skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
The 1% of people (assuming it's that) "exist to analyze how language is being used?" What does that mean? I'm in the 1% who understand "begs the question." Do I exist to analyze how language is being used?

Nor is the shift of meaning in a word over time identical with people misunderstanding the previous meanings. That type of shift is quite rare. It's much more common for words to shift meaning the way "computer" has than the way "buxom" did.

There's nothing official about dictionaries, incidentally. They describe usage (as well as they can); they don't prescribe it. If dictionaries defined terms in the prescriptive sense, I could refute you by starting one.
I love offbeat slides like these, but I only get 10% of the story from them. Mind you, making up the content might be more interesting than the real thing, in some cases!
Growing 10% per week. So there's SOME network effect. ;-) They aren't buying adwords!

I think the play is in the aggregate data... i.e. take the most linked to stuff, toss it on a page, and you have Digg without the voting (good content theoretically bubbling up).

All that said, I'm not a huge fan of the investment-- certainly could be big, but it's fairly challenging to imagine it as huge.
How much of business success is luck?
I would take the controversial opinion that if somebody's going to make a Sparknotes for a novel I wrote, they need my permission. Critical analysis is one thing: summarizing what I wrote in bulk is another thing entirely. The lengthy summaries of each Harry Potter novel I see as slightly shady.

Authorial control means you're allowed to give permission, though. If I make a tricky program, it's in my interests to let you write a how-to-X book. But it should still be my choice.

Movie reviews contain very little summary. Most of what's in a review is opinion based around that slim summary. So that's perfectly fine.
If you want to use metrics, that's fine. If not: well, whatever works for you, works for you. Obviously 37signals is a success, and they design on impulse. They make things that "feel good". That is a perfectly fine way to design, especially if you have experience with designing.

Copyblogger is everything that's wrong with blogging. They take something that should be intricate and personal and try to turn it into a generic "writing copy" style. Is there any blogger worth anything at all that ever got advice from Copyblogger? Because when I read blogs, I go for the ones that don't sound like they're working from a stencil.
French was an 'imperialistic' language as well, until not so long ago; France had a strong economic and diplomatic influence. You had good conferences in several domains in French. It's tough to loose this kind of influence, and I think the case is similar for countries like Japan or Italy. Young people in e.g. Poland seem to have it easier to adapt...

But your last sentence seems really harsh. Good communication skills are so much more important in real life to have work done.... I know a few good programmers in France for whom reading english is a lot of (sometimes necessary) pain. I'm sure more contacts with foreigners would give them a incredible confidence/motivation boost.
For HN: Greasemonkey script for enhancing HN user profiles (clickable links & topcolors)
I made a Greasemonkey script for enhancing Hacker News user profiles:

------

http://alteredqualia.com/visualization/hn/hnuserprofile.user.js

------

It does two things:

1. Change URLs into clickable links.

2. Show user's topcolor (if indicated by "my topcolor is xxyyzz" or "topcolor: xxyyzz")

It's far from perfect, but it should work for majority of cases. I tested it on leaderboard profiles, where it fails only in one case.

Note: Linkification is opt-in and client side, so it shouldn't interfere with the original reason for not allowing clickable links in profiles (to disincentivize spammers).
The Story Behind "The Secret History of Silicon Valley"
Agreed. The old design was ugly - memorable, but it felt so cheap and sloppy. The new design is terrific - I love how many different styled sections they have to convey their information. It isn't at all repetitive.
"relational databases are really good solutions to problems we don't have"
If you want to check how it works, here are some users with "topcolor" mentioned in their profiles:

http://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=jrockway

http://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=comatose_kid

http://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=tsally
Are you talking law or your ethics or what?

I would take the controversial opinion that if somebody's going to make a Sparknotes for a novel I wrote, they need my permission.

Why would you want this?
Yes, the fed is considered a central bank. However, it actually doesn't have any regulatory authority over financial institutions. It only has monetary powers.

No one in govt wanted the Fed to crash or slow down the housing market, so it's unclear how one can conclude that different regulations would have caused the Fed to do so.

> One nonetheless must point out what these people ought to have done, whether they really could have done it or not.

That depends on what said "pointing out" accomplishes. If it fuels bad policy/giving further power to the people who failed, it's a bad idea.

> I would note that the rise Greenspanism/"market fundamentalism" itself, starting in the 1990's, certainly made it much more politically difficult to stand against Wall Street's further partying in the 2000's.

If you're going to argue that the President and Congress weren't going to do anything, then it's unclear who you think would have done something.

I will note that McCain tried to get Fannie and Freddie under significant regulation during Bush's first term. He got a little support from some Repubs, no support from the rest, and kicked in the teeth by all the Dems who are currently screaming for more regulation and about how Bush screwed things up.
Al Seckel: Your brain is badly wired -- enjoy it [TED]
The 37signals Manifesto (Circa 1999)
Here's the punch line, which I was too ashamed to admit:

I used to have one shampoo and one soap -- usually just a bar soap.

Now my shower looks like a spice rack: I have 10-12 bottles of different "flavors" of Axe. The Axe guys managed to take a consumer that was low-end and happy and turn them into a power user. In fact, my entire concept of washing products has changed from one-size-fits-all to a flavor-of-the-day approach.

If I could take that ability and apply it to other web products, like search, it would be awesome. How is it that some products are able to break new ground in a _very_ mature market whereas other products fight it out for 2 percent?
I think the key misunderstanding here is judging bit.ly (or any other company's) value by whether/how much money VCs invest in them.

VCs raised money which they now are expected to invest. They don't know what will end up a good investment, since they don't have some future-predicting sixth sense that the rest of us lack. Bit.ly has some buzz around it, a few A-list bloggers mention it occasionally and the word "Twitter" can be seen in a few places on its front page, so it gets dropped $2m.

I'm not being sarcastic here - these are valid reasons to invest, the same features might help the VC flip it later to, say, Twitter for $10m. (And there's always AOL! :)
Good list of other cool things. (Rack is sort of implicitly in my presentation due to the Rails Metal thing.)

I had to really narrow it down to get 10 things.

I wanted to put ActiveSupport::MessageEncryptor in there for sure but I couldn't figure out anything else to take out so I had to cut it.
I always find DNN compelling. And appreciate the fact that he spends a lot of time trying to get others to go out and realize their visions, while providing some key guidance.

I agree with most every angle, except I do think he over-simplifies, a little, the idea that all viable businesses must start with a product that people pay for. While it's a hard road, and a great challenge, web apps that begin life as free play a very important part in the whole web ethos, and some become very valuable through a variety of valid business models that can be tacked on later depending on what/how things evolve. So to dismiss "startups" that shoot for this particular "success" wholesale, I would say is it's own sort of nay-saying. But again, as a whole...loved the pres.
These things do make me think less of people, but you have to be careful to filter for non-native speakers. And of course, there is a big difference between a single error and systematic errors.
You may _think_ that no "real" programmer would ever want to work for a bank when they could instead work for a software company, but that does not make the people working at banks any less talented or competent.

It just means they have different priorities than you do.
I always wondered if a lot of programs were riddled with timeouts (directly, or indirectly through calls to apis) and if eliminating them would make the computer faster (although more prone to errors ;) ).
Habbo Pulled In $74 Million In Real Revenues Last Year From Virtual Goods And Advertising
Projects FlowingData - data visualization
I'd love the counter point article -- "Workers make their companies lose 2.8 billion a year in wasted productivity waiting for their computers to boot"
I guess you missed the general trend of most items on this site...

However - to redefine your job offer : how do you get good hackers?

Mostly I'd guess its a process of coming across the right person at the right time and helping them grow into what you want.

This would involve lots of communication early, as my experiences have tended to show that unless people know what is expected of them, they'll put their own interpretation on the job at hand, and quite possibly go off on a tangent from what was expected.

Oh, and I find it takes at least a month to settle into the job initially anyway (finding out the hierarchy / who to go to for what / how "things are done")

So - no magic bullet. Feel free to prove me wrong though...
Well, I suppose we're talking about a different 1%. Perhaps you feel that you are a "pagerank 10" person regarding "begs the question" because you understand the original meaning. I would argue that the "pagerank 10" would be the person who has studied its usage and has observed that "raises the question" has also become an acceptable use.

Assuming that a shift in a word's meaning due to "incorrect" usage is rare, what makes it any less valid of a change? And are you willing to have the same view regarding all English words that turn out to have been formed as a result of misuse that you have toward "hacker" and "begs the question," even if you are forced to use an obsolete word?

You argue that dictionaries can't prescribe language, and I agree. I'm saying that there are limits to how much you can prescribe language in general, including the attempt to prescribe the meaning of "hacker" and "beg the question." The "beg the question" of 2009 is no less valid than the one of 1600.
The template language of spip : http://www.spip.net/@?lang=en
Do you remember the 90's? I recall that, for a time, at least twice a week the news would have a story going on about hackers, the danger to the audience, and their children.

I don't hear hackers used for fear mongering as much anymore, so I suspect that hackers will eventually reach the top of the hill. Of course, I expect it will always have slight negative connotation.
Hackers & Painters is also on scribd...

http://www.scribd.com/doc/47180/Paul-Graham-Hackers-And-Pain...
How Michael Osinski Helped Build the Bomb That Blew Up Wall Street
Taking drugs that have a net negative effect on your personality is a bad idea.
typically, i/o operations, which can be caused by numerous things. or, if you're just crunching some serious numbers.

if your "computer is running slow"(tm), its probably from paging/thrashing due to not having enough ram or having too many things open. i've fixed too many "my computer is running slow" problems that ended up being someone having 100 IE windows open at once.
Are Business Schools to Blame?
"If they were indeed obfuscating purpusefully, then there is a fraud case in here."

Unfortunately, not quite. Our laws regarding these things are very primitive, which often means that you can be in perfect legal compliance, yet still commit some very severe fraud against the people you're making offerings to.

I find it rather unlikely that our regulatory system will ever catch up with the state of the art in finance. There's too much money to be made in the short term by shoveling risk off into the cracks and pretending on paper that it doesn't exist, and it's too easy to do.
The presentations were all shot on video, so they should be online soon.
Because a Sparknotes is just regurgitating what I've written. I feel I should be allowed to deny people who want to take my hard work and simplify it while removing its merits. Especially in writing, where text is the only thing that matters: while text describing a movie might add some sort of aesthetic value, text describing text rarely does so.

I would give permission, mind you, because I think it's fine to distribute my work like that. But if an author didn't want that, I'd want them to have control.
Wouldn't their identifier become less valuable to them if it was used positively everywhere? Changing it wouldn't do them any good.
Coincidentally One of the Google ads on the page is for Axe when I'm looking at it...
Meet the Canadians who busted GhostNet
Folks, PyCon videos should go up once the con is over.
Microsoft to kill Encarta later this year
http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=508278

Really, really good discussion there.
a lot of the homonyms are commonly misspelled because when reading it back in your head it "sounds" fine, so it passes check. i don't make these mistakes because they irk me so much when i find other people making them. i'm practically analretentive about getting it right in my writing
Nazi codebreaker which shortened the Second World War by two years
I would take the controversial opinion that if somebody's going to make a Sparknotes for a novel I wrote, they need my permission.

I feel I should be allowed to deny people who want to take my hard work and simplify it while removing its merits.

I've cut away some filler, so I'll ask again: do you have a reason to want this -- some enforceable veto ability over sparknotes -- that doesn't reduce to wanting it because you want it?
That is a great thing and I totally thought of making the same website, because I'm constantly looking for a good problem to solve. I hope this gets popular, because there's a lot of problems out there hackers don't even know about waiting to be solved.
Volunteer YC: Sunlight labs 50 states projecy
It's even trickier than that. People who get it right will often think less of the person using the term incorrectly, but won't bother to correct them. I'm sure similar things happen when you encounter clueless MBA types in the valley.

There are more extreme cases of this kind of silent dismissal: thick brooklyn accents, ebonics, southern accents, spanglish, etc. will not get you very far in many places I've worked. I'm not saying that's morally right, but it certainly happens.
"So that means Rowling has no control over her fantasy universe, even when it's just reflecting what she wrote?"

That is right, and it's by design, as long as you're talking about the concepts and ideas of her universe and not their specific expressions. But again, as I said, it's not clear where the line between idea and expression lies with particular parts of a work of fiction.

The free exchange of ideas is essential to the working of a free society. I can't imagine that much good would come of making the distribution of all ideas subject to the will of the people that came up with them.
Interesting. I'm not sure why one would assume a 'tweet' isn't copyrightable. Seems to me that the real question is the part about 'fair use'. What kind of control do you have over a tweet, even if you do have the copyright.
Harvard encourages dusting off the classics
Predictions of population growth have confounded nearly everyone back to Malthus. The interesting trend is that the middle class seem to reproduce at a rate too low to sustain the population. Japan and Italy below the rate to sustain their populations. By 2100 the global population will probably be heading downward from a peak a few decades earlier.

No one really wants to throw a global cataclysm into the stew: nuclear war, pandemic, Yellowstone eruption, asteroid strike.

I remember reading predictions from a hundred years ago. (No, I'm not that old.) It missed all the mini-singularities, even the ones that had been already invented, like the automobile and the telephone.
Because it deals with my own creation, and I feel that I should have final control over my creation. Isn't that exactly what I said above?
Ways to Make Money
I guess it depends what you mean by "concepts and ideas", then. For me, the encyclopedia would cross a line, because it's talking about the plot and the characters using excerpts directly from the series, but "The Bible According To Harry Potter" is an original creative piece that Rowling shouldn't have veto power over.
We certainly got a lot of feedback on our thumbnail-ification process. Try reading the twitter feed with the presentation: http://search.twitter.com/search?q=reddit+%23pycon

And we'll blog.reddit.com the video and embed the ppt once everything goes live. A big thanks to everyone who got up early for our talk.
Yeah, you've answered my question: you want it because you want it.

Your opinion is: "I feel that I should have final control over my creation" (which, apparently, extends to summaries and commentaries, etc.).

When asked "why do you feel you should have final control over your creation", your answer appears to be (dissapointingly) "because it's my creation, and I feel like I should have final control over my creation" (in the broad sense, apparently).
Simplifying web development with django-mediasync
IIRC, Jane Street loves it, and uses it for their realtime transactions.

(I can only dream about the terror of writing trading software that's on one side of 3% of all trades on the stock exchange.)
I'm a non-native speaker myself. The words in question, however, are very basic ones.
"Society implicitly trusted MBAs to do no harm when it allowed financial markets to operate in a relatively unregulated fashion--but its faith has been betrayed."

Should we trust a Dean who thinks we have a relatively unregulated market? The markets, especially financial and real estate are highly regulated. How is he to teach ethics of capitalism when he views markets as not a right, but something society allows?
I'm not being sarcastic here - these are valid reasons to invest, the same features might help the VC flip it later to, say, Twitter for $10m. (And there's always AOL! :)

Cynism at its best. A stupid investment can be justified when there's reason to believe that someone even more stupid will come around to bail you out later. Don't get me wrong, I do see the truth in this statement. I also find it deeply disturbing.
The comment:

If you are male, the best "drug" for social anxiety is weightlifting. (No, you don't need to be a huge-ass body-builder-douche, if you don't do 'roids you probably won't be one, you'll look normal and athletic.)

I think probably it's all about testosterone - weightlifting increases the levels of those and thus makes us feel more "manly" and that just blows away the insecurity.

I'm not a scientist, so that testosterone stuff is just a guess, but it was amazing how at the age if 17 it transformed me from a shy, withdrawn, never-look-people-in-the-eyes teenager to a "real man" - relaxed, confident, one who talks to people as a real equal. Much of social interaction has hidden traces of very primitive instincts behind it: the sexual instinct and the fight instinct, and weightlifting gives you confidence in both (even though you would still be beaten to a pulp by any 120 pound Thai Box fighter, but that doesn't matter, you probably don't actually need to fight: it's just the feeling) which transforms into a relaxed and confident social interaction.

Another way to put it is that as an Aspie, I always felt alien from both the world and from my body. My idea of "me" is something in my head who tries to drive my body with a remote control and it just doesn't work well. Weightlifting got me to connect with my body, it made by body a part of the "me", and through the body as a medium, it made me connect with the world and other people. (Probably it's something about strenghtening some under-used neural pathways that connect the "self" parts of the brain with other parts.)

Now at 30 I'm often too lazy to do it, but whenever I do it for a few months, my Aspiehood just goes away.
All editions of Encarta are being discontinued (read about it on Wikipedia)
The comment author almost certainly assumed that the measurement would have a meaning - specifically, that it would determine whether he might benefit from a drug.

There is no doubt that we can measure the concentration of dopamine or serotonin in an aqueous solution (and eventually, within a brain.) Whether there can be any clinical point to such a measurement is debatable.
I´ll give you some examples: iSlot, iPoker, iBingo, iBackgammon, iChess, iCheckers.

Once you develop a beautiful game it will be there for a week, a month, or a year from now, even a decade or more.

There might be some cheap knock offs which can sell but there will be few professional looking apps that can last forever and those who get the early lots will be the real winners.

"most iPhone games do not pay off for the time invested." again, one week of work may be worth thousands of dollars if you know where to dig.

Like everything, there will be people raking millions and the majority won't see a dime. When the AppStore hits the billion download mark, one billion dollars will be in the pockets of the few who used their brains, and not those who waved the pioneers from the sidelines as they passed by while heading west.
Huh? But, as the article states, many deodorants are food scented.

In fact pretty much all household chemicals are food scented. It's all orange, apple, grape, lemon, vanilla etc.
If you want to use metrics, that's fine. If not: well, whatever works for you, works for you. Obviously 37signals is a success, and they design on impulse.

Is 37signals a success because they design on impulse, or in spite of it? I'm sorry, but I have yet to hear a solid argument that ignoring easy-to-capture metrics is better business. I'm not talking about anything esoteric, I'm talking about core business metrics, like the number of people who sign up for your service.

If you implement a new design "on impulse" and your signups drop by 90%, your impulse was wrong, no matter how much you like the design or how good it feels to you. Even if you're still profitable after the drop (and thus "a success"), that doesn't mean that you made the right decision.