skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Quality is Dead #2: The Quality Creation Myth
I particularly like the shifting of focus onto the notion of relationships.

If I may, I'd also point out that qualities such as "quality", the values embodied by practices, and the evolving nature of relationships over time all come down to intent. Amongst other things, without a clean connection to intent those other things devolve into static, abstract notionals devoid of life.
Counter intuitive principles and highly thought provoking ideas make it a great, although long, read. The application of the conclusions in this article would be interesting to behold and analyze.

Author, rightly or wrongly, holds some strong opinions against Clay Shirky's ideas.
There was a discussion here last week about technical debt, and I think this is a great example of it.

You incur debt when you make a decision like this one. When you make thousands of decisions like it, they add up to a whole lot of debt.

The problem is that this debt is nearly impossible to quantify, so it's often invisible to the business team. A decision like keeping two copies of Notebook around thus seems like the correct decision to the business team at the time, but later proves to cost a lot more down the road.

So while it's true that engineering supports business objectives at the macro level, a pure "business" mindset at the micro level can lead to short-sighted and ultimately costly decisions like this one.
Thanks!

Sounds like an attempt at describing a process of creating art.
An Entire English Village For Sale For Just $35 million 
This Thursday the idyllic village of Linkenholt goes on sale and, should you have a spare £25 million sitting in the bank, it could be yours in its entirety.
Insurance Quotes
interesting, no one commented so far about the disproportion of men to women in the field... I think this should be a separate question in itself.
Interesting point, but ultimately a non sequitur with the OPs question.
Elastic Build Agents
I've owned 3 mac minis over the last 4 years or so (2 G4's and now a new Core 2 version), and there's one thing that keeps me coming back to Windows for dev work - window management. Maybe I just don't get it (or haven't figured it out), but when I have 20 windows open on then Mac, trying to figure out what is what in the dock is painful (all of the terminal windows look the same in icon form). I find it much easier to jump between apps using the Windows task bar.
New Wireless Carrier Bypasses Networks, provides unlimited VoIP over Wireless
Ask HN: Why is there a disproportion of the ratio between men and women in the field of CS? 
I find it interesting that when I attend a marketing group (not to market a product but a general 'user group') that the room is filled with women. However, one would only see a handful at a CS usergroup. How did CS end up being a 'man's' concentration? and do you think this will ever change?
Ask HN: Finding an ad network for my startup (other than Adsense)
I've used Adsense in the past, but won't be able to use Adsense in my current startup due to Google's terms of use. (My app is stateful; When users click an ad, I need the advertiser's site to open in a new window so that users don't lose their place in my app. Google doesn't allow that.)

I have applied to Yahoo's publisher network a few times but never received a response; I put in a request for Microsoft's ad beta program today.

My startup will be freemium; I'm not solely relying on ads.

Any suggestions for a reasonable Adsense alternative?
Why did I know that the top comments would be complaints about the topic?

Ok -- why as a hacker (and non-pot-consumer) am I interested?

First, entrepreneurs are always playing the angles seeing where there might be some economic traction where there was none. Obviously if pot becomes legal, there will be social changes both in California and the rest of the U.S. I could easily imagine pot-based vacation planning as a web service. Or better still, some kind of pot fanboy sites, just like we have with wine and beer drinkers. None of these business options have been on the table until now. To me this pot stuff sounds like a lot of cash on the table. Sure the growers, distributors, and governments are going to pick most of that up, but there are lots of really interesting places to tap into that cash flow.

Second, as a government-hacking project, the idea fascinates me. Will the California legislature pass this? Will Arnold (a bit of a famous pot-smoker himself) sign it? If so, does the federal government step in? What's more important, having states try new unusual tactics to keep funded or having the feds control drug policy? Will the feds step in or not? It's a long way from ignoring enforcement to having states flout the federal laws. Ever since Lincoln decided that no, states aren't all that powerful there has been this interesting power struggle between states and the federal government that the feds mostly win. Will this be an exception?

I wouldn't want to see pot stories everyday, at least pot stories that are simply "legalize pot, now!" kind of things. But stories about significant other concepts, like startup opportunities or civics, that just happen to involve pot? I'm okay with that every now and then.
On a related note, can anyone recommend a good registrar with a decent API? I'd like to offer domain registration as an add-on to my customers. I'm almost ready to go with OpenSRS, but I thought I'd ask the HN community first.
I love how K5 articles have their own writing style. It's a shame the community is dead, because I genuinely miss the writing that came out of there, with its own unique rhythm and set of tropes.
... in the US or other developed countries.

There was an article posted here in HN last year related to this: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=194070

The short of it is that it's because women have the freedom to make that choice, and they choose not to go into CS.
Meta-discussion blending with topical discussion here, I'd be interested to know what the moderation burden on HN is. HN has maintained quality up to this scale and may be able to prevent additional growth, but what's the cost?
I know by doing this we'll get closer to reddit but, whatever, UPVOTED!
I've always gone with the domain, rather than the task.

Me: "I build medical instruments"

Them: "Oh." sometimes followed by "like what?"

Me: "Blood test machines"

Them: "Cool. You like football?"

Most people have little idea what a computer programmer does. But they can understand that when a nurse takes their blood it goes into an instrument that measures different things about it and that's good enough for them.
Or you could read them as though they were posted as multiple posts?
Through a cannon.

Jokes aside, it's best to be respectful and use common sense. If it's because they're underperforming, you can be clear about that. If it's a long time employee and it's because of the economy, obviously, you have to be quite a bit more sensitive. This is especially true in a small company.
Okay I checked just now.

The FBI was created by the Justice Department. It is entirely inside the Executive Branch. Its leader, like other cabinet officials, is appointed by the president and confirmed by Congres, although he serves a 10-year term. As Nixon clearly demonstrated, the heads of these agencies serve at the pleasure of the president (http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-srv/national/longterm/water...) More recently, Clinton got rid of Sessions http://www.slate.com/id/2066861/

Like all Federal Agencies, the FBI has close relations with Congress, which approves its budget, tells it how to operate, and investigates any wrongdoing. But policy decisions -- how to execute the laws in place -- are made solely by the President.

But none of that looking told me anything I didn't already know.
Your example does flow back, which I why I drew the Excel analogy. LabVIEW is a fascinating piece of tech. I have had many occasions to loathe it -- what emacs user wouldn't hate a language that can't be edited as text? -- yet I love it all the same, and when you work in science you can't really resist using it. It is fast, and effective, and if you carefully avoid the temptation to use it for everything it is a joy to use.

Part of its secret is that it fits the problem. You're standing in a lab plugging things into other things using a snarl of BNC cables. You're not trying to design the correct abstraction. You're trying to solve your problem by lashing together the tools that you already have, sometimes in a hilarious fashion. ("We're out of voltmeters, but we do have a $50k sampling oscilloscope. We can use that!") LabVIEW code often looks like spaghetti, but that's partly because its use case also looks like spaghetti.

There is more than one kind of power tool. Computer scientists like general-purpose high-level tools, for good reason. They understand that "the pen is mightier than the sword", and they spend a lot of time collecting pens. But sometimes you need to cut something in a hurry, and at those times there's really no substitute for a well-designed sword. You can use a pen to design a sword -- perhaps even a better sword -- or to convince the folks with swords to move somewhere else. But it's a long and unreliable process. And it can be immensely satisfying to just pick up a sword and stab something!
http://www.qwantz.com/archive/000955.html
Songsmith "is clearly a true work of genius"
I find that all the mac users I know are always waiting on the next update to fix some sort of problem. As an example, one of my friends cannot connect to a bluetooth network due to some bug that was introduced 2 years ago.

It's too bad you can't go in there and, you know, jumble some plumbing around and get it fixed.
What secret botnet herder admin? Did it make it to HN?
Things You Don’t Know About Pluto
I'm an Ubuntu 8.10 user, and I have to say that the font smoothing is much better than XP, and almost on par with macintosh computers.

If you are looking for graphic design fonts for Ubuntu, I would highly reccomend the Aenigma fonts package: http://crunchbang.org/archives/2008/06/14/aenigma-fonts-for-...
Incidentally, 3/14 is also Albert Einstein's birthday.
Ask HN: Please review Twollars
Dear HN Members,

I've been here on HN for almost a year now and time and time again I see the most valuable comments come by on Ask HN Review posts. To be honest, they are by far my favorites.

I am very happy to now be posting my own. Last month my co-founder and I launched Twollars. Twollars is a Twitter thank you currency. Simply by tweeting "Give 5 Twollars @username" - there is no registration - you can send Twollars to someone. (You can also use any of the other commands - here is a list on our Wiki with all the commands we are experimenting with: http://thinktank.twollars.com/wiki/71163)

Where we hope to do a lot of good is by allowing people to donate their Twollars to a charity. The charity in turn is sponsored by a company who pledges to donate the real amount in hard currency.

We are also very close to launching multi-currencies. Which will allow anyone on Twitter to start their own currency. The thoughts behind this are to allow people to setup their own community currency (similar to many open money concepts that are being tried).

URL: http://Twollars.com

Any feedback is really appreciated!

Thank you so much,

Eiso & Mac
They're wrong that 4chan's /b/ suffers from newfag infestation. /b/ suffers from having more traffic than the system can handle - a thread can only stay alive if it's bumped every minute, and this is only possible when it becomes a memefest, intelligent discussion threads just don't have this volume.

Other boards have as many newfags, and none of them sucks as much as /b/.
"Do we really need to add yet another mind-altering substance to the array?" - "That's a good point."

Actually, it's a terrible point. Three paragraphs after being informed that marijuana is a $14 billion dollar industry already, not a $14 billion dollar industry in potential but in actual fact, we get two paragraphs of people whining about "adding" pot into the mix. Adding? It's there! Like it or not.

This is why journalists get no respect from me. These guys ought to be asked how anything would be "added" to the $14 billion industry already in place. Perhaps they'd come up with some decent answer, after all, but in the meantime their argument as presented in this article is terrible.

At least the last paragraph showed some sane recognition that the horse bolted from the barn millennia ago.
Yes.

As much as I'd like to leave it at that one snarky word and leave you to fill in the rest, I had better fill out my argument by pointing out that this experiment was actually, factually tried, and it went terribly. Illegal alcohol was far worse for society than legal alcohol. Prohibition resulted in the only flat-out repeal of an amendment of the Constitution ever.
I have faith Numbrosia will be one of the greatest iPhone apps ever. Make it beautiful. Good luck.
This is a huge improvement! And congratulations on landing the NY Times.

As someone else said before, now you have to get http://jellyfishart.com/ to be a top hit on Google for your name, and/or the concept of jellyfish tanks. Unfortunately the NYTimes didn't mention the domain name or the company name. (I wonder, can such things be negotiated?)

Link to the NYTimes story on the front page of your site. Maybe start a "Links" section; this is also useful for trading links with other entrepreneurs to build page rank.

Just curious, why no phone number? If I were you I'd put that in the footer of every page.

Funny, but I see very few pages at all on Google for your company. Maybe you should try Google's webmaster tools.

http://www.google.com/webmasters/tools/dashboard

Since you probably can't afford the services of an SEO consultant (and most of them do shady things anyway) perhaps the best thing is to find a lot of business directories and make an entry for your company, with links back to your website. Also your YouTube channel or any other avenues you can think of. Ideally this should have been in place before the article came out but you still have time if you work on sites that Google crawls quickly.

There are a few mistakes on the page which a browser will render ok but may cause Google to give up. Use http://validator.w3.org/ and you'll see what I mean.

I'm guessing that you're using some kind of tool to create HTML - these tend to suck for getting Google rank, since the structure is visually pretty but hard for Google to understand. For instance, search engines can't determine what's a heading and what's not unless you use the standard <h1>...<h6> tags. Also, adding an alt="something" attribute to your images tells Google what is in the picture (and that's required for XHTML anyway, which you seem to be trying to support)
Not that long ago we (wrongly) thought the very same about other critters.
Know of anything similar in Calgary?
I love this quote:

When a 14 year old kid can blow up your business in his spare time, not because he hates you but because he loves you, then you got a problem.
DNS was an elegant idea from more civilized times.
Domain squatting should be punished in some way.
I created my own holiday a few years back which I've observed every year with friends since its inception... Nacho Friday.

It occurs on the 2nd Friday in July, you have to drink copious amounts of Tequila, consume lots of nachos and wear a novelty oversized sombrero all day.

Anyway, us Aussies have to celebrate Pi day next month (kinda) - 31/4 as today is 14/3 for us.

Although it seems wikipedia has an interesting article on the number 143, it can be created by adding up 2 different sets of consecutive prime numbers, which I found interesting.
Eiso,

Twollars is a cool idea. How do you bridge the thing? Real money vs Twollar money. I mean, do you actually donate money when someone donates money? or is it just a service where you allow others collect donations?

P.S: I've been noticing you've been using using Twollars a lot yourself. Did you launch it from a cafe? I think I saw a pic of you in a green shirt and a laptop :) I've been spying on Twollars for a while LOL :)
Have a look at witch (it used to be free)
http://www.manytricks.com/witch/

You can switch to a specific window (alt+tab for me) with it. It will also un-minimize windows. I actually auto-hide my dock and use command+tab and alt-tab to switch.
I think you're about two steps ahead of a really great idea--but the devil is in the details and you need to iterate a few more times to arrive at a viable approach, IMO.

Your business model will be more successful if it doesn't require permission from site owners in the first place. I have some ideas around this and would be willing to share them off-HN.
Very old article glorifying domain squatting. Flagged.
Sometimes when it goes to the next level, an asteroid materializes right on top of me, which seems a bit unsporting.
Hey Akash,

The way it works is that companies who are interested in donation money to a charity and getting visibility on Twitter can chose to sponsor a charity. So then if for example a 1000 Twollars are donated, the company sponsoring the charity will donate a $1000 Dollars.

Yup, I had launched it from a netbook in a hotel lobby/restaurant in London since I was traveling at the time and we really wanted to get it out there (someone posted a Twitpic of that). It was a great experience and got to meet up with some great people via Twitter. One guy even found a problem in the code and averted disaster.

All the best,

Eiso
yup! that's a really good idea.

It makes donation collection easier. So that makes you like "TipJoy for offline world" coz you'll not be dealing with real currency and only manage donations.

I can guess whats up next: an sms version, iphone app, android and so on.

Rock-n-rolla!!

All the best Eiso
I don't think this has anything to do with Erlang's internals, which is what the headline suggests. Most likely this is a snippet of code from Reia dealing with currying or partial application support.
AKA the tampod.
This is surprisingly approachable. It's fun (and flattering, I suppose) to see computability explained in a broader context.

It makes me wonder: what is the lambda-calculus equivalent of the busy beaver? Number of normal-order steps before normalization (for a given program size)? Are the LCBB numbers different for different evaluation orders? What metric do you use for program size: depth? Number of lambdas?
Surprise: these SXSW Twitter Visualizations are pure JavaScript (Flash-free)
But most of those games that burn 100% CPU still burn 100% CPU even if the game is paused with a static pause screen and the container window is scrolled past the flash area and the browser window doesn't have focus and is totally obscured.

So it's obviously not a deliberate tradeoff.
How do you recognise good programmers if you’re a business guy?
Spawned a New Process
Georgia Tech is sending out my acceptance/rejection letter today. gulp
Im at my Brothers for the weekend but when I get back tomorrow night I plan to figure something out (more radical).
Another current one is Regus HQ. http://www.regus.com/officesolutions
The company I work for used to rent some space in their Mountain View, CA office. That was several years ago and I don't know the current prices.
FYI I submitted a similar thread yesterday.

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=515376

Some interesting comments on there :)

EDIT: the rounded edges are annoying me the most :(

Im somewhat gutted because I am still 6 months or more off of launching our social network. If i had known in advance of this crap change I suspect we could have skimmed a good few users from FB :(
Libraries with Wi Fi are a great place to work unless you need to take a lot of calls.
Kids Virtual World | Kids Games | Nicktropolis
Eiso mentioned you but I never made the connection. It's a great idea! I work with a few charities who are looking to leverage social media to help them through these tough times. I need to talk with one of you about this more. BTW I know I don't comment here often, but I read you posts regularly and share your link's as well. Congrats, I have a feeling this is going to take off.
"Society doesn’t need newspapers. What we need is journalism."

Right now, I don't see any real journalism that occurs only in the online world. And we really do need it to keep watch on those in power. I understand his argument that journalism is the underlying thing we need, and newspapers are merely the current vehicle for providing it. But in my opinion, when some really great online innovation happens with regards to journalism, then it would be OK for newspapers to be pushed out. But until then, I think we should save the newspapers.
Well... Without a meaningful nervous system, I bet the odds are pretty low.
whats stopping the Charity-Water to make a fake twitter account and do Give 1000000 Twollars @username.

Also, you need to give an incentive for the businesses to use this, instead of sending the $$$ directly. For that you'll need to build up your core group of users, and then tweet stuff like "IBM has donated $15,000USD to _____ Charity thanks to your efforts"
As a hardcore, super-engaged user they don't care about you. The point is not to cater to existing hardcore users, but to create new ones. If you're using every facet of the site as it exists, of course redesigns are going to be painful. There is simply no room to add stuff. All they can do is move things around, and this is hard when you have muscle knowledge of where things are.

As a casual user (former developer back in the goldrush days of mid '97), I immediately felt like I was getting more interesting information. That's just one opinion obviously. I'm not sure why you say less people will see a note... I don't see any evidence of that. But clearly it seems things are simplified and content is fresher, these two factors can only benefit them with their target audience.

I will agree with you that the new design needs tweaks. They do need to bring back enough configuration to suit the power users needs. Overall though column arrangement of Filter Buttons, Firehose, Highlights strikes me as a move in the right direction engagement-wise.
Every Twitter account has a starting balance of 50 Twollars. So if you would tweet that - you would get a message saying you don't have sufficient balance.

The incentive for the businesses is exactly what you're mentioning - the visibility on Twitter.
I don't know what people did before Expose came around (I'm only about 2 years into being a Mac user here so I have no non-Expose experience). I have thumb buttons on my mouse bound to Expose and Spaces, I use them constantly (often at the same time, Expose in Spaces is very convenient). Honestly I have enough running most of the time that the Windows taskbar would have to be 4 rows high to be readable, but with nine desktops in Spaces and Expose a touch away I have never had a problem finding my way through the absurd mess of windows I make.

By the way, if you use Terminal in OSX, I highly recommend checking out Visor (http://docs.blacktree.com/visor/visor), I have it bound to ctrl-~ (tilde) and I use it constantly.
Why isn't this illegal, and why does Yahoo serve ads to this clown?
Your response indicates that you did not understand the parent post.

Assume I have some system where I guess right only 25% of the time, but if I guess right I get $5. If I guess wrong I lose $1. My expected return is (0.25 * 5 - 0.75 * 1) = 0.5, which is 50 cents.

So, I'm doing worse than a coin toss, but still making money.

This is what the parent poster meant by a "skewed bet". The payoff for guessing "heads" or "tails" is not the same.

You can't just look at the results of the coin toss (correct guess, incorrect guess). You also have to look at how much you get paid for a correct guess, and how much you lose for an incorrect guess.

In most real-life situations, the payoff is not symmetric (equal win and loss amounts). This is why your "if you can't beat a coin-toss" comment is meaningless (and usually incorrect).