skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
No sane company would open itself completely after only few years of existence.

First, obviously it is a social networking fest out there and facebook would be scared--even as it leads--of potential competitors. That is a valid reason to not open up.

Secondly, opening up at any level has lots of implications, especially concerning privacy. I would say we should be pretty happy with the direction facebook is going in. Few years into existence and it has built a promising application platform.

To all the folks saying that facebook will die the AOL way: they can, but not with the current team. If a day comes when facebook's existence is threatend because they are not opening up enough, guess what? They'll open up some more.
Generally yes; I believe this is fairly well studied although I'm short on sources. IIRC, during ovulation, a woman would dress up with brighter colors (or dress nicer or something), have more flirtatious actions... I forgot if there were dietary changes. Also interesting (also IIRC), is that women prefer more masculine males during peak fertility (best genes), and prefer more feminine males during lowest fertility (best care).
One of the World's foremost mechanical engineers says that automakers could build a carburetor that would let cars get 100 miles to a gallon, but the Oil companies won't let them!
Many thanks to Marco Gallotta http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=67900 for linking to this excellent guide.
Diminishing Dead-Tree Media and 3 More Ways Bloggers Can Help Save The Planet
I did, and I'm impressed. All I have to do is switch to a new editor for document editing, learn new keybindings and mouse actions, port all my editor customizations to Scheme, convert my .tex files to .tm files (a lossy process, both empirically and by texmacs' own FAQ), give up on being able to answer my questions with google or Leslie's or Don's excellent books, and give up on being able to edit my documents over ssh. The WYSIWYG productivity gain is sure to be huge, and more than make up for it. I'm waiting (tries it...) 0.422 seconds for tetex to run, every time I want to see what my document looks like, which is really slowing down my work. Sold!
What I liked about Slashdot was that you could redefine +1 Funny as -1 Funny.
Government Databases, EFF, and a Warning
Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) legal director Cindy Cohn submitted a statement to the House Committee on Energy and Commerce with analysis of the risks associated with the Bush administration's data mining and warrantless surveillance programs.
If you follow the money in medical research, you'll find surprising results. There's plenty of research into the corrupting influence of money on scientists (for citations, the book "The truth about the drug companies" has many).

Unlike most types of experimental science, we only have one earth. So, it seems like a worthwhile activity to look into the motivations of the people on both sides of the debate.

One of the advantages of digging deep and following the money is that you get a somewhat scary sense of the machine designed to discredit climate change science.
How Does Google Map the World?
Technology Review interviewed engineers at Google and at XDigitalGlobe, the company that supplies Google's satellite photos, and did a little bit of reverse-engineering to figure out how it works.
I've designed it so that the user doesn't see the voting option for importance until after they've voted for the accuracy of the quote.
Slashdot may not have the problem on a story/post level, but have you ever tried to read every comment on a story? A third are hate speech or spam, another third are repetitious or illogical, a sixth are insightful/funny, and the other sixth would be if they didn't happen to be against the wider political views of the people that had mod points that day.

I think the only real solution is to have a small community whose members are actually heavily invested in the topic... basically, experts.

If I try to go add to a discussion about some new Myspace feature, my thoughts are likely going to be off topic, misguided, or an outright waste of space... all because I don't have a Myspace account, and never have. For the same reason, if a bunch of Joe Sixpacks show up on Hacker News to discuss startups, they are probably going to bury any thoughts from actual startup founders or people involved in the 'scene' (whatever the scene is).

I'm not sure how you maintain that, short of making a community invite only. Even Hacker News is starting to show the pain of size. The front page often has pretty off topic stuff on it, when I, for one, came here originally to keep up on the startups funded by YC and the thoughts of the people involved in them.

Sure, PG still comments here regularly, but how long until this place grows and he becomes an absentee owner like CmdrTaco? He may not stop commenting, but there will be so much crap in the comments that few may notice what he says.
Well, let's follow the money: who pays for climate research? And do they pay more if climate guys tell tem "OMG, we're in deep trouble!" or if they tell "well, er, it's quite a complicated system we have here... and we don't, er, fully understand it yet so can you fund some more research, please?"

On this topic, another heretic to publicly speak against the theory of human origin climate change is Claude Allegre, one of France's best scientists (CNRS gold medal, if that matters). Of course, he may be wrong but at least we're pretty sure he's unbiased because, as an eminent french socialist politician he should logically have sided with his neo-marxists comrades on this thesis that capitalism leads to a global environmental crisis.
You are using emotionally loaded labels ('climate change' denier) and attack integrity of the opponent (back pocket of the oil industry).

These are tools of a demagogue. You cannot be taken seriously after that.
I'm not sure this fixes it. Try to factor the human emotional side into the equation. For example, for an article that says "RoR sucks", what do you think Ruby enthusiasts will vote? Even if it's accurate, they'll still mark it as inaccurate, because they'd be hating it and wouldn't want it to go up on the home page. It's human nature.
HowStuffWorks Acquired by Discovery for $250M
I think I understand Jaron's premise - sites like facebook reduce the human element by forcing its users to add information according to a predefined structure. Presumably these same users may have created more free form web sites (and he equates this to individual creativity), but I don't really agree that it leads to group-think.

Facebook or any other site is just a medium - whether or not it leads to group-think is more a function of the participants than any conformity in their online 'meeting place'.
> I think the only real solution is to have a small community

I share the same point of view, and that's what I'm building right now with my new startup. There has to be a balance somewhere. Too small, and you get a dead community that rarely updates. Too big and it loses focus. The sweet spot is somewhere in between.
I am really and truly surprised at the debate on global warming.

Surely even a back-of-the-envelope calculation as to how difficult it would be to do an accurate mathematical model of climate, and the computing power needed to run such a simulation, would show that any prediction based on a computer model at this point is essentially bogus; much less being able to determine whether or not it is caused by man or by natural causes.

When you add in the fact that an accurate model of "how oceans work" is decades away (we don't even understand the Gulf Stream at this point) you have to wonder, exactly how can you mathematically model something that you don't understand?
Sad but true. Most of the time, that comes from people forgetting that good design subsumes usability. If a design doesn't score high marks on usability, it's a bad design, irrespective of how it looks.
Ask Venture Hacks: What's the biggest mistake entrepreneurs make?
I use it in an commercial environment to automatically produce well-designed PDF documents in multiple languages, I recommend the texlive distribution for those getting their feet wet. Hopefully you won't have to use non-default fonts.
I've never tried rails. But I know that PHP can get messy, and if Rails does clean it up I wouldn't say that rails cant do anything that PHP cant. Because clean code is something that enables faster development (theoretically speaking) and more innovation. Of course, probably each has its own use. In some cases the scale gets unbalanced, it can happen.
Check out ChinesePod.com if you haven't. Blows everything else away.
Explicit rating & ranking will inevitably crumble under its own weight. You have to use implicit data that isn't easily subject to collusion. Look for trends among disjointed groups that are acting in their own self interest.

I wrote about this a while back:
http://breasy.com/blog/2007/07/01/implicit-kicks-explicits-a...
CSS Equivalent of Prototype?
One of our programmers had the following comment in a recent Subversion commit: "Verified to display correctly with IE6, IE7, FF Ubuntu, FF, Galeon, Konqueror". Sigh... don't you hate when you have to do that? Frameworks like Prototype and Symfony has made development life much easier, but sadly CSS cross browser hell still brings the pain. So I ask, can some brave master-hacker create a Prototype/Symfony like framework for us poor CSS/HTML programmers?
7 things entrepreneurs should know about PR
People really don't understand how much control they're losing when they put AdSense on their site.

Case in point, Matthew Lesko, the question-mark-suit-wearing infomercial guy. Inscrutably, on his sites where you can order his products, he has AdSense ads. Visiting matthewlesko.com a week ago, one of the AdSense link units under his picture simply read "Scam", while on mlesko.com a text ad warned "Don't Buy That Grant Book!"
When did Yahoo release the new search?
Yahoo's new search seems quite good. Anyone done a comprehensive analysis of this? The Search Assist function seems quite good. Does this smack Google's ass?
I hope you're being intentionally ironic.
So, 'ad hominem' attacks are not allowed, and therefore nobody should ever take me seriously? That's a pretty amusing argument, I must say.

You're quite right they're emotionally loaded labels. We only get one earth, you know. I actually care about it. So should you.

But in case you think that the possibility for scientific payola is above scrutiny, fine. I also included a link which discussed his actual claims, and the actual science and debate around them. Read it.
don't be like this guy ---> Thomas Dullien

http://addxorrol.blogspot.com/2007/07/ive-been-denied-entry-...
Glenn Kelman's Financial Model
My high school physics teacher had this to say: "as a scientist, with such complex systems, it's really hard to be certain about anything with the evidence we have, however, this is the only planet we have, and I'd prefer not to risk it".
There are actually quite a few CSS frameworks out there, just none which provide the tools the author asks for. As someone mentioned in the comments, YUI Grids provides much of the desired functionality. Another which comes to mind is Blueprint, a typographical layout framework.
He seems to be ignoring the "long tail" argument that the internet, with its vast reaches, enables many people in weird niches to find one another.
I don't entirely agree that US startups are necessarily losers - if they can produce something for export to the EU, for instance (and especially if it's "exported" via the web), they'll come out ahead.
A more competitive dollar is good for America
I don't think he's claiming the variation in content has decreased, but warns that dependence on collective rating systems could decrease the variance of an individual's effective sample size.

I also don't think the author claims the web has introduced any social problems, just that it isn't solving them yet. Are these even problems with technical solutions?
Feedback requested on an idea to simplify entering locations on GPS devices
I see Slashdot in a darker light. To me it illustrates two principles. First, that there is a level of "firehose" beyond which quality-maximizing editors don't scale. Second, that an abstract judgment (up/down) is less abused than a list of judgments, all of which are necessarily trite. Handing the right to judge out by lotto only broadens the standard deviation of voters - if anything, it worsens the groupthink. "Power users" have more invested in a vote.

Thinking about what makes a vote worthwhile, there has to be some high barrier to entry (or any troll will pile in) and it must not itself be subject to groupthink (or it will result in an automated clique). In the case of Hacker News, I propose the metric: anyone who has founded or co-founded their own startup (defined as: in at the start, and has partial ownership) may vote.
I have long thought that humans have no effect on global warming, and that the climate change we are seeing would have happened regardless of what we do. For me, this doesn't change much -- I still try to do things the "greenest" way practically possible and think that it is important to reduce your ecological footprint.

However I have only recently realized that this "reduce CO2 or the earth will boil"-publicity is actually really good, even if not scientifically accurate. It makes people think, and it makes people change the way they behave, to reduce pollution.

Therefore I am kind of worried if the public opinion changes into "we did not cause global warming, no worries", as that might kill this new thrive for ecological behavior.

Maybe I should have more trust in my fellow people. Probably not...
I have four suggestions for improvements:

1. Remove L from your alphabet. As long as people use upper-case letters, it's fine; but someone is going to use lower-case letters and get confused between "l" and "1".

2. Remove T from your alphabet. With poor handwriting, "T" and "7" can be confused.

3. Remove U from your alphabet. It's easy to confuse "U" and "V".

(Note that 29^9 > 6.48 x 10^12, so the above changes don't affect the ability to pack the value into 9 symbols.)

4. Use a better checksum. Maybe there's some deep logic which I'm missing, but I can't see any way to prove that your checksum will detect all single-symbol errors or all two-symbol swaps (these are by far the two most common data-entry errors). I suggest using C = 1 x p_1 + 2 x p_2 + ... + 9 x p_9 mod 29, which will always detect both of these errors.

-- the other local Comlab DPhil.
And you want the site to respect you privacy, i.e. you don't want to give the evil site any private information -- for example about what you are interested in. Or?
With all due respect, I suggest ignoring that teacher.

This is the 'precautionary principle' which, while it sounds all nice and sensible on first hearing, is actually a recipe for justifying all kinds of mindless nonsense.

"Vaccines might cause Autism -- best not immunise my kids against that killer disease measles."

"WiFi might cause cancer -- best not put wireless networks in schools"

"Industrialiation might cause global warming -- best not let poor countries build power plants"
You are playing a bit of a game by equating something where there are some definite indications in one direction and a lot of unknowns (global warming), with things where there is little real evidence and a much more well understood system (vaccines). And sometimes, it makes sense to be cautious. Smoking did, and does cause cancer and other health problems.

There is pretty good evidence that the climate is changing (glaciers, icecaps) - that much is obvious even for those who don't want it to be true, at this point. The open question is whether it's us that's doing it. Given that we don't know, and we risk serious consequences, a bit of precaution doesn't seem so out of place.

There are sensible ways to start working against global warming without wrecking the world economy - (republican economist) Greg Mankiw's "Pigou Club", for instance:

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

That's the sort of sensible, cautious approach that makes sense to me: heed the warning, start doing something, and keep studying, without losing your head and doing anything truly rash that would trash the economy, or go overboard the other way and simply ignore/downplay the whole thing because it doesn't fit into your view of politics.

Also, as something of an aside, I have a lot of respect for that teacher - he was/is a bright guy not at all given to doom and gloom or handwaving - he was one of those teachers who could have had a good job in industry, no problem, but really loved teaching. His statement (which I only remember the gist of at this point) summed up both a sense of professional responsibility in admitting that there are a lot of known unknowns and unknown unknowns, and of a cautious, responsible approach to things that are potentially serious and dangerous. That's why I still remember it after 15+ years.
Used to all the time in school, now only occasionally.
Thanks for the feedback. I'll look into implementing those changes. I'm not sure why I chose that particular checksum... it's been a while since I wrote this.

John.
Yeah we're all sinners. Seriously - 'man made global warming' is turning into a cult.

It's a very scary movement that is trying to restrict what 3rd world countries can do.

Kinda reminds me of the 'year 2000 bug'... "Oh no the worlds computers will blow up!!! You better all spend loads of money on fixing it"
"Oh.... nothing much happened... well thank god we spent all that money 'fixing' it."
Finally a programming medium ideally suited for Piet: http://www.dangermouse.net/esoteric/piet.html
Strange that he chose "hello world" - being German, you'd expect "99 bottles of beer on the wall."

Also, it's one thing to have bugs in your program, quite another to have your program devoured by them. Then again, he can use pesticides for debugging.

Ok, I'll just stop now.
In Europe there is a region called "Karst" (in German anyway), that used to be full of florishing green woods. Now it is a sort of desert, and "Karst" is a synonym for an unfriendly, dry and barren landscape.

How did it get like that? Romans felled all the trees for ship building, many centuries ago.

I know this does not relate directly to the CO2 discussion (which also seems a bit simplistic to me), but driving through that landscape as a kid left a deep impression on me. Surely if the ancient Romans could change the environment, humans can affect the environment in the 21st century. It would be ridiculous to ascertain that humans have no effect on the environment at all, even if we don't understand the precise chain of effects.
It seesm unlikely that human civilization has no effect whatsoever, though. Just because we can't calculate something precisely doesn't mean it doesn't exist. There are more phenomena we can't simulate correctly than there are phenomena we can simulate. I guess we can't simulate the weather, either, yet nobody is going around claiming that "hurricanes don't exist".
I think understanding a system and using that knowledge to get the most out of it is often a form of hacking. So for the lap dancer, it would be a hack to get off the pill, earn more money while fertile and go on holiday when her prospects are the worst. Same money earned for less work, seems like a nice hack to me.
Do we need to think beyond the PC to really innovate?
A lot of the innovation we've seen over the last few years in the web apps space seems to have slowed down a bit (the techcrunch 40 was won by a personal finance site for gods sake). So - do we need to start thinking more radically e.g. wearable computing.
Newsletters that teach
The real losers are non-US companies that rely on US income (i.e. advertising) but have mostly local expenses (i.e. wages). Trust me.
This is great, thanks for posting. I spend a lot of time now in spreadsheets doing something very similar for our startup so it's cool to see some other methods.
When a process has homeostatic feedback, it can absorb some change with no result.

Also, when a process has a maximum (in the case of CO2, total opacity in its spectral window), then going beyond the maximum has no further effect.
I think one thing that might help is if the choice was a little less binary. A one to five star rating system might help sort out the difference between "a decent way to kill some time at work, so up vote" (3 stars) and "something that will actually change the way that I look at the world, so up vote" (5 stars). Something to think about.
Unfortunately it's also an excuse for massive government intervention in all kinds of systems. Still, I agree that the whole affair drives innovation in energy production which is a good thing for many reasons.
If you use "Prince" (princexml.com), you can turn HTML + CSS into a decent looking PDF. I've been writing my papers for the last year in plain text Markdown, then piping it through a script to make PDFs. It works pretty well for me.
Have you tried Prince or was it too expensive to bother with?
I wouldn't say my last prayers just yet, either - definitely there are a lot of complex mechanisms at work, and some of them might help to balance the ecosystem. On the other hand there have always been huge climatic changes in the history of earth, so we can't just count on everything staying the same it always was. It didn't work for the dinosaurs, that much is certain. There is no benevolent force that sees to keeping conditions just right for human survival.

As for CO2, I also don't know why suddenly all attention is focussed on that. It seems to be just one part of the problem/puzzle.
I think his being unreasonable in the extreme is a double edged sword. It made him highly productive because he channeled it so well and it also made him a total pain in the ass to interact with. It's a hobby of mine to tolerate people like Stallman, who are ultra smart but really annoying to most people. It's sort of like appreciating stinky cheeses. In both cases a bit of alcohol helps.
One of the World's Foremost Chiropractors says germs do not cause disease.
One of the World's Foremost Researchers Has Called the Apollo Moon Landings a Hoax!
I wonder what's happening to advertising prices for things in Europe (and elsewhere). For instance, hotels in Rome, or something like that - theoretically, though ought to be rising, because the Euros used to buy them are worth more.

Of course, that doesn't work if your target audience is looking at ads bought with dollars.
> You're quite right they're emotionally loaded labels.

Sure, but when you start debating like that, it drags the forum in question down to the level of sites like reddit. Your other post below is much better!
Imagine this--Oracle is having trouble with another "friendly" buyout
Please do! news.yc seems to be veering a little off track a bit lately and it'd be nice to see it come back.

After all, if people want the full wisdom of the crouds/mob rule thing then there's always Reddit.
You could always try these tactics:

http://www.419eater.com
...
...
...

I'm still here.

Please draw the conclusion that this implies :).
REST 101: Part 1 - Understanding Resources
i don't think it is a lotto as to who gets to vote. those who participate in moderation and those who make comments that are voted up get to vote.

i think one of the very good things in the slashdot model is the cap at 5 on votes. it lowers the number of people who go out of their way to karma whore. what's the point when all you will get is 5 points?

i've used slashdot for a long time (my user id is 5 digits). every year new sites come along.

i used digg for a year before it degenerated into the mess it is now. it went downhill fast once it expanded from a tech only site.

i used reddit for 6 months. it has gone the exact same way. as i type this it has been offline for a day.

after giving up on these i always drift back to slashdot. maybe the question is why do i leave slashdot in the first place? what is wrong with slashdot that i look for other sites?