skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
In a country where more households have TV sets than lavatories

This seems insane.

Indoor plumming is perhaps somewhat involved but what about outdoor lavatories?

Maybe my image of rural Britain having outhouses everywhere is mistaken or occurred at a latter stage of development...
Not true as our local community college has a .edu. It just has to be postsecondary.
Here's one thing that stuck out to me, his iteration and testing on real people:

"""Every once in a while, he would bring the new game upstairs to test it out on his family. They would play along, but Teuber could tell that the game wasn't working. Sometimes, in the middle of a match, he would notice his youngest son, Benny, reading a comic under the table. Other times his wife would suddenly remember a load of laundry that needed immediate attention. After each of these sessions, Teuber would haul the game back downstairs for further refinement. He repeated this process over the course of four years."""
"This comes after three years of full-time work and a summer internship in 2005. Surprisingly (or not, if you know Amazon’s growth), that made me older than something like 80% of all Amazon employees in Seattle, the headquarters (and older than a much higher percentage of ALL Amazon employees)."

The next time that someone tries to tell me that software development isn't a young man's game, I'm going to point to this. Three years out of college, and he's older than eighty percent of the company's employees? Even for the software industry, that's incredibly suspicious.
I've done a lot of polling of my users and one thing I've noticed is that authenticated users provide much more useful feedback than "guests". Also, expect to get a very different response from people in poorer economic climates than others. Perhaps you could set up IP filters so you only poll users in your target countries? If so, this might be a great idea.
I hate seeing these print publications go, but I can't say that I'm going to do anything to stop it...

They're just too expensive. $6 for a magazine (or more)? When I can get the exact same thing (or a better alternative) online for free so long as I am willing to lend my eyeballs to some advertisers, I am not going to cough up my hard-earned cash just so I can get that joyous tactile feedback of a magazine.

If these magazines want to differentiate themselves from their online counterparts they're going to need to show us, their consumers, that they can do a better job than the bloggers. That is a huge task when you're competing against bloggers who are living the life that they're writing about (I'm looking at you, Bruce Schneier).

Look, a magazine is a delivery mechanism. If you want to start a magazine you have to create your content, then find a publisher to publish it and distribute it, you (or your publisher) have to eat the cost of magazines that don't sell. You need to fill a whole however many pages long your magazine is.

The internet is also a delivery mechanism, the difference is that if you build the content and put it on the digital newstands like reddit,digg, or gibsonandlily.com costs you absolutely nothing, infinitely less than it would cost to put it on its real-world counterpart.

Print media is dying, or is already dead.

Things like Communication Arts, or Print (these are both graphic design magazines) can, I think, remain in business, but the bubble-gum poppy trip such as 17 magazine, or Cosmo are going to disappear shortly (if they haven't already).

Note...me mentioning 17 and Cosmo isn't because I'm a male chauvinist bastard, it's because I grew up in a house with 5 sisters...the house was littered with these magazines.
Listing of the worst places in the world for sanitation:

http://www.wateraid.org/documents/stateofworldtoilets.pdf

Interestingly the total number of households without is about the same for India and China ~700m
Give them a poll with fixed answers and an option to reply in text with comments. There are many times when I wished a site would remove the flashing banner ads and ask me for a subscription fee (this is specially true with websites that offer data; i'm forced to waste their bandwidth scraping their data when I would have paid $19.99/mo for an RSS feed)

Some regional newspapers are so bought-out by special interest and industry, it's hard to get accurate market figures from them. There is enough market for paying users who want OBJECTIVE news and market analysis, but the newspapers never offered us this option.
IMO there's no point in building a vac-tunnel for a modern train car, because firstly it needs to be an airtight vehicle.

When traveling at 4,000 mph you don't necessarily have to slow down, you just need to levitate from the sides of the tunnel. Essentially you could make the train act similar to a swinging cart on a roller coaster where the center of gravity will always try to sit under the user. People can easily tolerate positive vertical gee forces with little to no side effect, yet exposure to less than one vertical gee force (like the chair-drop rides at theme parks) can make someone puke their guts out. Equally horizontal gee forces aren't tolerated very well either, but in the linear axis (the one we accelerate through) we're extremely tolerant and are in fact more tolerant if we're facing backwards. Although I don't think facing backwards would necessarily work on a train, you don't really want to hit 2 gees of acceleration and have your coke fly in a straight line to the back wall.

Also acceleration wouldn't need to take too long, however in this systems design it probably would. In the dumb car, smart track systems all the force is applied from the outside, which is where acceleration could potentially reach incredible speeds due to the sheer amount of power that could be expended to do so.

We're a long, long way from any vac-tube form of rapid transit, but if we ever get to it I think tolerating the corners will likely be a small problem. I think the big problem will be keeping the train pressurized under potentially huge pressure differentials due to the acceleration.
Ruby on Rails 2.3 arrives
This looks really interesting. I've been building a Rails app with Restful Authentication, and while it's a lot better than writing everything myself, it's pretty kludgy in a lot of ways, the most obvious of which is that the whole thing is a big generator. Which means that, as near as I can tell, once you've written your application with Restful Authentication, there's no easy way to upgrade your application to later versions of Restful Authentication.
I learned how to play this a few weeks ago. I had no idea at the time that I was playing a "perfect" board game!

Seriously, though. It was just okay. The game always ended just when things were getting interesting.
And who decides what the product is?

Not necessarily marketing people. Often engineers make those decisions.
It's easy for him to say "just write passionately and the money will come" because that was more true 4 or 5 years ago when he first launched Daring Fireball and Merlin launched 43Folders. Since then the market has become overcrowded. People starting out today don't have the same early mover advantage. Even a passionate and well written blog has to fight for attention against thousands of more established competitors. Bloggers have also gotten more competition conscious and stopped linking as freely as they used to. Twitter, Facebook, et al are sucking up a lot of the attention that used to go to blogs. The reason you see so many Digg-bait type articles isn't necessarily because these bloggers lack passion, but because sensationalism and social media channels are one of the few remaining ways to gain a foothold.

I find it a bit ridiculous when successful people say "just do what I did and you'll be just fine". It's just not true. Today is a different market and the strategies that worked a few years ago won't work today.

That being said, I do agree with the overall premise that success comes from passion and differentiation. Your best bet is to own a specific niche, even if it's small, and write with a strong editorial voice.
I'll play devil's advocate and say that it's not making the guy into a cult figure, it's writing about one person's relationship with his writings. That ought to happen with any good writer and thinker: they should build relationships with people on the basis of their work alone.

I have a similar relationship with PG's essays, though mine's not a particularly strong one. My cofounder, on the other hand, quotes PG essays a lot, looks into a lot of the things he recommends, and definitely has had his mindset changed a few times over the course of reading his archives. That's what's so cool about writing! When you make an essay you're putting a part of yourself - your opinions along with your personality - out there for anybody to see. It builds a connection with people, lots of people, on the fact of its sheer existence.

That's not a cult. That's good writing.
It really satisfies me to disappear from the public for a week, hacking away at home, and emerge with a new facial hair :-P over the last year I had elvis side-burns, a Saudi goatee, full bear, thin immaculately maintained pimp beard, and today I have a handle-bar porno mustache :-D
It caught my attention, but to be honest now that I think about it a frugal company is usually a strong company.
This is how sofware works.

Don't be ridiculous!

There is no "this is how software works." Software is the result of someone's work. If that person wants to sell that work, good for him. Who are you to decide how someone else should make a living?

Why do we persist in maintaining this silly premise that "Software" is somehow special or unique? It's a product just like anything else and as such it can be marketed, sold, rented, leased or just given away freely by anyone who makes it.
The Psychology of Automation: Building a Bulletproof Personal-Finance System
I don't think so.

A programmer that works on a single company's software has an incentive to work to improve it, rather than get simply get paid, as he is out of a job if the software fails. This is similar to a standing army--there will always be outliers, but more or less everyone is committed to achieving the final goal.

Mercenaries in both software and armies aren't interested in the goal--only the money. As their incentive is different, their output will be different. Just as I wouldn't trust mercenaries to follow the geneva conventions, I wouldn't expect software mercenaries to be focused on code clarity and bug prevention. Once the software works, they want their money, and they want out (Han Solo Syndrome).

As open-source developers today generally contribute from a general sense of goodwill and their personal interest in seeing the project succeed, they have much the same output as those in the rank and file. If I was going to add them to my (already quite strained) metaphor, they would probably be somewhere between the Peace Corps and Militiamen--committed to the cause, regardless of payout.

I realize that this metaphor is becoming a stretch, but I still think it rings true. There is a distinct difference between those doing work because of a commitment, those doing work because of a belief, and those doing work simply for money.
I disagree strongly.

Just because he is moving boxes doesn't mean he isn't providing value as a CEO. Presumably he is learning things that will empower him to improve the company somehow, which seems like a valuable thing to have your CEO do. I'm sure Mr. Bezos is smart enough not to go AWOL for a week if there were more critical things to attend to.

Also don't underestimate the value of improved employee morale and good publicity. Your company is vastly more productive with happy employees, because they will work harder and go the extra mile for something they believe in.
well said. As for your cautionary personal bias...from my experience, anyone that has lived in China can appreciate your position.. its not necessary to be of Chinese decent.
What questions should I ask Pandora founder Tim Westergrin?
In two hours I get to sit down and talk with Pandora founder Tim Westergrin, along with a few other students. What would you guys ask if you had the chance to talk to him?
I guess I should've been more clear: "older" did not mean age, "older" meant "at Amazon longer than others."
Service is a feature that's much harder to quantify, but there _are_ ways of demonstrating it. One of the best recent examples I've seen is http://www.engineyard.com/, which lists its sales & support phone numbers on the header of each page. In this day and age, where phone numbers are being increasingly hidden, a company that stands out like that really makes a good impact.
Allowing articles which are not within the immediate sphere of a hacker's interest is a slippery slope.
Jesus christ. I guess this is the downside of being famous - 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, when all you were trying to do was write a decent essay. What do you even say to people like this.

Dude .. I don't know what you are looking for, but it is almost certain you will not find it in PG.

This kind of thing scares me, it really does. Intelligent person .. good writing, obviously can express himself well .. but this search, this willingness to devote himself to something, someone, anything .. this is a serious bug in man's programming. I don't know the answer.
I went to a local state school

As did I. I felt that I'd rather spend time working on my own projects instead of staying up all night working on some professors' latest project. Turned out well for me at least, I made far more my senior year in college than my current income at my day job.

I think the more your intended profession relies on doing to gain experience, the less going to a top-tier college matters. On the other hand, if it's through research and access to the top knowledge resources, then a top-tier school matters.

For most of us as engineers / hackers, we learn much more through doing & building.
Rather old news: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=518222
Dedicated bus lanes provide a partial solution to this problem, and they tend to be cheaper than subways.

On the other hand, they reduce the speed of traffic outside of the dedicated lanes...Whether that is a bug or a feature depends on whether you are an economist or social planner.
In Minneapolis, light rail to the airport works for this reason, even though it is subject to stopping for traffic downtown. Once past downtown, the train takes precedence, so it really does save time. (Since I have no car in Minneapolis, the light rail makes everything feel like an extension of the Airport/Mall of America.)
I think you misinterpreted my words. I mean, if you want to make money from software you should try to make money from the product you are building, not from services you (or everything else in theory) can give about the product.

So you can focus on your product and make it better and better.
What does it say about "the cloud" when the Wall Street Journal is just now covering it? It feels like my mom discovering Facebook.
I cringed when I saw a quote by a student at my undergrad university. Not sure why anyone would respond to a reporter's inquiry on such a controversial topic that could get you expelled from school.
It's not just to rule, but also to obliterate their "inferior" culture. So we Americans did more killing, ideologically, we aren't much different.
Very interesting...if Microsoft pulled something like this...every person and govt in the world would be screamin bloody murder.
I don't really like it, I guess it's a personal preference, but I need a game where skill is just a little bit more important.

When I play Catan I just feel like I'm following a train track - zero options.

I prefer Warcraft, the board game! :)
I used to play this game all the time, but eventually just got tired of it. It became too predictable.
I was introduced to Catan during college and we quickly had a weekly game going. The interplay of luck and skill is intrinsically woven into the gameplay, which kept things very dynamic. The "wheeling/dealing" aspect of the bartering keeps things interesting when it isn't your turn.

Just when things would get boring on the skills side (someone was far ahead of everyone else), luck would rush in to make things interesting. Just when things would get boring on the luck side (a series of bad rolls), there would be opportunities to strategize around it.

I haven't played it in years, though (not near that group of people anymore), so it was a pleasure to see this pop up on HN. And it is pretty relevant insofar as the "programming" and game loop is quite clever.

There are some great online versions too (asobrain, jsettlers, etc... would provide links but I don't know what the best online versions are today).
You need to play with the 'cities and knights' extension. It makes the game more complex. Also try the board game Puerto Rico, which we're just getting into but seems pretty awesome.
You can't figure out, what game the article is talking about until you finish reading a lot of text. So here is the link.

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

It's called Settlers of Catan.
I would encourage you to look beyond me and myself and ad hominem arguments. This isn't about me.
I suggest reading about how the Tibetans ran their country before the Chinese invasion.
Phew... when I saw the headline I thought someone is screwing with the 3D graphics application Blender .
It's easy to branch the source code, but harder to branch the community, which can be one of the most important things. Sometimes a request for a feature comes with an implicit desire that it be in the main branch that everyone uses. Having good late-bound software would definitely ameliorate that.
I'd pay for it if they had a plan in between 2GB and 50GB. I want more like 10GB for like $2/month or something - the big plan is too big, so I'd rather not give them $8 extra per month out of the goodness of my heart.
> Them sort of being the 'Emergency Room' staff for failed nations does give them insights into typical reasons for malfunction.

Which doesn't help, and may hurt, because we're not failing for "typical reasons".

> So I'd like to see some input from people that know all the angles on how crooks get away with money! Their experience from developing nations is helpful.

If that's your reason for thinking that the IMF will help, it's almost certainly wrong.

Think of it this way. Does skill at catching shoplifters help if you're trying to stop murderers?

Note that the bulk of the IMF's activities are "development", which often ends up bankrupting the country.... That's not to say that such countries wouldn't have failed anyway or that contries don't fail without IMF help, just that IMF involvement doesn't necessarily end up with ponies and kittens.

Don't take my criticism of the IMF as support for the current batch of US folks - it isn't. (Pretty much every one of Fed Chairman Bernake's predictions has been horrifically wrong.) I'm just pointing out that it's quite possible for the IMF to be even worse.

Remember, that it's always possible to make things worse. (Better and worse are both changes.)
Something like that, but then again that's a well established practice. It has been a valid business strategy for years.
And Puerto Rico is even better :)
Is Twitter Really Trying to Make Money?
There's a bit of a contradiction in the article. On one hand, they argue that among a certain tier, all colleges are basically the same. On the other hand, they argue that this "arms race" to get into the best college psychologically harms kids because they pack their schedules with stuff they don't really want to do in order to get in. But if all colleges within a tier are basically the same, why don't kids just ignore them, do what they want, and let the cards fall where they may?

I did basically that in high school - I blew off classes, picked activities that I wanted to do rather than ones that'd look good, refused to take any SAT prep courses, and didn't even apply to college while I was in high school (I worked a year and then applied). When it came to application time, I picked half a dozen colleges that I wouldn't mind going to, with no clear favorites, and got in at 3 others. I don't think my life has been all that different because of it: in most people's minds, Amherst is as good as Brown which is as good as Rice which is as good as Stanford. (Harvard and MIT people may disagree, but then they end up working alongside us and realize that where you went to school doesn't really matter...)
Déjà vu: Where fact meets fantasy
I should also have stated that in the reverse: What if he had patented the thing, when I have also independently created the idea? Looking over his curriculum vitae, it looks like he already has:

"Patent Pending: Methods, systems, and computer program products for simulating a scenario by updating events
over a time window including the past, present, and future. Submitted July 10, 2008."

Oh well.
I agree with you. But "sound discussion of economic policy at a deep and detailed level" does actually happen. People do openly talk about such things in China. The censorship is not that complete. Where there are pain points, you will find people shouting about it.

You are correct that local media does not disclose the whole truth. But that's not too different than U.S. mainstream media.

"An economy thrives better with more transparency." agreed!!!
I've never heard of the village pass restriction.

He's probably referring to the hukou system.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hukou_system
Maybe you could ask him about their back end infrastructure? It is always fascinating to learn how they manage to handle streaming music seamlessly to their many users.
Why is the first comment on all blog posts about magazines folding something along the lines of "oh no! I just paid $9 for a two year subscription!"
$9 is less than most people pay daily at starbucks. No wonder magazines can't stay in business. The perceived value of print magazines has fallen to near zero.
Does it reduce the luck element a little? We have the base game and the Seafarers expansion, and we got a little bored with it. The key seems to be picking the right starting positions, the rest is mostly plain luck. (and relentless trading of resources)

I think they redesigned the game recently, so it's possible the new version of the expansions won't work with our original edition anyway.

These days, we're mostly into Puerto Rico, Ticket to Ride (various editions), Carcassonne (also somewhat luck-based), Power Grid/Funkenschlag and Agricola.
It's more than your gas cost, though - there are other things like maintenance, amortized cost of car ownership, insurance, etc.

You don't just pay for gas, you pay for the car to put it in.
I think the downside is easily outweighed by being able to inspire people.
Starting Something Up in a Cataclysmic Environment - No Egg, Just Chicken
I'd want to hear about the intricacies of their new audio advertising program.

What have they learned about listener preferences through tweaking the length, frequency, and targeting of audio ads? Are they making demographic inferences based off of music genre?

I'm also really curious about the creative on those audio ads. Do ad buyers know alongside which genres their ads will be broadcast? Do they adjust creative appropriately, i.e. hip-hop audio ad creative on a station of hip-hop music? I realize that each "station" is really an instance of user preferences, but still...

I could go on and on... I wonder if there is a cool side-business opportunity for supplying their ad buyers with creative (via a network involving independent commercial musicians/producers). This could help their ads become more effective and turn into something interesting itself.
I suspect that these are the operations that are causing my trouble with Google. I am punished yet they get through!

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=534249