skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Rushkoff's conclusions don't follow from his argument (such as it is, setting aside such silliness as middle-ages tourism).

He seems to be arguing against mercantilism and fiat money. Luckily, we've progressed past mercantilism in many ways, and fiat money could be easily replaced without destroying the economy.

His conclusions about the banking system seems a hopeless confusion between central banking and a market for capital. He indicts the former, yet wants to tear down the latter.

While he seems to be aiming at corporatism (or corporate fascism), he only takes an unsupported swipe at corporations in general, placing all blame on their shoulders without acknowledging any blame that might fall on the government and democracy.

Saying "For one business to pay back what it owes, another must go bankrupt", he reveals a childish idea that all business must be zero-sum, so that there must always be a winner and a loser. But it can plainly be seen, when two parties freely enter into a transaction, that both feel that they are coming out ahead.

He seems never to have considered that business can actually create wealth. And apparently dismisses the idea that new markets are being created at a furious pace, ignoring the giant strides in communications, healthcare, computing, transportation, etc, that have been made in the last half a century.
I thought he was advocating free market money where good money earned their way on the marketplace.
The more facebook changes, the more I want to start my own
The more facebook changes, the more I want to start my own. Facebook is not evolving. It is turning away from college social networking and becoming just a platform for tid bids. No longer a website to surf but rather just a window to check on.

Am I the only one that is ready to move on?
I don't know, i tend to glance at the posters name and I recognize both 'swombat' and 'unalone' because I expect them to say something interesting. I don't think I would remember them if I didn't expect their comments to be good, even though they do post frequently.
ok, who's the oldest founder of a startup selected by YC?
It was an interesting manipulation of the system, but as pointed out it's a dangerous slope. A community based on trust will sour very quickly if a lot of these tricks pop up.

Sharing the trick is entirely reasonable: small hacks like this are something to be proud of, given that you've acted in a reasonable way (e.g. contacted the site and informed them before telling others, not actually using it game the system, etc.)

Could have gone that way. Didn't.
nope :)

I think Facebook was leading the field for a long time. Twitter and Friendfeed (though I am not a fan of the latter) carved out a specific niche. But now FB is just stagnant - there hasnt been much in the way of killer new features for over 6 months (probably longer). It's just facelift after facelift (and this new one is not all that good in my opinion).

FB taught us some good lessons: I think the market is ripe for a generation 3 social network.
Yep. I wasn't sure whether it was DNRY or DRY but Wikipedia has it as DRY so I stuck with that. Wikipedia failed me once again.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Don%27t_repeat_yourself
I like the registration page. But, it would be better if you could align the textfields.
As far as social networking sites go, I think Facebook has done well: They maintain the largest database of former/current contacts available, while encouraging a "real name" policy so that I always know who I'm talking to (as opposed to a site filled with pseudonyms). While the Applications fad muddled the waters, I think Facebook has been shifting to a much more consistent model with their latest News Feed. It doesn't seem as hodgepodged together as it used to.

If there was something better, I'd move. But if my friends don't move, that question is largely irrelevant. So many students today have joined Facebook that it would take something extraordinary to move enough of them to another site to make it worth my while.

That's the biggest problem I see here: When a social networking site like Facebook captures so much attention and growth, it will take a major blunder or a revolutionary competitor to move enough people away. We may be stuck with Facebook for a long while, because they aren't bad enough to warrant change for most users.

The battle for this generation of social networks has been won. The next site that wants to capture users will either have to aim for the next generation (read: younger) of students, or will have to incorporate something very new. I don't know what that is -- features I'd like to see would include photo face-recognition, GPS location info, etc. More presence, to enable users to interact with others in real life. Yet that may only arrive as devices like the iPhone become the rule, rather than the exception.
How do I delete or rename projects? I can't find an interface for that anywhere.

When I wanted to edit tasks, I tried double-clicking on them. This did nothing. You can detect double-clicking with the dblclick event, and I think that would make things a bit more intuitive.
Well spotted - a very good summary of an thought-provoking & well reasoned argument. This has some interesting macro insights for startups, I'd not thought about socio-economic development in this light before.
Metal Discovered To Become Transparent Under High Pressure
Thanks for sharing - I'm a GTD fan, and have implemented on both windows and OSX systems.. tried just about everything out there. I have also played with just about every piece of project management software that seems useful.

First, your interface is very nice, and mostly intuitive.

However, to me, I could never see using the application unless it integrated into my e-mail system. This is a minimum for actually using as part of my workflow. As a bonus, I usually configure my GTD systems to integrate with my calendar (ical and google cal).

A nice web app is interesting, but to me, and I expect most power users, GTD is about managing existing information (e-mail, calendars, folders, files, etc), not for creating meta-lists which indirectly and subjectively modify the information I need to deal with.
My time is worth a shitload, pardon my French. I will pay for things that prevent me from wasting time. In general that's the only thing I'll pay for.
My mother still hasn't quite learned how to use a computer. My hope is to get her a Mac in the next year and maybe finally she can check her own email :)

When I used Windows I never used Outlook. I didn't actually think other people ever used it. Even though it was built-in, I just assumed that Windows pre-installed software was roundly worthless.

OS X does the opposite: they really place emphasis on their built-in programs. As a result, I tried every program they gave me, and found myself liking almost all of them. I don't think I could switch back from Mail to Gmail. Perhaps I'd have liked Outlook, too, but Microsoft didn't give me that same incentive to switch.
I like the one about all positive integers being interesting better. There, at least you have to break out the fuzzy logic to debate the "proof"'s value.

There is probably a tie for shortest Wikipedia non-notable page at 0 characters. Filtering out 0s, we get a bunch of 1-character pages not worth ordering. Also, the distinction is always changing, since non-notable Wikipedia pages are always changing (page blanks, vandalism) and being deleted. The fact that the "shortest page" distinction is being passed around promiscuously to a bunch of different crappy pages means that it's a pretty meaningless one.
Yes, post quality is one of the factors. My point is that of course there is plenty of gaming going on and it's of the simplest form. The leaderboard only encourages this gaming mentality.
Are you sure that's not just presenting the "authorship-preserving" nature of git, rather than a significant increase in contributor diversity?

Note that as contributor diversity appears to increase, LoC/primary contributor decreases.
You wouldn't necessarily need someone to volunteer their username to make this work. This unfixed and ancient (2002!) browser vulnerability leaks information, via the styling of 'visited' links, about other URLs you've visited:

http://seclists.org/bugtraq/2002/Feb/0271.html

In many cases, the only person who will have visited all of...

http://news.ycombinator.com/threads?id=USERNAME

http://news.ycombinator.com/submitted?id=USERNAME

http://news.ycombinator.com/saved?id=USERNAME

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

...is USERNAME. So another exploit -- still sneaky but not quite fraudulent, and not especially unique to HN -- would be to design an offsite page that does one or both of (1) greets HN users by name upon their visit; (2) logs which of some chosen set of HN users has visited the page.
The Manic Mirror
HOME OF HIP HOP XXL - REPRESENTING THE TRUE ESSENCE OF HIP HOP
So the community is based on trust yet you don't trust the community with information on how the community functions.
Ask HN: Best hosted solution to sell digital products?
I've done some research on few of the hosted solutions (volusion, shopify, corecommerce etc.) for selling digital products ... but pros and cons of each of them confuses me further. I thought Amazon Webstore would be the choice with less hassles but they dont let u sell digital products yet, so I'm back to square one.

Any suggestions?
Ask HN: Good coffee shop near CMU?
I'm staying at a hotel near CMU for a week - my business partner likes to go to sleep early and I need to work late. Where's a good coffee shop around here to bring a computer, that's open late?
Is there an estimate of how long YC needs in order to become self sufficient?
I have never liked faux home building materials -- linoleum tiles made to look sort of like stone, Countertops with granite prints, and wood-patterned vinyl windows. There's just something dishonest about them that makes them aesthetically unappealing.

I'm missing a leg, and I don't think I would want a cosmesis (a shell that looks skin-like) for the same reasons. It's much less creepy to have, in my case, a black carbon fiber socket than a sorta skin-like covering. It's not trying to be something that it's not. Perhaps I'd feel different if I was missing an arm, but the quotes from the article implied similar feelings.

What interests me is what designs might emerge if the implicit requirement that a prosthetic foot look like a real foot was removed. Would it be better to have a carbon fiber heel stick out way behind where my real heel should be? Would this allow for a more efficient (note that I didn't say "natural") gait? What if the spring extended outward and up like an elf's foot? The only devices for which these rules have been relaxed are feet worn by amputee athletes (mostly runners). I suppose these rules are in place mostly due to economics; the same foot designs must be used by both those who care about looking like a normal person and those who don't. So, designers work in the space provided by the union of all restrictions.
depending on which country you're coming from and your personal financial resources (i.e. bank account), it could be easy for you to get a quick tourist visa or almost impossible
If you want to nit pick, I can point out flaws in every single OS we have currently available. They're all as crap as each other but for different reasons just like they are as good as each other based on different features.
As much as this was done irresponsibly, is a fix planned for this? CSRF is, by now, a widely investigated field of web application development; most of the mystery is gone. To borrow a term from The Old New Thing, it's one of the taxes everybody has to pay.
Where's Bin Laden? New theory, Google Earth offer clues | Between the Lines | ZDNet.com
yep.

well I don't avoid recursion per se, it can sometimes be very clean.

But I sure did notice the power of map-, fold-, reduce- style programming from playing with KDB+/K/Q [an apl derived terse language for handling stream/column data] and the lisps.
What's really stupid about all this is that I give fellow users on this site a little bit of trust because I know that many times, they would like advice or help with their projects, or conversely, they have stumbled on something I can learn.

So I don't worry too much about giving my user name out, or entering it into other HN members' apps. I did it, and I'm not worried about it really. It's not like run4yourlives is my bank id or anything.

What bothers me about the whole thing though is that I've now had it confirmed that HN is too big to trust anymore. Whereas before, there was a sense of kinship with people here - none of whom I've ever met - I now have to worry that some of them are just losers looking to exploit my trust.

That's worse than off topic posts and low quality comments really. It's an attack on the fabric of the community, and the value of the users. It's clear now that I must treat HN as I would treat reddit or digg or any other room full of potential idiots; people who would much rather exploit trust than build it.

Sad but inevitable I suppose.
They're all as crap as each other

Condensed rant: I HATE lines like this. We're talking about millions of lines of code that let you do anything you want to by looking at a screen and typing. When I was a kid I used a friend's typewriter and thought that was the coolest thing I'd ever used, and now I have TextEdit.

There are flaws in everything. OS X has this flaw where it's not clear that I can only encode a certain length of video onto a DVD no matter how compressed I make the files. That's tolerable if a bit annoying the first time. Meanwhile, Ubuntu has this flaw where sound won't play, and where to install sound I have to go to Terminal, and if I type Bad Things into the terminal my hard drive will melt.

If I have a choice between "slightly confusing DVD burning options" and "may melt a hard drive" I'll go for the slightly confusing thing. (Also, I assure you: I nit pick far worse than you do. I'm aware of every small little thing on OS X that irritates me.)
Last time I tried, bookmarks broke. And, of course, it wasn't there when I unmounted the image.
Solving some problems caused by recursion in recursive descent parsers. (Eli Bendersky)
Also, check out the effbot link in the comments: http://effbot.org/zone/simple-top-down-parsing.htm
It does, and I wish we didn't have it. (I also wish we didn't display post score. I don't know what it provides as a benefit.)
FYI: The source chart is on page 6 at http://books.google.com/books?id=vKxxtjJz--wC&dq=the+ris...
Taking it public is a fix. Now that this information is public none of us will give out our usernames to external websites, thus ending the problem. In effect Xach's could decide between emailing someone hoping they fix the problem, or just fixing it.

I found this whole event funny. I'm also amused that people reacted as negatively to this prank as middle managers at my old $MEGACORP job would.
Great start. A bug:

1. Create a project with a space in its name "project name"

2. Add a task to that project and only the first word is tagged as @project
There's Kiva Han on Craig Street, and another place I can't remember (I'm not there all that much). That's easy walking distance from CMU.

Then there's the Walnut St. complex in Shadyside, a little further away (harder to walk), including the usual upscale stores (Apple, etc.) and some decent coffee shops with Wifi.

Much further east on Forbes from CMU (probably easy bus access), there's the Squirrel Hill complex, with a lot of options on Forbes and on Murray.

Hope that helps a bit--I'm not really a local, but I do get in there fairly often.
your absolutely right.

I'm trying to avoid the temptation to play with language too much, while I build my startup app.

Theres so much cool stuff there.. Being interested in the language makes for much more pleasant hacking / prototyping experience. [Id lost this feeling with C++/java even ruby]

You can actually just get the basics and then learn in more depth as interest and time dictate.
Hackers should know how to secure their own website. Between this and the JS injection hack (from the same fellow), it's clear that security is porous at best.
I tend to think of "interestingness" as a fuzzy property that is at or near 1 on the obviously interesting integers {0, 1, ...} and approaches 0 as N -> infinity. But that obviously doesn't alter the fact that "interestingness" is extremely subjective.

Another cool paradox is the one surrounding "the smallest positive integer that cannot be expressed using twenty or fewer English words".
I can believe that the leaderboards encourage gaming, but I think post quality is the most important factor. I would not object to charging a karma point for each post though. That might make people think a little more before posting.

But, then there are posts like this, which won't be read by many and probably will not reach a score of two. And, docking a karma point might discourage the longer discussion threads, which are sometimes very interesting.
Overall, I don't care.
http://www.gathergo.com/list/20
Bono is on tour.
You can hope for a popular backlash against big government and associated interest groups. This happens from time to time, and sometimes the interest groups get pushed back somewhat as a result.

I think this is unlikely in the U.S. any time soon. Most people are not really outraged (any more) about the trillion+ bailout to Wall Street. Most people would say that we need to funnel even more money into health care and education than we already do--that is how successful those two interest groups are.

You can also hope for increased productivity and economic growth. Competent interest groups won't stop trying to shape the system to favor themselves and call it progress, but you can have real progress at the same time.

But I doubt there is a real, permanent solution to the basic problem of interest groups getting control over the systems of a society and eventually dragging it down. It is just the way the world works.
Calculating solar panel shading in Python
Yea. I don't have an answer. The only solution seems to be to just be more selective in what you post. Non strictly hacker articles can be submitted but not too often.
My understanding is that lobbying is far and away the most profitable industry, with a 100-to-1 return on investment. Rationale: the lobbying industry is about 13 billion per year, and it controls the flow of about 1 trillion per year.
Even Faster Web Sites: Steve Souders @ SXSW
If you do an investigation / code digging similar to this with Microsoft code (or any code that contains a similar license), could this create legal issues if later you decide to write open source code that operates similarly or performs a similar function?

This is just a random thought that I'm curious about. I'm not trying to troll the topic.
_There are flaws in everything._

That's exactly my point. Sorry if my wording wasn't as eloquent as it could be.

Personally I use Ubuntu, Win Vista and OSX for various reasons and have love/hate relationship with all of them. Happy to compare nit picks :)
Eliminating corporations would destabilize many
sectors of the economy(particularly infrastructure-
oriented ones), and it wouldn't make those sectors more
fair than before.

Instability needn't be a bad thing. Newspapers are destabilised by the internet. This doesn't indicate that the internet is a bad thing.

I knew a guy who ripped the guts out of a regional beef market cartel with a simple program on an Apple II. There was lots of instability there and it was definitely a good thing.

It's interesting that you identify stability and low risk as being a strength of corporations - the only strong argument I've ever heard in favour of the idea of creating a structure with an individual's rights but without its responsibilities is that the limited liability of a corporation gives people the opportunity to take risks they otherwise wouldn't, and that the net effect on the system is positive. I'm dubious about this too.

We probably still don't get the same kind
of nutrition per person as the people in
the Middle Ages.

The improvement to quality of life, health, friends, freedom, and opportunity for self-actualisation in general is profound. We support a large population and anyone in regular employment has an opportunity to access education, food and resources that are so luxurious to people of the middle ages that many would be incomprehensible to the people of that setting.
For some examples of high-quality prosthetics, watch the two TED talks of Aimee Mullins:

http://www.ted.com/talks/aimee_mullins_prosthetic_aesthetics...

http://www.ted.com/index.php/talks/aimee_mullins_on_running....
The code for HN is open source:

http://arclanguage.org/

This is not how the community functions however. The community functions by being made up of a group of people who believe in courtesy. It is not vulnerable to any sort of software hack, instead it is vulnerable to the slow drift towards thoughtlessness.
It seem that hackers are late on the special interest wagons. Hackers have yet to unionize.
>(I also wish we didn't display post score. I don't know what it provides as a benefit.)

That would be an interesting experiment. However, I think it does provide a certain use, which is getting a sense of how people are perceiving the discussion. Like the audience clapping or booing during a debate.
I know the suffering of dial-up (dirty phone lines in rural areas) or other means (e.g. GRPS) - it is awful.

Isn't there an EDGE or 3G network available? Maybe something like CDMA2000?
Just wait a few years, and you'll be able to be dumb in a different way, like us old farts, thinking we know something.
Instead of having to clean my room, my mother made me clean and organize my wires.
Huh? You can download the source code for HN, and you can infer how voting happens from Firebug. Where's the lack of trust part?
look really promising!
but submitting anything but ascii characters gives error 500, like the swedish letters å ä ö..
I can only guess how they're going to do, business model-wise, but big data doesn't necessarily mean big companies or web properties as you suggest. Small startups can do compelling things if they make sense out of big data. It's a tedious and often impossible job now for just about everyone. Companies displaying competence will do quite well for at least the beginning phase of this movement, and have customers both big and small.

My gut says that it will become commonplace to need to handle tera or petabyte-sized data. 640K turned out to be a wee bit shy of our memory needs. Traditional RDBMS's will turn out to be a wee bit shy of our analysis needs.
awesome - many thanks both lists are great
"poor"? I'd say just the opposite. Woz is rich, and in more ways than money.
I don't think it applies to Hacker News, because no one "games" karma, and having a high score doesn't seem to give anyone special influence over site content.

Wikipedia certainly has this problem, though. It seems to appeal to those with the petty-tyrant mentality, too.
Simple parallel JSON processing using "make -j"
I am not sure what kind of help you are requesting.
Any plans on an iPhone app soon ?

This would be the "make or break " feature for me.

(I have signed up and am using the app. Great work !)
Hey sgrove - thanks for the update.

I'm only one of the 600, but I'm definitely keeping an eye on ChuWe. 'Ask HN' posts are great (as you realised, and acknowledged) so a website full of small biz questions is very exciting.

Looking forward to the hard launch ... and your thoughts on that as well!
Eh? Ruby has one interpreter. It also comes with an interactive shell called IRB, written in Ruby. Reia works the same way.
Your argument, which might be strong, would be evidently strong if you could cite a couple cases where a large "pre-monitized" turned out to be lucrative for an acquirer.
ICarly.com