skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
The people who "protected" the page are site admins. To become an admin, the community votes you in. Anybody can request adminship. Everybody with a WP account can vote in the RfA.

Have you ever read a WP RfA? From the way you wrote this comment, I'm guessing you haven't. Wikipedia adminship is cliquish and obnoxious, but the process is relatively rigorous; WP users read through entire multi-year edit histories, dredging up "controversies" for public debate. If there's a cabal, it's an organic one.

Moreover, admins don't singlehandledly delete and protect pages. This page was "protected" because normal WP users effectively deleted it (replacing it with a redirect). There was a discussion about whether to do that, in which anyone with an interest in the article could have participated. There was a procedural shortcut here (since the page was redirected instead of deleted), but there was a procedure, and it was an open and transparent one.

At any step along the way from creation to protection, decisions could have been appealed to yet another open, transparent forum, where Fravia's proponents could have debated ad nauseum why WP needed an article about him. They have plenty of opportunities to present evidence for his notability and inclusion.

Pages get "protected" when people ignore those opportunities and procedures, and undo the work that the WP "fulltimers" do to maintain the encyclopedia.

Your comment is a caricature of what actually happens on WP. It also ignores the reality of a massive living document, exposed to the public at large in the top of most Google results and routinely highlighted in the mainstream media. If preventing an article from showcasing Fravia was a mistake, 1000 other cases this week of people attempting to SEO their products or write pages about their girlfriends weren't.
Convert Confusion into Curiousity
This is easy enough: just open firebug and maximize its space on the browser window; the background gray-on-white text of YC news is innocuous enough.
How are you "forced" to do anything? If you've made the choice to work a corporate day job, you've also made the choice to be "forced" to be in the office for 8-9 hours a day. This sounds like making a decision and then not accepting responsibility.

Secondly, I also have the option of working from home and can easily just VPN in, except personally I work much better when I'm in a setting that is designated for work only, so I choose to head into the office M-F.

As a programmer there's a lot of flex in big companies that let them come pretty close to the flex of working on a startup. In fact, I would argue that working 80-90 hour weeks (including weekends) on a startup is hardly flexible. The only real difference is whether or not you're working on something that is intrinsically motivating, but I find it's always possible to find meaning in even the most dull of tasks.

For now though, I balance the need for food and rent with pursuing my own ideas.
I often see "social media" sites hiring users (via Craigslist's writing section or Mechanical Turk) to create accounts and engage in some baseline level of participation. I know there's the old chicken-and-egg issue when working toward critical mass on a community site, but something about hiring scads of primarily-disinterested users seems a little dirty and dishonest to me.
That format may be printer-friendly, but it is significantly less readable on-screen. The text fills the browser window, making each line far too long to read comfortably.

Bloated pages (both visually and in terms of file size) are a problem, but linking directly to printer-friendly pages is not a suitable fix, IMHO.

Avoiding advertising also bothers me (even more than the actual advertisements bother me) in general, because I like information, and information generally costs money to acquire - especially high-quality, reliable information. Newspapers and their investigative journalism appear to be going away, and that makes me sad.

Note: I'm not familiar with Inc. magazine, so discussing quality journalism may or may not be entirely relevant in this context.
A Prism for Interface Design [Theory]
My company's name is a play on words and also deliberately begins with A to be near the front of alphabetical listings, but this has also backfired in that I had to go first on two recent pitching sessions.

My product's name, I'm not sure about. It seems to stick in people's heads, and is a combination of a term that describes what the product does and a number, so we could get the .com. (The number's relevant to the product as well, but I don't really like the complicated name that results.)
You wouldn't lose an argument about whether WP should give articles to everyone --- it's not a crazy idea --- but you wouldn't win it, either: the WP community, guided by people who spend huge amounts of time working on the encyclopedia, has already decided that providing pages for non-notable people isn't part of WP's charter.

They have arguments for that, and they are sensible arguments.

For instance, if you provide articles for everyone who ever lived, someone needs to police those articles. If you don't police the articles, you end up with tens of thousands of pages making specious claims about people, some of which may be damaging to the subject of the article, others of which may be damaging to the fields those people represent, all under the aegis of one of the most important sites on the Internet.

Also, WP is by design not a primary source. Original research isn't allowed on WP. It's not WP's job to validate and referee research, to provide political analysis, or to promote people and companies. But the overwhelming majority of the content you'd get in articles about non-notable people would be inherently original research.

By restricting the WP to summaries of independent reliable sourcing on notable people, the problem of maintaining an entire encyclopedia as a volunteer effort is at least tractable. I think veteran Wikipedians could probably win the argument that eliminating those standards altogether could make maintaining WP intractable.

Also, remember that the article we're discussing here really sucked. Fravia might be important, but whoever wrote that article did him a disservice if he was.
B&H - Knowledgeable sales people. Honest business practices. Lowest prices or competitive prices.

Circuit City - Clueless sales people, (I was once told that a laptop I was looking at "has to run vista because of the drivers that are installed"), dishonest business practices and prices that are guaranteed to be significantly higher than what you see in other places.

The question is will B&H become a victim of its own success? As Joel says in the article, he doesn't even comparison shop anymore. I've been using B&H for years, and while I don't comparison shop, I almost always go with B&H because of their terrific customer service and I always know what I'm getting (none of that annoying "well, you know this model doesn't come with a battery" bullshit).

My experience tells me that eventually something will change in the mindset of the org, either the guy calling the shots will start to cash in on those years of trust, or his son will take over and he will cash in, or they become a publicly traded company where the board members care more about next quarters profits than a long term sustainable business. I would wager Joel's article will accelerate that process.

That makes me wonder...perhaps the publicly traded corporate structure is not conducive to a company that wants to win on price, quality and customer experience.
If you have certain areas that you're particularly interested in, make a customized feed. For example, I've used Yahoo Pipes to create a feed to filter out Delicious Popular items that contain words (topics) that do not interest me (e.g. Twitter, Illustrator, etc.). I simply load the customized feeds on Google Reader for efficient browsing.

If you come to Hacker News mainly to read through discussions, I've found subscribing to AskYC RSS feed helps (or to visit AskYC archives on searchyc.com), since they seem to contain the most interesting opinions & discussions to me. Other than that, make a commitment to check HN only twice a day (e.g. once in the morning and night) or something, since you won't miss out on top items that will be on the front page all day long.
Actually, a nice and polite plea was enough to get it unlocked.

Thank Reddit for this one.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User_talk:Matt_Crypto#Fravia

http://www.reddit.com/r/programming/comments/8hxhx/goodbye_f...
You can bypass a version check to upgrade directly from Windows 7 Beta to RC: http://blogs.msdn.com/e7/archive/2009/04/07/delivering-a-qua...
I've banned slashdot, reddit and digg from my /etc/hosts file since I was spending too much time on those sites - and objectively they weren't offering me anything in return except a lot of intertube-noise (the readership of the latter two is particularly asinine).

Now I only read HN, and my productivity has gone up considerably since :)
a failure to meet their legal obligations

Does the App Store agreement actually put an upper bound on when payment will be made? All of the similar agreements that I've seen (e.g. AdSense) only specify an approximate date.
I half-regret bringing up the issue. I had wanted to know more, and was sad the info had been deleted.

The half I don't regret is that maybe someone here can contribute better to Wikipedia. Reverse engineering guys are mostly tight-lipped, but they're family ...
I agree about the importance of having a .com domain, but it's still rather unfortunate, since I can only presume it's the primary cause of all the obnoxious nonsense-words we see as Web 2.0 company names.

Flickr, digg, reddit, pownce, frappr, tumblr spring to mind as a few high-profile example.
SARS Sleuth Tracks Swine Flu
There really isn't much I can think of offhand. It tracks hours. It might be nice if it were easier to enter notes in the 'week' entry screen. Other than that, it's a great product.
I'm also interested in doing that, but with windows/mac/linux & possibly browser games.

The problem is that people seem to be somewhat averse to paying for a browser based game (like a Java applet or webstart app), even when they'd have no problem paying for the same game as a standalone program (literally simply using a JPanel instead of a JApplet, or providing an installer to a local version instead of a webstart link).

Of course browser games still get a lot more hits than locally installed ones.
I think the deeper question here is how eager are the recently-unemployed to find another job and what is the key motivating factor to get another job? I think it's highly related to how people in different countries view the world of work.

I can't speak for other countries, but in the US, I think that most people view work as a necessary evil. They don't view their jobs as opportunities to make a self-satisfying difference. It's just a place to trade 40 hours (or more) a week for a paycheck.

Most American workers feel overworked and constantly exhausted. When they lose their jobs, depending on their financial situation, they don't rush to find the next one. This is most likely because they use their period of unemployment as a substitute for the rest they didn't get while working.

Perhaps if we improved the world of work, the world of unemployment would also improve.
They link to Apple dev forums where apparently Apple devs are reporting the issue.
As much as The Reg likes to exaggerate, they are usually pretty accurate. In this case they link developer discussions in forums.
Yeah, I noticed that as well. Originally I was working on a Flash game, but decided that it was almost impossible to make any money (unless you are Desktop Tower Defense).
Off topic, but I love Jason Santa Maria's blog. Every post is not only interesting in its content, but is a design exercise in its own! It's a pleasure to browse the site even if you don't read the posts.
Wave 2 of announced layoffs hits Microsoft
Use Google for Real-Time Web Search
Big screen Kindle: Textbook margins are the real aim, not saving newspapers
They were popular in the pre-web photography market serving New York artists and other professionals. They were not popular with general consumer electronics like a Circuit City (and I wouldn't say they are today either).
Just a note: The page was unprotected about an hour ago. I don't know anything about the guy, but to anyone who does, edit away! http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Fravia&action=...
Well yes at a high level of course I am not forced as it was my choice. I'm talking at the local level of company policy. It's nice that you have the option of working from home; I'd like that as an option once in a while.

The thing is, if I left the office in the middle of the day for a walk/gym session, everyone would get noticeably uncomfortable. Mind, I'm not sure how much walking one can get done in a suburban office park.

I can easily work long hours on something I care about, but the pressure to chain myself to the desk and avoid noticeable breaks gets to be quite a drag. In summary I don't think we are disagreeing on anything.
How about Android? Seems to be a less saturated market than the iPhone.
I used to refer the first page as the "to-read" links, but found more than few times that first-page-links can be misleading.

Now I skim thru the links, then check out the comments and decide if it is my-click-worthy.

But I usually find few 'unworthy' link-comments where many of us here pour our hearts out and thus making the link-baited article itself useful. I can't decide if that's good or bad :)
I don't disagree, but it's nice to have the option once in a while for when real life throws a spanner in the works.
I created a site that pulls news from my favorites (HN, TechMeme, /. etc.), uses some smart(ish) processing to figure out what might interest me the most, combines duplicate stories and puts it all in one place. It's sort of a meta aggregator, hence the name--Meta.li. It looks for things like how many times a story was voted for, commented on, viewed etc. on the source site and ranks links accordingly. The layout is a great example of cognitive overload, but it works for me.

http://meta.li
I'd be curious as what people thought about this. From what I've read, Android's market share is still very low. However, I suppose that means there are less games/competition.

http://seekingalpha.com/article/132665-mobile-ad-market-shar...
Wishful thinking aside, The Gimp < Photoshop.
Does Your Documentation Suck?
Hasn't Mail in OS X been doing this before facebook? Its really Apple's Tokenizing Input Box.
Since they post odds, this may be more about the wire wager act, which prohibits interstate transmission of sports gambling information.
Last year's Google Killer was Cuil. Just sayin'
Dreaming of Rails as the Next Microsoft Access
The actual sale itself takes time... drafting proposals, speaking to the right people, etc. I think the author down played that a little bit.
Thanks for summarizing the cons. Yep, there's enough on the plate for now. But we'll probably get a 'Biopedia' in some form or another sometime. Then we can debate if animals should be included ( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bucephalus ;-)
[perhaps nsfw link (adult novelties, etc)]

We wanted to sound racy and to be non-graphic and originally had racytoys.com before we obtained http://racy.com last year.
Google Reader has also helped me manage the amount of time spent reading news. I click on "All Items" and then start scrolling through. If there are longer items that seem interesting I star them so I can come back. Shorter items I skim and then move on.

I also try to assess the value of an item (not everything in your reader is worth reading - really!) as I'm going. I find that things generally fall into the following categories:

1) Interesting, short, and worth reading right now.
2) Interesting, long, and worth reading later.
3) Mildly interesting but doesn't help me improve as a programmer/engineer and thus not worth reading.
4) Not interesting and not worth reading.
5) Webcomic (dilbert/penny-arcade/xkcd)

The last category is self-regulating since they are only released periodically. They also take 30 seconds to parse, which seems like it's worth the enjoyment they bring.

It's also worth remembering that when you're bored at work, EVERYTHING in your reader is going to seem extremely interesting (but they're not paying you to read it).
Yeah, I had the same experience (after upgrading to 9.04 b0rked and I had to reinstall).
After watching the movie Sunshine, I got the name for my company IcarusONE
yes, 45 days
Last I heard, the real-time kernel is not part of the current version of Ubuntu Studio.

I tried it about a year ago, and it was unstable/crashed frequently. Switched to Ubuntu regular; been happy ever after.

I like the Dust desktop theme.
this is equivalent to asking if anyone here can develop a "cool website that you can do stuff on"

you're just being very vague

what exactly is one supposed to do on this website? what is its purpose? display of real estate listings for a certain area? from a certain realty group? listings based on pricing? listings based on foreclosures/shortsales? information on the history of real estate and graphs showing housing price indexes from the last century?

???????
Upvoted for Prof. Eugene Wang's perspectives. As a fan of Chinese calligraphy, I'm proficient in both Simplified and traditional Chinese characters.
Facebook Shuts Down “Newsfeed RSS” App for Publicly Exporting Your Facebook Stream
Thats part of his problem, and mine. Reading the comments sometimes takes longer than reading the article.
I don't think most hackers are going to see much value in another tutorial about installing Ubuntu.

This kind of thing can be valuable, but I'm surprised to see it on HN.
Building a startup for $5k? Really?
Portland's David Abramowski provides some insight on how he's working to keep his startup costs low.
I can't think of anything in The Millionaire Next Door that doesn't apply to Buffett. He's particularly good at it, and really good at explaining it.
> The text fills the browser window, making each line far too long to read comfortably.

This is easily rectified by a single click and drag to resize the browser window to your preferred column width.

I for one much prefer print links for reading articles.
Tell that theory to Apple's board. They seem to be doing alright.
From reading his previous posts, it sounds like he has already purchased 10 products, including DotNetInvoice. (http://www.softwarebyrob.com/2008/10/03/should-you-build-or-...)

What he should have said was "I haven't acquired anything new yet"
The abridged version:

I use Google Reader and delicious. I make liberal use of starring articles (rather than reading them inline) and then as a secondary filter I also will tag them as "Read tonight", "Read this week" and "Read someday" in delicious on the second pass.

I have had to let go of a lot of temporal "breaking" news since it's just so hard to keep up with it, but this process lets me still see the headlines and see what's going on, without getting sucked in

And discussion in the comments definitely take more time than reading the original article ;)

I have a full discussion of my process here:

http://sidsavara.com/personal-productivity/how-to-effectivel...
Real time conversation/communication is overrated and has much lower S/N ratio than async email/comment etc.
Isn't this just taking the risk from the venture capitalist (who is in the business of taking risks) and giving it to the customer (who isn't)?
I happened across it accidentally on an ad-hoc trip to NYC and I was not sorry.

It was the biggest highlight of the trip for me.

Statue of liberty is one thing, everyone has seen that, but the store is great. :D
That was my first thought. I agree that $100k is low for medical research, but it is very similar to the YC idea: fund something for a few months to see if it can get legs. If it can, additional investment can be found.
Why you shouldn't upgrade to Ubuntu 9.04
Would you mind sharing the model of laptop? I might be in the market soon.

Just curious
Heh, have you ever worked in Sales? This is a highly effective technique for getting what you want from your suppliers or people you are waiting on (obviously not customers). People deal with the issue or have to put up with your frequent interruptions. They usually rush to do the former.
Honestly, I have no idea why they're limiting it to be firefox only. They're using the wrong level of abstraction, it should be available to all applications. (IMO)
Blog comments almost certainly don't help with SEO, since every major platform uses the rel=nofollow on them. Forums may not have that, but most of them are poorly indexed by search engines (if at all) so those likely weren't much help either.
Tech Rumor: Apple in Talks to Buy Twitter for $700 Million
+1 for pclark for his neverending kind words
The stream of recent news regarding "company XXX shutting down or not approving app YYY" makes me really wonder about our wonderful future of cloud computing, which makes our old Microsoft-owned days seem less and less bleak. At least Microsoft didn't try to "shut down" Windows apps it didn't like.

What will really freak me out is news about Amazon or Google shutting down applications deployed on AWS/AppEngine.
LeraoSoft. Lerao is an alternate name for Yggdrasil or the Norse World Tree. We chose this based off of philosophy and it sounds not too bad. Also gave us some excelent project names, including Mimir. Too bad that Mimir is a Database... wish i knew that before o-well.
That is the description of my life at the moment. Unfortunately, life demands (wife, children, mortgage) make it difficult to move on. In the meantime, getting out of bed is a chore.

OK, I'll stop whining now. :)
Facebook to vacate downtown Palo Alto in May 14 move
Absolutely! And genuine, valuable information is censored by the "admins" (and from observing some of those people, I have concluded that quite a few of them are hardly literate - NOT qualified to make decisions of the magnitude that they make) and the damage this causes is proportional to the amount of accurate information available on the web on a topic, the less useful info there is, the more egregious the damage . . .
Foundry Group, Allen's Vulcan inject $6.75 million into Gist
Sort of tangentially related to this is a rather fascinating look at Holland from the vantage point of a US ex-pat: http://www.nytimes.com/2009/05/03/magazine/03european-t.html...

Lots of interesting notes on our contrasting social systems and cultures. One of the main points that I took away from the article is that we tend to have an falsely dichotomous view of european countries generally. They're either lampooned as socialist nightmares where all of your money is confiscated by the government and nobody wants to work, or utopias where the government cares for all of your needs and you get 6 weeks vacation. the truth is rather more complex.
Railsconf 2009 Keynote Summary
Isn't it a bit deceptive to talk about Toyota etc. being made by American workers? The parts are designed and largely made overseas. The American workers are putting prefab parts together. Fact is, the US industrial base is largely gutted and Asia is where it moved.

p.s. there is some good design done in the US but I'm talking high level here.
If you can't buy it legally, of course you'll download it
I applaud FB for this one. I do not want somebody exporting my status updates into their RSS feed with no controls whatsoever. I have Twitter if I want a public feed. :)
Lessons Learned from the Girl Scouts of America
This works great for B2B consulting or custom products. That's actually how my previous startup managed to survive for more than a year without raising VC funding, and we were able to develop a hardware product on our spare time (and dime).

It won't work for consumer/web applications, unless you have some Pro version that you can sell to businesses first, but that's unlikely.