulating, but some are really vapid. Generalizing about any medium as a whole is probably a bad idea, except in relation to the factors shaping it. For example, I think that media which makes money by holding your attention long enough to expose you to ads (some tv and blogs, most magazines) have a strong incentive to produce content that grabs your attention but isn't necessarily deep.
Drugs: The one that makes us feel the best wins.

Music: The one that gets noticed over the clutter wins.

Games: The one that's the best at giving us the illusion of social status and accomplishment wins.

None of these things are really competing against each other, because the hook for each is targeting a different need.

And I do think there is a way out. Change our environment so that our lives aren't so hollow and empty. The reason these addictions take hold is because, for example, people are accomplishing absolutely zero in their lives so they need the fake feeling of accomplishment and respect from hitting level 60 in WoW. If we re-engineer society so that people actually have an opportunity to make friends, do productive work, get exercise, etc. these things won't be nearly as dangerous as they are today.