skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
There is an extreme lack of finance in the region, and for a land strapped farmer acquiring a loan is a near impossibility. It's hard to justify an investment for what is essentially subsistence farming, with a little surplus in good seasons (perhaps!).

Undoubtedly some soils were taxes beyond what they could handle, but consider the alternative: slash and burn agriculture, or a steady crop rotation (hardly tenable when you need a crop this year, or your population dies!)

I have to say, however, I disagree with the headline. There are economists who oppose agricultural subsidies in favor of globalization, and those who support them. In the case of Malawi and other, tiny nations, it is clear enough to most economists, even those formerly of the World Bank (say, Joseph Stiglitz) that the dangers of an economy reliant on cash crops subject to rapid price fluctuations are too dire. One plague, one drought, one bad season, and you're wiped out, and need to accept punitive terms from international lending agencies just to feed the populace. It's not like there was a consensus of experts the president was disregarding.

Incidentally, one of the reasons, insufficiently mentioned, I believe, that subsistence agriculture can make sense even in semi-arid countries, is that it has a distribution network built in. Often times there is significant corruption in the distribution channels, other times they are simply disrupted by political upheaval, other times still the infrastructure simply isn't there, or is otherwise quite costly.

The distribution of inorganic fertilizer, by contrast, is substantially easier, and it is much less vulnerable to political disruption. You need to move less of it, the demand is substantially less fixed (more is better, but less won't kill you) and less immediate (rebels and bandits can steal food and jack up prices -- not so much with fertilizer), and the economic benefit has much longer to reach everyone (a crop lasts longer than any given shipment of food).
you should really add GET parameters that will let you go straight to a channel with a url and be logged in with a random username.
How to botch a launch: Razzle.ca
Facebook gets another $60 million in investment
It's like selling a religion because John Travolta and Tom Cruise are in it...
Something people want: Read blog from beginning
Deutsche Grammophon launches giant, DRM-free classical music store
Common Lisp web servers
"Hawkins believes entrepreneurship is a means to an end, as opposed to an end in itself."

This sounds wise. The goal is more important than the form.
Ah, some servers have a 'nick server' that enforces password protected nicknames.

In this case, if you aren't logged into a registered nick, it won't let you join any channels.

So, /nick Obscure234232 and then you are good to go :)
I am not sure thats legit...
But if you can build your own pieces, why do you need Bug?

I am no good at electronics, but sometimes I looked. Seems to me you can buy whole "system on a chip" chips today, chips that have all the functionality you need for creating a PDA (usb, bluetooth, wlan, whatever). If you know some electronics, you are probably better of soldering such a chip onto a small mainboard, rather than using the bulky bug thing. I mean those chips are probably the size of a stamp - why use a brick instead? And they do have small connectors, too.

Sorry, just playing devil's advocate - I sure wish them luck with Bug, I just don't really get it. 10 years ago maybe, but today?
The Cost of Web Development
Will any startups try this? I've never been able to break past a PR of 5 no matter who links to me it seems. Any advice?

This is the site I'd most like a higher PR on answermysearches.com
The bit about making elements in video clickable. I don't know if this is automatic detection or a manual process, but either way, ad targeting within video would be pretty phenomenal.
Lazily initialized, portable, threadsafe singletons with Boost
http://uint32t.blogspot.com/2007/12/you-lazy-bastard-part-1....

I figure there might be some experts here, and would like some feedback on whether my approach is correct :-)
Ask PG:What happened with the saved link?
My explanation was inspired by this video:

http://channel9.msdn.com/Showpost.aspx?postid=358968
Transparent PNGs in Internet Explorer 6
It's why there are so many MySpace layout creation websites. If MySpace was well-designed, there would be no need for those other sites.
Mobile Porn Facing The Same Problems As Other Mobile Content
I don't get it either. They seem to be targetting rich gadget freaks; there's nothing wrong with that but it's a bit risky: early adopters will buy and play with the thing, then move to the newest fad.

Their platform include all the "high-end" technologies (GPS, etc.) The problem is that the market of mobile consumer electronics appliances is already flooded with devices; you can find nearly any device you want. If, on the other hand, you want to build something more specialized (say, a tiny robot) the hobbyist electronics market is there, too. You can easily buy cheap, easy to use controllers and components, you have online PCB prototyping services, etc.

It's another example of well-meaning geeks building something that is cool'n'shiny but, unfortunately, nearly useless.
Too many students attend college, said former UCLA prof
Wanting to be in college is not the same as wanting an education. Among the other reasons for wanting to be in college is that it is a social scene with large concentrations of people of the same age and the opposite sex.
A good example of one to know is Brian Pokorny of Baseline ventures. I hear he's been mighty useful for YC startups
First UCLA gets creamed by SC and now this.
the lower levels? He's not arguing for coding in assembly, but Lisp - THE high level language. Unfortunately it takes some (myself included) several years to realize that.
I tend to agree. A lot of folks in a lot of colleges are there for the wrong reason. Make highschool education more comprehensive and don't require most of the population to waste another 4 years just so they can get a "decent" job.
Top 5 Contradictory Positions of Ron Paul Graham
Come on, you know you want to.
Something needs to be done about this:
http://www.alexa.com/data/details/traffic_details/basecamphq...

Controversial and inflammatory titles surely must bring in some buzz.
Would people use it though?
Surely it's a...

"I want to watch the rest of this video" vs "I'm going to click on this toaster and see special offers for toasters"

Seems like either the video will be so boring people will want to escape via adverts, or the video will be interesting and no one will click on 'ads'.

Perhaps I'm missing something.
blogging is dead? according to whom?
Good idea. Work in progress...

http://www.mibbit.com/irc.freenode.net-startups

Actually works now, but only for that server/channel at the moment. Also my ident server is down so login is a little slower than it should be.

It'll log you in either with your mibbit username if you're known, or with a random mibbit session nick.
http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=85273
Any decent programmer can also build a webserver, that doesn't mean each and everyone of us builds a new webserver implementation, we just use existing technologies like apache.

The idea is to leverage your tech skills by using a community, and finally being able to do it with hardware is really cool.
Related:

"Why I am Not a Professor OR The Decline and Fall of the British University"

http://www.lambdassociates.org/blog/decline.htm
read: linkbait.
Designing Products That Make Customers Happy and Passionated
Peter Merholz gave an exciting talk about product experience called "Experience is the Product". He is president of Adpative Path, one of the leading consulting companies when it comes to product experience strategy and design. Why is the experience of a product so important? Why not focus on the technology and many features?
For hackers that can build your own pieces from scratch, I'd say--because it cuts down on your development time. By analogy I can definitely write my own mapping widget in javascript, but if I'm trying out a concept where building a mapping widget isn't the point (but rather an app that showed me where my friends are), it would be prudent to try it out w/ the google maps API first. So if there's something that I can snap together using Bug, I'd do that first, and only go to soldering boards if it's something I can't do with Bug. And if the concept doesn't work, I can unsnap it, rather than unsolder chips.

For the other types of geeks...not all software developers are hardware people nowadays. Not that you need to be, but not knowing hardware puts things like mobile devices that aren't phones, sensor networks, and RFIDs out of your reach. Having a platform like Bug frees you from having to know it if what you need to do fits in Bug's framework.

It's true that most of what they have appeals to builder geeks. Will it be something your non-geek friends would use? That remains to be seen, but they seem to be creating an environment that allows freedom to create things their non-geek friends would want. If the geeks make stuff where a Bug brick's functionality can be modular and snapped on without requiring programming, then that might be a possibility.

I think a lot of hardware people are looking to open up the hardware world like they see going on in the software world. This is one interpretation of what open hardware might look like.

No problem, since it challenges my own thinking. Thanks for being clear headed and courteous about it.
I grew up in the UK and now live in the US. In both countries a college education has gone from being something of value to waste of time due to lowering of standards.

Leaving no child behind will probably destroy what little respect anybody has left for a college degree.
I voted your comment up because I'm a Trojan, but I have to admit, I somewhat agree with this. I do think its much more applicable to undergraduate students than graduate students though.
I've been getting the same feeling at UT Austin for a long time.

At UT Austin, there is a 10% rule that has crippled the standard to which students are held. The 10% rule states that any student in the top 10% of their graduating high school class is automatically admitted to the university; no questions asked. When you consider the range of quality among high schools in a state as large as Texas, you can imagine the disparity between the valedictorian of the best public school vs. the 9.99%-ranked student of the worst one.

As a result, the intro classes are populated with the type of students mentioned in the article -- those that are there for the wrong reasons, and don't really have any direction. The later classes suffer from this to a lesser extent, but the university's leniency when it comes to failing classes and the length it takes to receive a diploma is still problematic (some students take up to 6, 7 years to graduate).

Thus, the solution is to isolate oneself among the outstanding students, i.e., in honors and graduate classes, in computer science in my case (or any other difficult field that acts as a natural filter), where the top students reside, who are truly excellent and stand among those from any top school.

Case in point: I am often surprised to meet students that were accepted to top-notch schools - -- but couldn't enroll for one reason or another, such as money, that I wouldn't consider outstanding students. I wonder if a more competitive school would be "easier" because I would be pushed to excellence instead of striving for excellence in spite of a standard of mediocrity.

That said, Computer Science at UT is an excellent and competitive program. This is true of most of the hard sciences, math, physics, and a few others, but I truly question the validity of certain degrees...
I have the same impression. Plus, I think poor usability will kill it. I can't imagine my mom (the mom test is always important) clicking on objects in a video to see "relevant" offers. And the frustration level will be very high once a user clicks a few times and doesn't get what she wants or expects. Some people would click on an actor to see his bio and others would be interested in his shirt. Others will click on the wrong thing because the scene will have changed at that instant.

It seems like cool technology, but a bad product. I wouldn't invest. Go Justin.tv :)

Aside: the other startups in the challenge -- the ones the didn't get a lot of votes (apparently the voting has turned into a popularity contest) look both interesting and promising. Their founders may not be in their 20's, but I would invest in them over Ooyala and Justin.tv -- especially Commerce360.
I feel like more and more this dumbing down of college leads into making undergraduate degrees a second high school diploma.

That begs the suggestion that grad school becomes the "new" college, but that kind of idea isn't too fun in the Startup Crowd.
context: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=85255
How are Popular, Top 10 Youtube Videos Created?
Question: are these strategies ethical?
Needs work. The web design is clunky and restriction to a single label means the selection is not the greatest. I'll keep them in mind and check them out again down the road, but for now I'm sticking with Amazon.
This is the single most articulate and concise, yet comprehensive abstract explaining the need and reasons for copyrighting one's work, that i have come across.

You need not be a Fortune 500 corporation to justify protecting your work. On the contrary, anyone writing anything original is well served to read this article and go about the business of staking claim to your work!.
Some of the most successful people people I know graduated in so called 'less valid majors'. The real world requires a different skillset than just memorizing what a euler path is for the exam next week.
He assumes that the main value of a college education should be traditional education. For many students, college offers the first opportunity to live on their own away from home but in a substantially less frightening environment than the "real world", i.e. college allows you to practice swimming in the shallow end before hopping into the deep end.

That, plus the friendships and connections you get from college, may well be worth the price of admission, even if it isn't what you (or your parents) are paying for.
Oh yes, let's return college to its former status of being only for the elite.

Why do you think so many people go to college? Because it's a practical necessity for most decent-paying jobs. Not to do the job, but to get hired in the first place.

Telling people they shouldn't be in school is akin to telling them they don't deserve a decent standard of living.

As long as having a decent standard of living means having to make a living, and as long as making a living still means being employed for most people, then as long as employers still require degrees, people will go to college to get them.

There's a general solution that solves a lot of problems and is not specific only to this one. Make employment obviated, preferably by technological advance, so humans no longer have to slog away at mind-numbing "jobs" under the threat of homelessness and starvation.

That's the humane approach. It will do away with crimes of poverty, television advertising (people watch TV to escape, which they won't need to do when there's nothing to escape from), and college over-enrollment, among a zillion other problems.
I actually applied to the last YC round with an open source hardware idea (rejected, though), so I am very interested in the field. However, I was rather thinking on the lines of somebody to use 3d printing technology to create a prettier casing for Minty MP3 ( http://www.ladyada.net/make/minty/index.html ) to make it a real alternative to the iPod shuffle. I want to see really cool open phones, not the locked up crap that is still being sold today. So I guess I am just a bit disappointed that Bug won't help here (except with the prototyping, maybe).

Still, there are other exciting developments, like printable electronics, which all compete with the Bug. If I see something cool come out of the Bug thing, it will only make me happy.

Btw., the Bug reminds me a lot of the Khepera robot (http://www.k-team.com/kteam/index.php?site=1&rub=3&p...) which actually with it's modular concept was/is a very successful product in academic circles. So who knows, perhaps the business is viable after all.
But what if you can click the actors and get IMDB info, or click animals in a nature documentary, etc.
Limiting the power of government would reduce the power of the office, and reduce the incentive to cheat to get into office.

And I didn't just mean bribery when talking about poor incentives of moneyed interests.

My complaint is that he is trying to solve some fundamental issues with obvious solutions to a subset of the problems.

His work is like searching for the roots of aging to extend life span when the patient has a gaping knife wound in the back.
meta modding
Sort of amusing, but I now associate mentions of Ron Paul with the death (to me) of Reddit.
Yes, group think kills.
I have heard the claim, fifth-hand, that Yahoo rewrote Stores in C++ in order to get it to scale.

I know that when Google acquires start-ups, the rewrite for scaling commences... so it seems at least somewhat plausible.
Remember that page rank is distributed based on the number of links on the page. The more links, the less PR you will get. There are a ton of links on that page, it is not worth $166 a month.
I agree with the first part of your post, and I don't even think those points would be disputed by the author of the article.

But the problem arises because levels are lowered across the board. Even the best minds have to go trough the shit that undergraduate education has become, and their potential will be underdeveloped because they are not pushed to do their best, leading to a lot of lost potential (and a possible degradation of scientific work and standards?).

abossy said in another comment: "I wonder if a more competitive school would be 'easier' because I would be pushed to excellence instead of striving for excellence in spite of a standard of mediocrity."

I absolutely feel his pain.

- Master Student in Computer Systems Engineering at SDU
ok, makes much more sense in context.
I think I should just start outsourcing all my blog ideas. Here's an assignment for anyone who wants it. Write a 400 word product review. Incorporate the following quote:

"They call it the Jesus phone, so naturally I assumed it would have a little bit of Jesus. But after playing with it for a couple days, this phone has significantly more Jesus than even I expected."

The title should be as follows:

"My iPhone has pretty much replaced my penis as the default thing I reach for when I'm bored"

That should probably be good for at least 3,000 Diggs. You could probably even use a markov chain to randomly generate the rest of the text based off previous reviews. I doubt most diggers would be able to tell the difference.
I liked it better when it was in the top navbar as well... now it takes an extra click for me to look at my saved links.
What a typical way for the New York Times to reduce a complicated issue like farming and trade in Africa to a single phrase: "the free market failed".

There is little free about markets in Africa, with or without subsidies for fertilizer in a particular country.

We can certainly blame ourselves though, if not the experts advocating open markets and no subsidies: the West's tariffs, restrictions on imported agricultural products, and subsidies for rich farmers are directly related to problems in Africa. Farmers in Africa have a much harder time penetrating our markets because of these.

Considering one of the first steps past subsistence farming is selling produce to global markets, these restrictions are a very big hurdle to development.

The free market advocates, the "experts" derided in the article, have the most coherent ideas on this topic.
It would be much more compelling to say, "Joe Schmoe picked up this language in a weekend and used it to create a dating site that got 3mil users in a year" than "a few superstar genius programmers who built things you'll never ever build swear by it."

Most people are convinced by examples they can relate to and feel they can achieve, not by the feats of the top experts in a field that feel outside of most people's reach.
Isn't this just a variant on "be nice to the receptionist"?
Blizzard, maker of World of Warcraft, merges with games firm Activision, in an $18.8bn deal.
Dual boot MacOS X Leopard or Tiger with Vista/XP on your regular Intel/AMD PC
Extending Python with C: A case study
Though I disagree with the practice, there is a reason behind the 10% rule at UT. I think many people in this nation would be surprised to find out what would happen without rules like this at our better state schools. I'll save you the details, suffice it to say that whites would disappear from Georgia Tech, UTexas, UWisconsin and the like almost overnight. Again, as a conservative, it is abhorrent to me, it's essentially affirmative action for white kids. That said, I do understand what the people who run these schools are attempting to do with rules like this.
The Man Who Allowed Bill Gates To Become The Richest Man In The World
Despite all the ruckus in the echo chamber about social networks, ajax, web2.0, I there's lots of other areas to explore that don't seem to get mentioned often--open source hardware being one of them. Lots of pieces are moving into place to make it more of a reality, but in my opinion, it's not quite there yet.

Thanks for the heads up about khepera. I'll have to look into it.
MAKE: Blog: Fun with Xbee and Arduino
Please don't start posting Ron Paul links here, I left Reddit for this very reason and now this bs starts here. Why has this been clicked on ?
Simple Geometry Puzzles You Can't Solve
Barack Obama knows his sort algorithms... jump to 6:40 in this video
i wonder if the world would be better once we can cheaply subsidize everyone's basic needs. i think everyone would just become even more of a zombie, because electronic entertainment is so easy and you don't have the office as an automatic social life.
We get the joke. It's just not particularly funny.
Damn. I didn't read the "Ron" bit. Yes, ok its funny, but no more.
why?

It is mocking both the slow motion failure of reddit and the tendency for pg fanboys to dominate, for example, comment threads here on any of his essays.

It's quite funny, though it wouldn't be 2nd time around.
HS Hackers- Scholarship for Entrepreneurs
We have high school hackers, they seem too young for YC, so I suggest they apply for this scholarship then. If YC can do $20K, then a HS student can definitely do with just $10K.
What it takes to be great
The 22 Immutable Laws of Marketing
The Days of our Facebook: How Love Moved to Hate
You left reddit because of Ron Paul?

Do you stop reading the New York Times[1] because they shamelessly...shamelessly...hold forth the smoke-filled-room candidates as somehow legitimate?

Reddit has these little arrows that can be pressed up and down. The NYT has nothing but its coming bankruptcy to correct it.

[1] And every other rag.
So, what's the right answer, guys? Quicksort? Radix?
Wonder why they didn't use NOFOLLOW.
They also ignored what caused the famine in the first place, i.e. the continued subdivision of land amongst offspring. They have temporarily staved off famine, now they need to prevent it from happening again....
When in doubt, use quantum bogosort. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bogosort#Quantum_Bogosort