skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I don't want to play this game. All I'm trying to say is it doesn't seem like you understand China well, and should reserve criticism until you have some basic understanding of her problems.
the domain is down, what's the story?
The Attentional Spotlight
I said this in my below comment, but... Don't people do the same thing with any kind of artist? I know that I feel I have a personal relationship with David Lynch that's evolved as I watch his movies. I definitely have that relationship with author Daniel Handler: I'll find an old interview of his and feel slightly wounded, like he didn't tell me about it before.

That's natural. We devote ourselves all the times to good things. Do you ever get into web browser fights? Or Mac vs. PC arguments? Hacker News versus Digg? Because that's all devotion.
Privacy on pyre.
100 L.A.s didn't bloom in Europe. The car is similar to other fads, it's exciting and everyone wants one first, but later people start to get tired of it.

What's unique about the US west coast is that the cities there were not much older then the automobile, that's why the are so much more car oriented.
Looks like this has been fixed. I'm going to leave the post up in case people are curious about what was happening.
The Sorry State of Music Startups
wouldn't it make sense to just poll your users directly?

People are very poor judges of what they are willing to pay for things, and are especially poor judges when "free to me" is one of the options on the table.
There's an open letter [1], an FAQ [2], several documents on an open mailing list [3] and several updates in the ASF board reports [4].

Okay, so perhaps that's not "well documented" but it's also open and available for public review.

[1] http://www.apache.org/jcp/sunopenletter.html

[2] http://www.apache.org/jcp/sunopenletterfaq.html

[3] http://markmail.org/search/?q=list%3Aorg.apache.jcp-open

[4] http://www.apache.org/foundation/board/calendar.html
The problem I have with most time management techniques is that I'm a writer. Sometimes sitting down and trying to write for an hour is like trying to bleed a stone, some days it just isn't going to happen.

I've noticed I can easily get 3,000 words done in a few days without a problem, but the extra 2,000 words before I finish a chapter tends to screw me up. Suddenly I'm doing two jobs at once, I have to finish one story line but tie it to the next. I also hate the advice of 'you should write n words a day no matter what', because it's inherently useless advice. I don't write unless I'm writing something I know is half-way decent, I don't believe I should write simply for writings sake.

I don't think any programmer here would add an extra 500 lines of random code 'just cause'.
This headline is best enjoyed when sung to the tune of Bob Marley's "No woman, no cry."
Maybe we work differently, but I certainly associate with ideas rather than their originators. The fame of a successful work should eclipse the fame of its author in hacking, unlike other fluffy fields of work like management and self-help industries (hint: the "Linux Torvalds" effect.)

I don't know if it's the intention of PG to become a "Get Rich Quick" guru, but to me he is the author of ANSI CL and On Lisp, a decent human being in the same league as Norvig, Kent Pitman and Dick Gabriel. Actually, I like Paul Graham more than "PG", thanks to all this idol-worshiping.

Whatever that guy wrote in his blog should have been a private email. Better yet, a personal diary entry in _paper_.
Entities that are that big have big lobbies. Big lobbies give effective control of governing bodies (at least, in their limited scope); this is known as regulatory capture. AT&T was broken up by judge, not by Congress, so it is not a good counterexample.
Funny a friend just introduced this game to me a couple weeks ago, it is pretty fun and easy to learn buy in my opinion too short, more like a rush to get 10 points than a thorough strategy game. For the first few games, just when I had my little economy humming along somebody would bust out their ten victory points out of nowhere.
Is there something wrong with making more profits because of free labor performed by those who willingly give their consent for that use?

I'm not sure who you think is getting hurt in this situation. Is it supposedly some third party who wanted to develop the same thing and charge money for it and now he can't? That's like saying that it's immoral for jobs to be replaced by technology. It's called progress.
agreed..I'm not interested in saying much more either. If this were any other forum, I wouldn't bother replying to erlanger's statements.
Why? Making that stuff public should be totally fine. (I get some flack because on my blog I write literally everything I think of, whether it's personal relationships, religious philosophy, web design, or what ever; I get emails regularly asking me to at least tag my various posts for easier consumption and I refuse, because for me that's not what my blog is.)

I find a fascination with people: why they build what they do. So while I love books, I tend to love the authors of said books just as much.
Note that once an article is flagged enough times it is [dead]-ed. I'd encourage others to use that feature for wildly off-topic posts such as this one, and to spend a little time digging through the "new" section for stuff that is relevant to the site.
Social stratification is a game we humans love to play and have been playing since forever.

Sure it might make practical and academic and all kinds of sense to be less selective, but seeking exclusivity is as human as getting high, cheating, fighting, etc.
Anyone else get the feeling that this is a way that StackOverflow could be monetized? Example:

1. User identifies bug, posts on SO

2. SO participants try to fix, but realize it's an underlying code bug.

3. User puts up an eLance-like ad within SO, offering some money for the bug fix

4. SO participant accepts, and fixes. SO takes a cut for facilitating transaction
Ah. Still suspicious, but in an entirely different way...
A light breeze, a beating heart could power mobile gadgets
Blogs for Those Who Love Design
I don't get into any of those arguments. Except Mac vs. PC, which is on very specific technical and aesthetic grounds!

Regarding "personal relationships" with cultural authors, all I can offer is Neal Stephenson's Why I Am A Bad Correspondent, which explains better than I ever could:

http://web.mac.com/nealstephenson/Neal_Stephensons_Site/Bad_...

By the way, I also like Lynch. And I bet you also like Stephenson. I wonder if there's some ultra-narrow cultural niche we all fit into ; )
Seafarers just makes the game bigger. Cities & Knights makes it more complex (as well as making it bigger).
Cities and knights is my favorite extension.

You should buy such extensions if you have played the basic game a lot.

Games also last longer with this extension, count on 3 to 4 exciting hours.

Since I'm on hackernews, I've always wondered when this game would pop up and what other board games you would advise. I'll have a look at Puerto Rico asap.
Gaming Unplugged Since 2000
I made the mistake of buying Anathem, which is way more involved than I have time for at the moment. I need to find a lighter novel of Stephenson so that I can get used to his style first.
It seems like there's a lot of room for fudge factors in the numbers though. How are they defining metro areas? By many definitions, the NYC metro area extends out to the tip of Long Island, which is nearly all farmland, forest, and beach. The forks of Long Island have a combined population of 125,000 (1/10th of Manhattan) on land area of 564 sq mi (almost 20 times bigger than Manhattan).

Similarly, the Boston metro area is often considered to extend out to Worcester and southern New Hampshire, which includes towns like Dunstable (3000 people on land area that's about the size of downtown Boston). But there's a very big difference between a metro area like Boston where most of the people live within a dense urban core and then it drops off to farmland and open space quickly, vs. one like LA where it's medium-density suburbs all the way through.
I've put faster in quotes because speed has been inferred based on the connectivity of the anatomy. It's a fair conclusion to draw but speed, per se, wasn't measured.

http://www.jneurosci.org/cgi/content/abstract/29/7/2212
"A country is not made of land; a country is made of its people." --unknown
Rolling Stone has an outstanding article explaining the current crisis. I think you'll love it: http://www.rollingstone.com/politics/story/26793903/the_big_...
but this search, this willingness to devote himself to something, someone, anything .. this is a serious bug in man's programming.

Is it really a bug? Idolation is more common than it's not and I'd be surprised if everyone hadn't felt it to an extent (if only to a non human entity, such as a programming language, a band, or a religion).
But does it add more depth of strategy/tactics? Complex rules don't mean it's not still primarily luck.
IBM leading 'Open Cloud Manifesto' charge
Puerto Rico, Power Grid, Race for the Galaxy >> Settlers of Catan, all the way.

Basically, start at the top and go down: http://www.boardgamegeek.com/browse/boardgame
Gorillas may not be as vegetarian as they are supposed to be
Startup Advice: I'm a Geek, How do I Pick a Business Partner I Can Trust?
Shocking... an InfoWorld article not submitted by CraigIW.

And, yes, this is ancient news by now.
growing up in germany I lost a lot of my youth time to this game
Twitter and Wikipedia for Elementary Students
Actually, you have to be careful when mixing monetary rewards with non-monetary rewards. It's possible that adding direct monetary payments can wreck the intangible rewards that are motivating others to work on something. I have seen instances of some projects decaying because of funding being applied in ways that other participants felt was unfair.

It isn't simple. But it is perfectly valid to hire a programmer to add a feature to an existing open source project and to offer the work product back to the project.

What doesn't work at all is attempting to guide a projects direction by playing political games with funding.
If anyone doubted a new iPhone model coming soon, this should be all the proof they need.
I think that, like newspapers, the value is in the content more than the presentation. So magazines with excellent writing (New Yorker, Vanity Fair), better information (Economist), that nail a niche (National Geographic), or that have a positioning value (celeb mags at the checkout isle) will be much better off.

An interesting example of where the magazine format matters is Seed magazine. It's not particularly special content (kind of midway between Popular Science and an academic journal) but it is well designed and beautiful from front to back. I doubt I'd ever read it online but I love the mag. Ditto for National Geographic.
Yeah. :) That was by accident though. Tere started out as a metasearch engine and answers service. (I was an early contractor. I left for a few years then came back after they switched to ads and landed the MSN contract.)

The technology was very lean and cheap -- Lackner, Leo, Drago, Paterlini, and Freitas are real hackers. But it wasn't sophisticated compared to Google then or Panama now. Our advantage was that when the phone rang a real human said "Bom Dia".

Amy's problem is not rare. It's one of Google's weak points.
Board games depend a lot on taste. Are you more into eurogames (great mechanics, generally light on theme) or "ameritrash" (great theme, generally complex mechanics)? Do you want a heavyweight, longer game, or a lighter-weight, short game? Are you a fan of luck in games, or would you rather it was more skill-based? Do you like diplomacy as a game mechanic?

If you're just looking for a list of games to try, see http://www.boardgamegeek.com/browse/boardgame and start from the top.

Also, most (good) board game shops have an open play night where you can go in and check out whatever you want. This makes putting $80 down for that copy of Agricola much easier.

If you're in the greater Seattle area, Uncle's Games at Redmond Town Center has a game night on Fridays. They're also the best game shop around, imho (although I might be biased, they know me by name).
There are some "diploma mills" where the only qualification for your phd is a large check and a dissertation sized paper. It doesn't surprise me that these are farmed out to essay mills.

On a side note, I looked into writing for essay mills before, but the money wasn't worth it for me.
Looking for the bottom - not there yet
I hope you aren't conflating "decent human being" with technical skill.
Huge boardgame fan checking in. Settlers makes for a great "gateway game," a way to introduce non-gamers to the world of eurogames, but most hardcore gamers in my crowd find it a little too luck driven. We tend to prefer games like Agricola, Powergrid, Caylus, and El Grande these days. But I still think it's a pretty good game.

If you're new to boardgames and like Settlers, I recommend going to BGG (boardgamegeek.com) and checking out their list of the top 20 or so games and trying some of those.

If you're looking for people to play with, there are a number of active boardgame Meetups. You can also check out http://www.brettspielwelt.de/, which is a German site with a lot of popular boardgames available for online play.

Happy gaming!
NYTimes: Service-Oriented Architecture: Using Our APIs Internally
Um, early April Fools joke? Oh and did you go to the homepage: http://www.gicleelife.com ? I'm laughing, anyway.
Thanks for the information wheels.
Erasmus for entrepreneurs
So you wouldn't invest unprotected. Insurance was invented to solve this specific problem: socializing the costs of unlikely but disastrous occurrences.

The vast majority of companies will be fine the vast majority of the time, so there's plenty of opportunity for an organization to sell inexpensive insurance which covers for those rare cases where the pot boils over.
I think you have a valid point about exploited labor, but I think you're conflating education and essay writing.

An educational degree is supposed to be about learning, not about of how many tests you have taken, homework assignments completed, essays turned in. I mean, when I was in college, I was highly aware of my credit requirements too and planned for them. My point is that the tests, the assignments, credit requirements all are simply proxy measurements of learning. Learning is what really matters. By gaming the system, and skipping the actual learning, the rich and lazy students are not getting anything in return either.

I guess it's a little naive but I'd like to believe that if you really got nothing out of your education, it will show. The paper only gets you so far.
A decent human being is _modest_ whatever of his or her technical skills. Successful decent human beings encourage you to think for yourself and reach your own conclusions, even if they're emotional and subjective in their own analysis of themselves or their work.

This blind fanfare and celebrity-worship just makes PG look like any other self-promoting guru that you find filing the paperback shelves. Tim Berners Lee is a decent human being. Self-promoting commercial bloggers, faddists, and get-rich-quick types are not, even if they're competent enough to roll out a sophisticated web platform for their self-promotion campaigns.
"Jesus Christ" ... "random crazy people start fixating upon you as their leader/friend/saviour/nemesis/soulmate and reading all sorts of crap into every aspect of their life"

You may be on to something bigger than what you meant.
Cheaters Game Microsoft Certifications
A growing problem for certification companies.
Zodiac is very light. Sex, drugs, violence, and environmentalism.
While this isn't the monetization approach I would take (for what it's worth) you do have to ask, how much is Twitter worth to you? Would you pay $10 a year? $5? $1 a month? Surely you must get that much value out of it?

Take Facebook for example. It's a free service that most of its users get a great deal of value from. If asked, wouldn't many (by no means all) pay a small fee as appreciation for services rendered.

The counter argument I guess is that someone else will come along and offer the same service for less (most likely for free). But if something really is of value to the end user, why would/should they be opposed to paying for it?
I disagree. A mercenary in your metaphor is essentially a contractor. Contractors have a more direct incentive to do well that a coder at a company. On a team (i.e. a company) slackers can bet on someone else pulling in their slack while a contractor (at least any that are successful in the long run) need to develop trust in their clients. If they don't then they won't get hired again and they won't get good word of mouth which is the primary way to get more business.

I guess this boils down to your premise that contractors are only working for money while someone working at a company is working for more than money. You have to make the case for this premise which seems wrong to me.
You make a mistake to judge those other people so harshly. What makes a human being decent is much more complicated than we all like to think it, and many of those sorts of people really are good people. In fact, it might be safe to say the least decent sort of person is the one who judges decency so quickly.
IETester is good for testing different versions of IE, but is Windows only: http://www.my-debugbar.com/wiki/IETester/HomePage
No, I didn't misinterpret your words. My question is why should _you_ be the arbiter of my business model?

If I decide to make money from software by using it as a service, why shouldn't I? Maybe my natural gas prospecting software is world class OSS that I downloaded from SourceForge and tweaked a bit, but the real money comes in because I bundle it with my well-drilling services that I couldn't otherwise sell.

You're trying to limit what other people are doing to what you can imagine, and that's what I take issue with.
When looking at Long Island as part of the NYC metro area, usually Suffolk gets split in half. At least from my perspective as someone who grew up on LI. Though that probably doesn't happen when looking at census data.

(If you're familiar with Long Island, the metro area in Suffolk would be Suffolk - anything south of the Sunrise Highway up until Westhampton (going up north through Riverhead), and anything east of that boundary)
Does your link require a password?
I believe the situation we are creating is one where the most valuable jobs are those which pay people to do those things they do /not/ love. We programmers love what we do and as long as we give that love away for free, there will be less love of the job because the job will not feed us.

Instead, we will be paid to build rockets and bombs that kill people. We will be paid to construct elaborate financial systems that make profit for a few at the expense of many.

I think the world around us is one that pays people to sacrafice their conscience for a dollar. Why not instead do we pay people to do what they love? If we paid people to do what they love, there would be more love. More people would love their jobs, more people would be doing good things.

Instead, we pay people to be greedy. We pay people to kill. We pay people to do bad things because if I'm going to do something bad, someone is going to have to pay. Actually, I got tired of using my skills to do bad things.

I would rather live on the street than build a missile that is going to kill a child, yet I had a conversation just the other day with employees of Ratheon. I said, "Why don't all the hyper intelligent people out there building the bombs and the missiles and the drones guided by operators in Las Vegas just stop building that technology?"

What was the answer? "Because there's /tons/ of money in it!"

* sigh *

We have replaced the love of money with the love of work. We are paying for the erradication of love.

Look, I know where you and many in this thread are coming from. I know why you are negging me. I understand it. I get it because I too give away my labor for free. I love the feeling I get when someone's life is made better because of something I /gave/ them. I know my Karma in the real world, though not in this thread, is increasing like wild fire -- the people who use what I build love it! They /love/ it! It makes their lives better.

But I am not talking about me. I'm talking about an industry. I'm talking about an industry that is working itself out of a job in exchange for a warm and fuzzy feeling. I do not believe it is sustainable.

Technology is sustainable. Technology will continue to improve. I will never go hungry, because the skills I have are in great demand and there are way more people looking for people who can do what I do than there are people who can do what I can do, so I am not worried about myself.

I am worried about society. I am worried that this is not sustainable. I am worried that free labors of love are going to support labors of greed and crime and death and destruction.

And it worries me. It feels like this hasn't really been thought through. The high we get from giving away our labors of love is just that -- a high -- and I feel a crash is inevitable, perhaps we are in the thick of it now.
Help testing ircd-seven, freenodes new IRC server deployment.
When it sounds too good to be true, it usually is.

That's the problem with interviewing sales people especially. Telling the great ones apart from the used car salesmen can be tricky.

Any other advice on how to do it?
I agree with a lot of other commenters here that Catan is luck-driven and essentially over (except for a lot of tedious listening to people tell you _again_ that they don't have the resource cards you want) after you make your initial placements. What deserves more attention, though, are the ways in which "worse is better" applies here - the specific things about Catan that make hardcore gamers dislike it are, in many cases, the things that make it popular.

For instance, lots of people like to feel that when they win, it's because they were skillful, and when they lose, it's only because they were unlucky. On the other hand, if you really _are_ investing your skills in your decisions but still lose due to luck, you'll be really frustrated. Catan does an excellent job of keeping players busy, but essentially on an equal footing of powerlessness. On this basis it really appeals to people who get all kinds of nervous when asked to play any kind of game of skill with friends.
I remember a bit in one of the Feynman books about Murray Gell-Mann's grad students playing a trick on him. They thought of something new, but then despaired of telling their professor about it, because he'd just run with it, and they wouldn't be able to keep up with him. So they thought of all the implications ahead of time, and scripted out the whole sequence. Later on, they brought up the idea, then just as Murray was about to think of the next implication, one of them would blurt it out. Apparently, the professor was a little despondent about "losing his touch" after that.

I've had a similar experience with a Comp Sci professor of mine in an advanced automata theory class. He'd consistently get impatient with us and blurt out answers, just before we were about to. It's not that he could think of things we couldn't. He'd just get there at least a half-beat faster.
I wonder if it would be more practical in .NET. They have this idea of Application Domains that I've never needed to fully understand, so never have. Perhaps you could hack that into a Erlang style process model?
I think it's a combination of some small degree of "faster" thinking, which leads to confidence, which leads to bolder choices and more experiences. Confidence and experience are self reinforcing, so a small initial advantage can turn into something big.
> Someone do a startup!

Check out http://www.fossfactory.org/ .

http://micropledge.com/ used to be similar, but they changed their model. The creator used to be on HN a fair bit, not sure if he still is.