skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
AFAIK, the OP did NOT request your intervention (I am sure the OP's skin is thicker than yours, so to say). You are making a storm in a teacup. BTW, I was not mocking the OP, in case you haven't figured it out yet. Borrowing a British expression, I was taking the piss.

Born and raised in Western Europe, I have lived some time in a 3rd world country. I have seen the most annoying condescending gaze on the faces of so many American and British expats who claim to be very sensitive to cultural issues, but who actually never bother to interact with the locals. Going for a game of crickett at the private club is more fun than hanging out with the local "savages".

I admire people who work hard and get stuff done with minimum means, regardless of their race or nationality. Period.
I agree. It is very risky. When I made that decision, I basically told myself "what is the worst that could happen?" The answer was "lose my house and rental properties, declare bankruptcy, screw up my credit score". Then I thought "that's not too bad." I graduated in 1999 with zero money and got to where I am, so I can probably do it again in half the time.
I would say constancy is more important that confidence. It's simply dull, constant practice that gets you to be perfect in a certain skill, not confidence (and I'm speaking with experience as a hard sciences student). Advice from business-people is inapplicable to us science students most of the time.
At my day job, we use linear programming to calculate virtual capacities on airplanes, i.e. overbooking. There's a few other optimization techniques involved, such as dynamic progamming, but if you've ever been asked to take a different plane, chances are an LP was involved.
Thanks Pierre for your insightful & open response.

I was considering building a business-class url shortener this week (mostly to learn Metal which comes with Rails 2.3 & Sinatra) and what I had in mind was something very similar to cligs. I was thinking of monetizing it exactly the same way with analytics. Looks like you guys have done a fantastic job with it. Congrats on some solid execution!
Windows 7 adds ability to remove IE, Search, Media Player
Makes sense. I had never thought of it from that POV. I can't take back what I wrote, though. Personally, if someone made a joke implying that I was doing something illegal, I would not be offended at all (unless I was, in fact, doing something illegal), but it seems not everyone's skin is as thick as mine. Cheers.
I don't see the asymmetry.

Having a downvote on stories simply accelerates the divergence of good stories and bad ones... it doesn't add any information, and in fact gives undo power to early voters. An early downvote would prevent a story from ever having a chance at the front page. (It's hard enough to get people to read the 'new' page as it is... they aren't going to read something that is five minutes old and already at -1.)

If comments could 'fall off' the page like stories can, they wouldn't need a downvote either. Also, there are fewer stories than comments, so they are easier to watch by the editors. Downvotes on comments let users help out the editors a bit.

Personally, I'd rather not have downvotes on comments either. Being able to flag trollish things is enough. If I simply don't agree, I should reply or vote up an opposing comment rather than simply downvote with no explanation.
It's been 1 year and you're broke. Where do you plan on spending your time, on Yonkly and the book? Do you have any other next steps?

Great story and congrats on your engagement!
While I know that marijuana relieves pain for certain, very specific illnesses, to say that it is a general pain relief alternative is quite naive.

As to whether or not it is an adequete antidepressant, you believe what you want. I don't know of any evidence to support its effectiveness in that category of drugs.
No updates for a year. Abandoned?
Messaging/queuing/publishing-subscribing is required in an incredible number of complex applications, especially at the enterprise level. Consider, for instance, trading floor and backend systems.
You best go buy "Mad World" (Wii) tomorrow..Time to dust of the old Wii!
I suspect tinyurl's hosting account costs more than $5
Aviary Acquires Browser-Based Audio Editor Digimix
Yes, it does belong here, because it's interesting, and it's not like Hacker News is flooded with drug stories. It's okay to have the occasional off-topic article if it's one of the best of its genre.

There have also been intelligent, interesting stories about Ron Paul on Hacker News. For example this one ;-)

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=76469
The counter argument is that this might be true in expectation. If we caught and executed 1 out of every 50 drug users, maybe the rest would stop using. If being on drugs is half as bad as being dead, then on net you've saved 23.5 lives for every 50 users.

This is, of course, a very flimsy argument, which I would not stand by under any circumstances. But I think a better take on the subject would be "penalties against drug possession should be a net win for society", rather than what Carter said.
“It might sound scary initially, but it would almost be on life support,” he said. “It would probably be highly dependent on someone feeding it 30 or more small molecules. It wouldn’t be likely to escape into the environment and run amok.”

"almost," "probably," "wouldn't be likely" -- those words don't exactly inspire confidence.

Amazing breakthrough though.
Right on!. I'm with you. However, probably not recommended with kids or medical problems.

But for everyone else, as long as you can get over the ego parts -- you will have to give up going to nice places for dinner, driving nice cars, having big houses, new toys, vacations etc, all the way to bankruptcy, as you said -- then it is worth it.
Do entrepreneurs need more pats on the back for success?
PCs should be smaller like the mac mini.

I still don't understand how a case needs to be that big and be 90% empty, making shipping costs 6 times higher.

Asus came and won with the eee for laptops, Apple had the idea with the iMac and mac mini but the prices are prohibiting in times of crisis. Dell missed the boat and is struggling to survive.

I don't believe in subsidized PCs, I believe in efficiency.

Time is ripe...
To make an analogy, it is similar to supporting sweat shop labor by buying Nikes (or whatever companies still use sweat shop labor). The argument in the case of illegal drugs is that handing over money to people engaged in violence makes it more likely the violence will continue.
As for pain, I don't think it functions as a direct substitute for opiates but in combination with opiates lower doses are needed for the same antinociceptive effect. It is probably a more direct treatment for certain kinds of nerve pain.

Price shouldn't really be an object for people that are depressed: Wal-mart has a number of generic anti-depressants available for $4 and $10 for a 90 day prescription. The doctors' appointments are more expensive than the drugs themselves. Depressed people need marijuana like they need large amounts of alcohol. It would be a terrible thing if large numbers of depressed people starting self-medicating with marijuana, medical cannabis's #1 negative side effect is the tendency to exacerbate underlying mental health conditions. The anxiety/paranoia caused is very real and doesn't mix very well with depression. http://i.walmartimages.com/i/if/hmp/fusion/customer_list.pdf

The marijuana growers in CA definitely benefit financially from the current state of affairs. Right now things are just about ideal. I would still bet that the majority of them would prefer their industry to made legitimate, despite the repercussions on their revenue. It's a political/belief thing. The price fall to tobacco levels (no government subsidies + evil tax) will take years during which profits are sky high. There will be price fixing.

If I was a top marijuana grower and cannabis was legalized, I would be on the phone to the tobacco companies immediately offering my skills as a high paid consultant. It will be interesting to see what happens, I fully expect cannabis to become legal during Obama's second term. Or at least for medical marijuana to be legal in the majority of the states.
Does he have a reason for why he sold the company? He said he wanted a change, but what change was he looking for? This article seems half done.
After you're finished that cosmo-style psyhology text, take a look at our favion.ico. =)
I find this odd coming from someone who is known for highlighting profanity in presentations - which seems at least as much of a gimmick as a LOLcat.

Not that I care - I enjoy Rails and generally find DHH a fine speaker when I've seen him at RailsConfs - but it does seem mildly hypocritical to me.
It's the fault of the server reading the host header. I'll fix it now.
It is probable that there would be more drug use if drugs were legalized. (This is acknowledged in the article.) However, its not clear at all if related crime and accidents would go up. Looking to the example of alcohol prohibition, crime went sharply down when it was re-legalized. Many people die as a result of alcohol use while driving every year, so it seems possible that accidents from driving on drugs would increase with legalization. (This could be mitigated to some degree by harsh penalties for driving under the influence.) In general, I am puzzled as to why alcohol should be treated differently than other drugs.
The iPhone Springboard in CSS3 (no JavaScript)
Thanks :) There is a lot more coming with Cligs soon that will enable me to roll out services to compete more aggressively or respond faster. As I said, it's a competitive market!

But the existence of Cligs or the many other great (and some not so good) alternatives is no reason that you shouldn't create your own. It's a matter of what you want from the project and how it fits with your business/life/CV strategy.
I agree. Reddit started to get really messed up when the "silly pictures" posts were allowed to dominate the front page. Those posts attracted more of the same, and the change in the comments that followed should not have been a shock to anyone--the same people upvoting the picture of the "jesus toast" were the same ones making stupid comments.

However, all of this is missing the main point: for a site to be popular (lots of eye balls) and be able to sell itself to a large media company for a large sum of cash, it needs to appeal to more than a small, coherent community. Reddit changed because their founders wanted to cash out. HN isn't changing because you have no (apparent) goal of cashing out, and are thus willing to keep HN as it is.
It has lasted everywhere where there are high-speed trains. Check-in, security checkpoints, and boarding 300 people through one tiny door are all exclusive to air travel. When you take the train, you buy your ticket from a machine, put it in a turnstile to access the platform, and then wait until your train pulls in. Then you board through one of the 20-or-so doors that is closest to your seat. It's really that simple, and it has been that way for years.

Remember, America is almost 45 years behind the rest of the world here. The first Shinkansen in Japan went 130mph and started carrying passengers in 1964. We still don't have anything like that (except Acella), in 2009.
Every sigmoid looks like an exponential curve early on.
You're correct in the sense that eventually train security will approach airline security and take just as long, but trains still have the advantage of being able to load and unload faster (there are more doors and they are generally more spacious) and baggage doesn't have to be handled by a crew... each passenger can carry on his own bags and stow them.

Also, once you are on a train, the crew doesn't have to spend as much time doing pre-departure stuff like checking seatbacks/belts/tray tables and running through the safety instructions that no one listens to.

Lastly, they have a slight advantage (when run well) of being pretty darn consistent on departure and arrival times, meaning riders don't have to leave as much fudge time. In my experience, if you only have a carry-on, you can catch a plane by showing up an hour early, but you can catch a train by showing up 30 mins early (I'm thinking of the Eurostar, where security is similar to an airport).

Personally I think the big advantage is passenger comfort. The comfort level of a high speed train, even in 2nd class, is better than first class on a plane. There is more space, you can stand/sit/walk at will, and there is actually something to look at besides a white ocean of clouds. Not to mention the bathrooms aren't the size of high school lockers.
I Clepped basically an entire year of university. Higher education serves two purposes: Learning, and credentialing. And there's certainly faster ways to learn - so that leaves you with the credential. The cheaper and faster you can get it if you want that one, the faster you can get out into the world and do cool things.
That's a very good point. For the MantisBT project, we were interested in moving from SVN (after our initial move away from CVS) to a DVCS, and Git's excellent `git-svn` layer allowed us to experiment with using Git while still working on a day-to-day basis within our central SVN repository. It was an extremely useful method of evaluating a new source control tool, with reliable usage in pulling from and committing directly to the underlying SVN repository.
This is much lower level and doesn't require javascript to work. (Ignoring the fact that the demo is an in-browser javascript http server). So, it's not comet.

The problem is that this isn't supported by any clients that are in wide-spread use, so you can't just load up a webpage and see a demo.

The advantage of this type of approach only becomes clear when you are using a lower-level http client library to access resources. It gives the server a chance to poll the client for information, without using Javascript. For browser approaches, this may not matter. However, for lower-infrastructure things, this approach is great.

I've used a very similar technique to link compute nodes to a job server where the compute nodes were behind a NAT. This eliminated any long polling required and still allowed the server to query the nodes for their status.

Again, not the type of thing where you're running anything in a browser, but I wanted to use HTTP as the protocol for simplicity, and needed a way for the server to talk to a client behind a NAT.

Now the down side is that you basically have to rewrite a web server in order for this to work. I'm not sure if this could be bolted on. You also need some sort of session management built in, so you can pair incoming (client->server) requests and outgoing (server->client) requests. And then you need a client library that can spin up it's own http server and handle it's own requests.

In my case, I was able to write everything from scratch. But I doubt my code would scale very well. I'm also not sure that in this case it isn't better to just make a new protocol. There is a lot of hackery required to get this to work, and I doubt you'll see web browsers support anything like this.
Sure. Vitamins fix vitamin deficiencies. That's a special case, and it does not apply to the rest of us. In fact, too much vitamins can damage health.

You could argue that breathing more air improves heath ... because it works for people who are underwater.
The building it was originally made at in Y-12 (called facility 9404-11) was torn down in 2004. The nasty solvent (which metabolises in the body into cyanide) called acetonitrile, of which Wikipedia claims there is supposedly a world shortage as the sole remaining factory producing it was shut down in 2008 (to reduce pollution) for the Olympics.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Acetonitrile

http://www.armscontrolwonk.com/1814/fogbank

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Teller%E2%80%93Ulam_design
We cannot live by scepticism alone
It seems that I can't respond directly to newt0311's response to you, because the post is "[dead]". But I just wanted to say that had he started with this level of analysis, he might not have gotten so many down mods or at least got his more serious points noticed. Studies on recidivism rates are very relevant to this discussion, and it is disappointing that citations to serious studies about it are now grayed out and buried deep in a comment thread. It would be useful for the debate to have some arguments in favor of keeping drugs illegal that include empirical data, and I think newt0311 could have contributed some of that, had he not led with the "kill all the drug users" opinion.

To respond to you, the idea that the solution to the drug problem is the same as the solution to crappy writing is interesting. Not sure I agree, but interesting nonetheless.
Is meeting people one of those things that fall outside of the being relentlessly resourceful category?
Okay. I'll start with this one.
It seems it does based on the voting. We also had a post by Tim Ferriss on the top of the page for nearly two days last week, not programmer specific but it was enjoyed / hated and had a good discussion going on about it.

This site is vastly related to programming and startups, but other topics that are of interest and thought provoking tend to rise up as an interest.

We don't have kittens on the front page, so I consider it a victory.
You know how you tie your shoes every day, but then one day you stop to think of how to tie your shoes and you find that you don't know how! And the only way to tie your shoes is to stop thinking about it and let your muscle memory take over.

That's how reading that article made me feel about social interaction.
mathematica is a reimplementation of similar systems that were already proven to work. alpha is a reimplementation of similar systems that were proven not to work.
Lots of services do this for Twitter already: http://twitturly.com, http://twitturls.com, http://www.tweetmeme.com,...
Jakob Nielsen: Kindle2 Usability Review
Why not just IGNORE instead of DOWNVOTE ?
addiction.
Additional advice:

1) Video tape yourself giving your talk. Tape off a section of your floor, set the camera up on a tripod, and give your talk (complete with powerpoint or whatever you're using). Then watch it. Ask yourself, "Would I want to listen to this person?" Probably the answer is "no". Figure out why, and fix it.

2) Just like you should walk with purpose, your hand should communicate with purpose, too. Too often speakers flail their arms wildly about, rather than using them as a tool of communication.
This is so incoherent I don't where to begin.

> On a less snappy note, I sincerely hope that these two-faced bastards

Less snappy? Am I missing the irony here?

If I understand correctly, the poster thinks paying for recorded music is bad. 360 degree plans? Nonsense that deserves to go out of business. But if a label can't charge for music, and obtaining revenue from other sources is also nonsensical, then pray tell, swombat, where is the money to fund promotion, recording, etc supposed to come from? Should it grow off trees?

> this time by making big payola payouts to music sharing sites

Err, what? It's the music sharing sites that pay the content owners for distributing their content, not vice-versa. And if you'd done at least a iota of independent research, you'd know that the majors (e.g. Warner with youtube) are unhappy with the arrangement because their revenues to date have been minuscule.

> The world doesn't need Big Labels - with or without free recorded music.

The funny thing is you're partially right here: with free recorded music, the world doesn't need labels (not just "Big Labels"), seeing as their raison-d'etre is the creation and monetization of recorded music. Which doesn't make the statement any less silly, paranoid, and juvenile.
What's wrong with http://xml.gov ?
Exactly. Nintendo changed what the player has in her hands. They did it with the N64 (analogue control) and they have done it more radically with the Wii. I think it is Peter Molyneux who has said if you want to innovate in gaming change what the player has in her hands.

Software is important, but ultimately secondary.

I think this will probably be the case in any big changes we see in personal computing as well. The mouse and keyboard work really well for some things, but as new input systems like multitouch and who-knows-what-else come along real changes will begin to pop up in software; not the other way around. Of course you might argue multitouch is a software innovation...
This is a terrible guide for analytical people who over-think things to begin with.

When you first approach an attractive stranger, having established at least an indication of mutual interest through eye contact, try to make eye contact again at about 4ft away, before moving any closer. At 4 ft (about two small steps away), you are on the borderline between what are known as the 'social zone' (4 to 12 ft) and the 'personal zone' (18in to 4ft).

If you're having problems socializing with people, drawing 'zones' around them and following strict rules of interaction isn't going to help.
Usually racism, bigotry and basically any purely ignorant BS gets piled on. An unpopular comment usually only gets downvoted to between -1 and -5, however recently there has been a problem with (I'm assuming) new users downvoting anything they don't like, which thankfully seems to be going away.
A year? 0.3 came out in Nov 08.
How did the web lose faith in charging for stuff?
Actually, in Spain, we had to go through a metal detector to get on train from Sevilla to Madrid. Security wasn't as tight as for airplane boarding, and was very quick, but I was very surprised to find it there at all.