skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
> I am worried about the incentive effects involved when a majority of the voting public do not pay anything for the programs they vote for.

Don't, the wealthy don't need you to worry about them, they have paid lobbyists to do that for them and they're well taken care of already. You need not fear for the wealthy, they'll be just fine, they always are.

> I can't figure out how that is ignorant or selfish.

It's ignorant because you're concerned about those who need your concern the least, because they've brainwashed you into it by making you think you'll be one of them one day.

It's selfish because you've directed your anger at the poor, those who need help the most, you're complaining about it as if they're the ones who write the rules or control the system; they don't.

Look, there's absolutely nothing wrong with being rich, or wanting to be rich. But it's fucking selfish to point fingers at the poor and say they aren't paying enough.

Frankly, you don't know what poor is, you're in Grad school for Christ's sake, that's not poor.

Poor is shopping in dumpsters for clothes and food because you have no money and no hope of attaining money.

Poor kids don't go to college, many don't finish high school, staying alive is too pressing a concern to be off "wasting time learning" when you're little brother is starving and you could be bouncing store to store buying 1 cent gum with food stamps so you can get 99 cents change to eventually collect up enough to pay the rent so you're not all homeless tomorrow morning.

Poor is collecting rain water in a big tub on the back porch so you can take a bath, and then sharing the water with your siblings one after the next because you don't have indoor plumbing and you've never seen a shower.

Poor is walking 200 feet in snow to go to the bathroom, again because you don't have indoor plumbing and you built an outhouse near the edge of the woods and the distance in necessary to keep the stink away.

This shit happens, here, in America, daily. Poor is an economic status most are born into and never get enough education to realize ways out even exist. You don't fucking know poor, point your accusatory finger elsewhere.
This is basically what some paper journal or even book editors do. It is just a bit unexpected and new on Internet.
As long as everybody in the ring wins, I've the impression that it is Ok.

Thought if the rational is just to give what people are looking for and want, with just enough quality and pertinence to remain undetected from google's garbage detectors, where could this lead us ?
Alleged Sarah Palin Hacker facing tougher charges
Look, I'm pointing out what has historically existed. Competition was around at that time as well, and these things still happened. You're the one putting forth this idea and I am criticizing it. If you cannot defend it, then it probably needs work.

" I'm talking about a startup that competes for low wage/low skill time and then contracts this work out. It really isn't much different from the prison work programs, except the homeless can leave anytime"

Considering prisons, for the most part cost money, I would like to see how this would be profitable.

I love how you justify this kind of behavior by qualifying anything you say with something to the effect of "but they can leave at any time".

BTW This sounds like the same system (Gang System) employed by the English agricultural industry in the mid 19th century. It was one step above slavery, because "they could leave at any time", although their wages were so pitiful this was realistically an impossibility. And yes, there was a lot of competition. Same thing with domestic labor. When you're an unskilled laborer, your options are pretty limited by default.

These are not new ideas, they're just horrible ideas from the past that people for the most part have forgotten about.
You are wrong. Everyone's standard of living is not increasing. Quite the opposite. Adjusted for inflation, median incomes have stagnated or declined in the last 30 years. Household debt has skyrocketed oftentimes as people have simply tried to keep up. Yes, some people have lived ostentatiously beyond their means, but many others are just trying to stay afloat, and deal with the rising costs of everything as their paychecks stay the same. Conservatives told people that incomes did not matter because their investments (stocks and houses) were rising in value. This fallacy has been utterly exposed.

The gains in GDP have more or less gone entirely to the top 10%, and in particular, the top 1% of the population. This makes everyone else feel like the pie isn't growing - because it isn't for them. Now that their stocks and homes are worth substantially less, and their credit is drying up, people have to spend less. And this fall in aggregate demand has disastrous consequences - not just here, but abroad as well, for all the countries that depended on exporting things to US consumers (Germany, Japan, and China).

Income inequality is of course not in itself a bad thing; it is the consequence of an economy where risk and work are rewarded. The question is extreme income inequality. Obviously this is a subjective matter. You may not think we have extreme inequality now, but when it's at the highest level it's been in 80 years, I'd venture that it is extreme. And extreme inequality often leads to falling aggregate demand and debt deflation. In short, a depression. If you think income inequality means nothing, you know nothing.
Something I wondered... where do these adsense keyword lists actually get their data?

Surely it's something google keep pretty close to their chests?
Me too. That's the only feature I really want in Firefox, I think.
You can automate a lot of this once you get the hang of it down.

The spammy part kind of sucks. I would say, if you're going to do this, at least make sure there's useful content. There's nothing wrong with that. People search google for information, they click an ad or find you organically. If you've given them good information, then it's not spam, but actually something useful. Sadly, this ideology isn't the adopted norm.
I didn't mean in the core, necessarily. But it should be dead-simple to do -- a flip of a switch and a config file maybe.
Let me guess.... YC?

[I like your sense of humor, I hope you like mine too :-)]
This is "interesting"... ;) I've seen the same thing -- many people are too worried someone will take their idea, so they don't ever talk about it to a wide variety of people. If you "eat like an elephant and poop like a bird" (Guy Kawasaik in Rules for Revolutionaries), and actually talk about your idea to people you meet, then you can get feedback, develop their idea, figure out if there is a market for it, and through serendipity find a person or two who is equally passionate about your idea and may be a good partner to collaborate with you.

Talking with others helps with timing too. It's important to get an idea going so you can get your software built as the demand in the market is accelerating. But at the same time, by bouncing your idea off lots of people you will gain datapoints and then grow intuition about if the market is really ready for this yet. "Too early is sometimes as bad as too late" (Sandra Kurtzig in CEO: Building a Company from the Ground Up).

I've had friends who had the idea for so many things, but didn't do it -- and then someone else did. Genius is 1% inspiration and 99% perspiration. And as Edison clarified that thought, "I never did anything worth doing by accident, nor did any of my inventions come by accident. They came by work." Talking to people is part of that work.
For a $80 device, they're not going to put in an entire text->voice program capable of on-the-fly translations. It's insane to think they'll stick a 500mhz processor into an $80 device that's smaller than my thumb and it still have enough power to actually be usable.

This is an amazing solution to a complex problem, and with the quality of voice from these programs it's likely understandable at a very low bitrate. Using AAC my 2gb Sony Walkman held more songs than my wifes 4gb iPod nano, now on my iPod I often use AAC simply to increase the storage capacity.

I have little doubt you could get a fully understandable output at maybe a hundred kb in AAC.
If they could cram an accelerometer in there, then you could pick a song by tapping on it a la songtapper.com ...
In reality, it's virtually the same thing. Those trips aren't free, you get hit with bills, you learn to avoid them. You're now arguing pointless semantics.
The free blog one sounds like a good idea. Would that get you google-banned?
It is a real job, but if he makes that kind of money every month it's quite alright. I assume that he could stop doing that and it would still pay off for quite some time.
I was amused how they described Alan Turing:

"Alan M. Turing, who helped the Allies crack the Nazi Enigma cipher during World War Two."

... was all the other stuff he did too complicated to distill down into one line? Describing him as such is like saying Einstein is important to physics because he was a patent clerk.
I was intrigued by the $8 for a 500 word article. Some commenters were complaining that it was too expensive, but when I compare that with my consulting rate for my writing, it's a real bargain. I wouldn't farm out a technical article, but it makes sense for consumer oriented ones. I would spend more than that on coffee while I wrote.

EDIT: does anyone know what the going rate for a well written 500 word consumer article from a US/CA/UK based writer would be? Back in the days when I was using PR firms, it was quite expensive.
Convert it to AAC and you'll double the storage space of the Shuffle. Their estimates are based on MP3 and I know from experience that AAC can store a song with equal quality (well the same output quality from an earphone).
Seems to me the second part is only lame because he's doing it strictly to make money. If he were doing it for a more creative project it would just be self-promotion.
Simple Usability Improvement: Named Logins
"To my surprise, in the rock examples the MP3 at 128 was preferred. I repeated the experiment over 6 years and found the preference for MP3 - particularly in music with high energy (cymbal crashes, brass hits, etc) rising over time."

Encoding to MP3 @ 128Kbs will apply a low pass filter (so that more bits can be used to encode the lower frequencies) and high freqeuncy sounds can sound smeared. I would guess one or both of these factors could be responsible for reducing harsh sounding treble.

I'm guessing of course but if right, I wouldn't say the MP3 was better. Merely, it masks a horrible sound to begin with.
Sure makes sense to me. Spend a year or two building a business that returns $10-15K a month. I then have a choice of continuing to build my income, pulling a Tim Ferris, or putting it into maintenance mode and working on something for the fun of it.
yes but its putting considerable time and intellect into a very vulnerable asset. google inevitably changes the way it does things and then its time to start over. and with each keyword he is competing with passionate and dedicated people (the winning side of any war is filled with these) that view their efforts as something more than a hack or arbitrage.
Redesigning Craigslist With Focus On Usability
This is the idea that underpins "poker planning" used in some agile software methodologies. You estimate a feature's required effort relative to other features that you (or the team) have completed in the past.

It's interesting to me, because I've always been more partial to Joel Spolsky's philosophy that only the developer who implements a feature can estimate it, and only after the feature has been designed in detail. This study says that is all wasted effort (it's the "inside view").
Developing cloud apps: What's different
I've jokingly suggested for years that the right approach is to make your best estimate, then multiply by pi.

Not only does it boost the estimate enough that you're likely to hit the target, it also adds a lot of bogus precision to the numbers that the less-than-clueful will interpret as accuracy.
Dodgeball for ever: Foursquare continues what Google didn't
I think you mean, McGruber, http://www.google.com/search?q=macgruber
Well, since ideas can be patented, trademarked, become intellectual property and whatever else, it's understandable that we feel scared about ideas being stolen.

But I think the roots of the problem are basically in our enthusiasm and our (lack of) self-confidence. On one side, we consider our ideas awesome and that anyone who hears them will also think they are the coolest thing since sliced bread. On the other hand, we believe that, if they like it enough (which they obviously do because of the previous point), they will steal/copy it and possibly execute it better than us (because they have more experience, more people, more contacts, more money... infinite reasons).

This article speaks the truth, 99% of the time people won't care or understand, and you will have to chase them to make them believe in your ideas (I'm experienced with the "that's interesting" people :P). But when enthusiasm is strong enough, it's very hard to accept that someone won't like your idea. And if self-confidence levels are low, here comes the problem and the secretive attitude.
The key "trick" that he's using is to have unique, relevant, helpful content. That's the whole secret, imho, to good SEO ranking (obviously using the right tags, keywords, etc... helps).

He's just doing it backwards from what you and I would do, i.e. he's finding ad money, and building a site based on that, versus building a site, and then working on building traffic (ad based or not, you want traffic).
Sun plans to integrate SSDs onto the server motherboard itself
For C, the Lua source is great, and there's a hyperlinked version here - http://www.lua.org/source/5.1/ . It's written in strictly compliant ANSI C.

For Lisp and Scheme, try Peter Norvig's _Paradigms of Artificial Intelligence Programming_ and Christian Queinnec's _Lisp in Small Pieces_ (PAIP and LiSP). The former has more Common Lisp, the latter Scheme. Both will give you quite a bit to think about. :)
MIT SIMILE Project graduated to independent open source project
How Running a Startup is Like Collecting Baseball Cards
Here's another you've probably never heard of.

http://www.sitepoint.com/forums/showthread.php?t=345974

(Guy owns some websites you've likely never heard of, not getting masses of traffic, but he knows how to do PPC and make money).

The thread is from 2005, and at that point he was spending $300k a month on adwords, and making a ton more from affiliate networks including adsense. (Attached bank statement screenshots)

I did the same for a while (Ad arbitrage), and got up to about $2k or so profit/month, but as odd as it sounds, it didn't really seem fulfilling. Probably the lack of contact with real users etc.

There's money in this 'advertising' thing though ;)
Hopefully never. The embedded Quicktime player never seems to gobble up CPU like Flash players often do. And I'll be that a high % of their traffic has Quicktime installed.
Have citizens actually write out a check every quarter

Have you actually met any citizens lately? I think you're overestimating the average person's ability to manage their finances. You know that idiot buddy of yours who only takes out $20 at a time from the cash machine so that he won't spend too much? That guy is orders of magnitude brighter than most regular people. Average people have this amazing ability to spend all of their money whenever they have any of it.

So yeah, you and me would know that we needed to keep $60k in savings until April to pay taxes with. Nobody else is capable of doing that math.
$15K/month * 12 months/year= $180K/year. Not a bad paying job, either.
Fair enough on TF. But plenty of smart people also thought housing prices would never go down...
Does a high score list result in a lot more people playing a game?
Only a few people would have names near the top. One could argue that a high score list would discourage most players.
I wouldn't hold your breath.

If you did, won't that be murder? :)
Interesting, but I've seen footage of chimps in the wild going on military-style raids of neighboring groups. Land grabs, basically. I think that requires at least as much planning for the future.

(The footage was in the BBC series Planet Earth. Amazing series.)
I had a post on that story, but I can't get through to my threads display (HN seems to cut that off when load is high, makes sense, not complaining). But I'll endorse aoeu's Wikipedia link. Between that and some of the article Wikipedia links you can get a pretty good idea of the problem and the scope.

Until this problem goes away, CDs are no longer the choice of discriminating audio enthusiasts.... but not because "digital" is worse than "analog", but rather because "destroyed digital" is simply bad. Right now in the "digital vs. analog" war, CDs aren't bringing their A-game.... they're not even bringing their D-game.

A further thought occurs to me; maybe people prefer "Crappy 44KHz originals with clipping softened by MP3" to "Raw crappy 44KHz originals". This ought to be controlled for, if it wasn't, as this might be the rational choice even by audiophile standards. (Yes, it's crap vs. crap, but there may yet be a distinctly less crappy one.)
Ask HN: Dear HN, why are you going down all the time?
Lately HN seems to have downtimes pretty much every day.

I'd be curious to know what is causing these downtimes, technically?
> you're selfish because you've directed your anger at the poor

Who said I'm angry at the poor? I'm not. I just think there is a certain intelligent logic in how taxation and representation are rhetorically linked. I also think a majority-rules democratic system where a majority pay $0 in taxes in unsustainable. I think the decisions made in such a system will be stupid and short-sighted, leading to massive deficits, economic collapse, and maybe even political instability in the long run.

Leave your emotions aside for a moment. I am simply trying to discuss what is wise. I am not advocating eating the poor. However, I see that you already have your mind made up and have no desire for discussion.

In addition, you're imputing a ton of motives and positions to me that I did not state. You're in attack dog mode for no reason, and there is no way that I can intelligently engage you if you've already painted me as an evil misanthrope.

The number of people who pay no net taxes in this country is much larger than the number that get their clothes from dumpsters. You're painting a dishonest scenario and smearing me with dishonest motives.

In general I don't enjoy talking to people who think that those who disagree with them are evil. I can say that I didn't enjoy this conversation.
Why work when the taxman steals your labour?

Why the editorialising in the linktext? It doesn't appear in the article.
I run one of those free blog hosting sites the author mentioned, and have to spend a few minutes each morning deleting a dozen new blogs from people that took that guy's advice. Please don't add to my workload.

But yeah, linking from bad neighborhoods is pretty much the best way to get removed from Google's index. Blog hosts that allow spam are considered bad neighborhoods.
why couldn't he do both? having a less meaningful job that you use to fund a more meaningful but lower paying one is a common solution.
Why HN is slow lately
We've had a huge spike in traffic lately, from roughly 24k daily uniques to 33k. This is a result of being mentioned on more mainstream sites. I hope this spike will subside, like past ones have. In the meantime I may temporarily hack a few things to make the site faster, like putting fewer results on threads pages.

You can help the spike subside by making HN look extra boring. For the next couple days it would be better to have posts about the innards of Erlang than women who create sites to get hired by Twitter.
Actually, I don't live in the US. But yes, living in the US is a luxury, but that isn't relevant to the US tax system because everyone taxed by the US (more or less) lives in the US. (When people say things like "we should tax the rich more" or "we shouldn't tax the rich more", "rich" is really shorthand for "among the best-off of the people being taxed".)
ISynth Brings Microsoft’s Powerful 3D Photo Viewer Photosynth To The iPhone
Awesome guys!
Does it matter? If it wouldn't today, it might tomorrow. If you care about one site, you can't take that risk. He can because he has hundreds of sites to risk.
That's a great example of how an "optimization" actually makes your code run slower -- which highlights the importance of knowing what the underlying platform is doing.
When setting up with e-junkie can you do it in such a way that their name doesn't show up anywhere? (on the payment page, on the credit card bill, etc)

I wouldn't want my customers seeing "e-junkie" anywhere where they are giving me a credit card number. It sounds shady and may make some customers put their credit card back in their wallet.
sounds pretty shady... in the seo industry its impossible to know whats real and whats not

it wouldn't surprise me if this article is just a clever advertisement for this guy's article writing website
No matter what tax policy the government has, some people will do particularly badly and others particularly well. (It is obviously not feasible to investigate every single taxpayer's financial situation.) Of course it will sometimes happen that someone with a large salary is badly hurt by paying $X extra taxes. It will also sometimes happen that someone with a smaller salary is badly hurt by paying $X extra taxes. And the point is that the latter will happen much more often than the former.

Taxing the rich (for whatever definition of "rich") more doesn't mean believing that all rich people can easily afford to pay the extra, any more than not taxing the rich more means believing that all not-rich people can easily afford to pay the higher taxes they'll have to pay if the rich aren't taxed more. It just means believing that overall the population is better off that way.

(And yes, of course, tax+redistribute until equality is never actually going to happen, and a good thing too.)
YC News, please implement Facebook Connect and Disqus for comments
I think that would be awesome
I think there's some really good lessons about SEO that startup founders can take away from this. Namely:

- Relevant, well-written, and keyword-laden content on your site is important

- Getting links to your site is important

- Getting links with good anchor text is even more important

- Having keywords in your site's browser titles is important
This is a nice statistic - but you should rather use the number of economically active people rather than the whole population when you calculate the per person value.

That is because only the economically active persons generate wealth (and they would have to eventually pay the stimulus).
It would be interesting to know what is the likely reason for each traffic spike. Perhaps you could have a page that shows this information in a way similar to the Google finance news items:

http://www.google.com/finance?q=NASDAQ:GOOG
I like the "donate to an opensource project" thing :)
Very interesting. It happens that Pivotal Tracker https://www.pivotaltracker.com/, (full disclosure: from my employer Pivotal Labs), is built to combat this bias via the concept of "emergent iterations." You specify "points" for each fine-grained task, and tracker determines your velocity over time in dealing with these tasks, and predicts future progress.

Therefore, the question for the user is "what other tasks is this task like?" at which point tracker can be the external observer, noting how long those tasks actually take. Interesting stuff, so I wrote a short post on this: http://pivotallabs.com/users/woosley/blog/articles/724-pivot...
Still I'm curious, what's the underlying problem?

33k/day doesn't sound like a lot of traffic, honestly. But also I can't imagine lisp being that slow either. Maybe add some caching?