skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
> [Many awkward sounding phrases] might be very difficult to understand at first, but their near universal meaning makes them more valuable than writing your own 'clearer' version.

The modern trend is unmistakably in favor of plain English. See, e.g., the work of legal-writing guru Bryan Garner, who recently co-authored a book on the subject with Justice Scalia.

As Ken Adams rightly points out: "Caselaw is full of instances of courts displaying a poor grasp of semantics. It would be foolhardy to rely on courts to be arbiters of everyday language." He also notes that "[c]ourts in different jurisdictions have seen different meanings in everyday usages. ... relying on courts to determine the meaning of everyday usages is to invite inconsistency." See http://adamsdrafting.com/system/2009/03/29/mscd-outside-us/

The SEC has also been weighing in: For 10 years now, the Commission has required securities filings to be written in plain English, and has bounced more than a few that aren't. See http://library.findlaw.com/1999/Jun/1/127259.html.
This is not a depression, but an idea that would work is the house listing idea. Prices are going down, so speculators are going to rush to purchase.
"...or, heck, if you’ve ever tried to apply for a job at a big company...."

At a hospital near where I live that shall remain unnamed, I found a job that seemed perfect for me on their site.

Except when I went to apply for it -- not joking -- the application was so incomprehensible and novel-long that I just gave up.

I can't imagine they got the best people with such an application process, though perhaps they got the most persistent ones, and the ones with no better prospects.
Why do people routinely make this cliche comment, thinking its going to give them genius points, when it only kills their karma?
I wish they stop showing that photo for articles/news about Bill Gates. It's not very flattering :)
I'd pay $10 a month if I never had to use Facebook -- if no one ever asked me, "Why aren't you on Facebook?" etc. It has become such a social expectation.

But probably not many like me out there. Most people probably will pay.
>Would you pay $1 a month for Facebook?

No.
The "private beta" is a web 2.0 trope that's going to disappear in web 3.0. It's something you can afford to do when you've got a rich sugar daddy, but when you're trying to make a profitable site on your own dime, you've got to start early.

Yes, I know about the testability problems of community systems -- I've lived them. Web 3.0 finds answers to them. Web 3.0 succeeds where Web 2.0 failed.
I plan on signing up for this -- I've just been procrastinating. I have no reason to doubt that within 2 or 3 thousand years they'll be able to bring these "corpse-sicles" back to life, and I want to see what the world looks like then!
I haven't heard the interview, but Pullum is a regular on Language Log; one recent post is a direct reply to the comments posted on fark.com: http://languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu/nll/?p=1319
How is it better than just downloading a torrent? It's still "illegal" to use proxy servers to use Hulu from other countries.
Should hackers pay attention to Silicon Valley?
No.

Especially now that I've found some of the people I've lost contact with and have their email addresses
an iphone app that tells you where the soup kitchen is
The last five episodes of the series were delayed a week. I can't begin to understand how that seemed like a good idea.
Debugging software with your ears
Fun Numbers - Ruby and Perl (Massive difference in core test suite size)
I know there is a more recent article on the subject but I was unable to find it. If you know of one, or have examples of your own use of sound in debugging, please pass them on.
The classic saying is if you buy SAP/Oracle, you don't customize the software suite to fit your company, you customize your company to fit the software.
Okay he cried. So what?
Probably. $12/year to have a nice address book for keeping in touch with old high school/college buddies, and playing a couple of fun games (namely Prolific and Lexulous) seems worth it.

Also, if enough people continued to use Facebook, it would be worth the $1/month to have access to the marketing opportunities that exist there.
Cuil is a particularly good example.
I'm on 2 sides of this. I agree with you from the perspective of a long-time front-end dev about accessibility. On the other hand, I am firmly of the belief that continuing to help people cross the street that are perfectly capable of looking both ways does nothing to encourage them learn to look. The more we keep going out of our way to support IE6 doesn't encourage people to upgrade to newer browsers.

I think people in our line of work often forget that before IE6 killed Netscape, people were used to upgrading their browsers to new versions fairly often. There was always a new version of IE and Netscape available. Granted, the overall size of the internet population was WAY smaller back then, but I think statistically the upgrade behavior would have been the same. We have to get people back into the habit of doing upgrades to improve their experience. This also ties in deeply with people that don't do updates on their operating systems because they have this outdated notion that "updates are bad".

Finally, the argument that most IE6 users are corporate and can't upgrade is bunk. In the last 4 years, I've worked at small companies and big companies, and in no situation have I seen a corporate policy that forbids upgrading the browser. No one ever gives real-world examples of companies and applications where this happens. Its become this "common wisdom" that everyone "knows" but can never point to literal examples.

Lets stop reinforcing bad behaviors.
I would consider it if it meant no more ads and I could disable all third-party applications (including notifications when my friends try to rope me in).
There was so much estrogen in that article it was hard to read. Every knowledgeable source cited was a feminist, she was clearly a feminist. Why does it seem like every feminist is either a sociologist, a writer, or both.

Are there any feminists involved in engineering or science? Or are all of them involved involved solely in liberal arts/pseudo sciences whose main and often only source of money is from the students that they teach, who can only become professors or leave the field.

This is rapidly becoming a rant about about liberal arts so I had better stop.

On the feminism thing though I am only speaking from personal experience, so I could easily be wrong.
My friend Chris at MIT wanted me to make something like this for him and a dozen of his classmates thinking it would be simple. When we specked it out, it turns out it is not simple because you need to account for several circumstances like schedule changes and whether someone is vegetarian. I decided to build it into part of a larger project I'm working on. I think it is a great idea. Just cook one meal every week or two and go over a neighbor's house to enjoy a meal the other days of the week.
I know how this goes.

I think my own father thought much less of me when I was a kid because I didn't play sports (at least, not organized ones, anyway), showed little interest in most "masculine" things that were popular in my area, like fixing cars and hunting, instead preferring to read, learn and write.

The cult of masculinity is just as pervasive and oppressive as the idea of patriarchal oppression.

Funny, I don't think my father truly respected me until I became a paratrooper in the Army, which proved nothing to me but apparently a lot to everyone else.
Pascal's Wager breaks down as soon as you posit more than one competing religion. Cryogenics doesn't have the same problem.

Pascal's Wager also requires you to actually believe something. Belief is neither voluntary nor governed by rational wagering. A cryogenics user doesn't have to actually believe he'll be resurrected to sign up for cryogenics, though.
i couldn't help but laugh at this, but actually, mobile apps that can deliver up-to-date information on where things are, might be really useful. Since a large part of the great depression is a lack of "things you need"...
It's not about being decent or not, no need to try and belittle. It's about who your target audience is.
I'd move on to the next free network to come along.

Companies can try and charge money, but as long as there's a line up of free sites willing to take their place, it's easier for most people to migrate to the next thing.
I would, the very day they announced the fee, build a free Facebook clone.
The Pirate Bay Verdict Won't Affect File Sharing
While there would obviously be a market for one, what would your business model be? A free Facebook has proven to be a great way to lose money.
Google is replacing conference room paper schedules with solar-powered LCD's, updated via 802.15
I am not sure why that statement, in itself, is bad. I've been in the enterprise software industry for a while, and I have seen how customers have a tendency to request customizations on top of the base product that are huge in scope and would kill the project. My org always recommends 0 customization (never achieved, but intended) to shorten deployment time and go with codebase that is maintained by the product team and does not need a huge in-house IT staff post-deployment.

Of course, if the software is crap that statement would make sense, but if that is the case, you should throw the tool out rather than try to plug the holes.
As a first approximation, that's a good metric :-) And yes, it does make the valley an epic fail in general. You can caltrain/vta both ways to a certain extent. Or else its cabs. But really, there's not a decent downtown all the way from morgan hill until you hit san francisco.

I find San Jose downtown to just be a bit depressing.
You make it up in volume, duh.
I find it curious that the tech-savvy world of Hacker News, which should be comfortable with the idea of specialization in modern capitalist economies, seems to pine for a return to a "cottage" music industry, where the musician is to perform all of the afore-mentioned roles himself. Am I alone in thinking this would be a step back, rather than forward?

You could have smaller companies created that consist only of audio engineers, music marketers, distributors, etc. allowing musicians to pick & choose which company helps them out. Currently it seems like the labels force you to use certain people and if you don't like it, too bad.
Offtopic: I recommend picking up Expert Python Programming by Tarek Ziadé if you want to get a feel for what is 'Pythonic'.
> Turns out Bill and childhood buddy Paul Allen had startup ideas well before Microsoft. The pair came up with something they called "Traf-O-Data."

I dislike the use of "turns out" here, as if new data is being revealed. I read a biography of Gates back when I was in college (maybe around 1990), and I know that Traf-O-Data was mentioned there.
Common Sense Software, many people who created this mess could use it
Facebook could easily launch a freemium model by just slightly impairing use of some of the most killer features.

Viewing a friend's photos? Only half of each album is visible until you upgrade.

Viewing friends in common or friends-of-friends? Only half are visible until you upgrade.

Enjoying the news feed? Stories are embargoed from you for an hour or two until you upgrade. (You're included, but always late to the conversation.)

Etc., etc.

These would minimize the reasons to migrate elsewhere while making it really tempting to make an impulse yearly subscription. The biggest issue would be community backlash to having anything that was once free taken away, but I think that could be managed, too, via gradualism and education.

They could also offer other ways to 'buy out' the small fee, like agreeing to watch a short targeted promotional video and then giving your feedback.
Cuil had more problems than just 'timing' though. They were trying to be a google killer. That requires a fundamental paradigm shift which their product simply wasn't offering.

They could have timed their launch to the precise nanosecond. It still wouldn't have helped.
No.

Why? Because even if I paid $1/mo, many other people wouldn't. As such, Facebook's value goes down - without their contact information, postings, photos, etc. Facebook has no value. So, even if one is willing to pay for Facebook, by charging money Facebook would eliminate the reason why one would pay for it - namely that almost everyone is on it and creating lots of content you want on it.

That's part of the reason that it's so hard to monetize a site like Facebook - the value is being created by the users, not by you. You're just a venue. Should you want to change them for their own content, they'll just move to another venue. It's somewhat like trying to charge teenagers for loitering in your store. Sure, they're using your place as a venue and it costs money, but some definitely won't pay and as some start leaving, the crowd will follow even if a part of the group would be willing to pay for the venue.
I look at the statement as not good or bad, just a statement of truth. There is no such thing as shrink-wrapped enterprise software. I've worked with at enterprise software organizations where the customer does their own custom modifications and tries to politically lobby us to get them baselined (and take ownership).

Modifications form a lucrative and essential part of enterprise software, judging by what my co-workers and friends at other companies were billed out at an hourly basis (the consultant was always paid a mere fraction of the $100-$200/hr). Sometimes I wonder if paying for expensive consultants wasn't just a CYA-move by the client ("look, I hired the company to consult directly")
How would being gay would interfere with a dad teaching his son what its like to be a confident and secure man?
I'd pay if they provided a bit more value. All of the functionality can be found on other free and better alternatives.

GMail does messenging much better than Facebook and Friendfeed makes dealing with the stream of info much easier. Flickr lets you post better quality photos, etc.
No matter what the studios or the RIAA (et al.) like, file sharing is the future. They will be forced to monetize it at some point, but it just ain't gonna go away.

People have been more resistant to having their computers controlled by large corporations than anyone suspected, I think. And thank the FSM for that.
Actually AdBlock+'s element hiding rules can filter facebook ads. In fact I think a recent version has a subscription for filters that include facebook ad blocking.
Methodological and Statistical Issues in Adult Nutritional Research
Tell me about it. I played a traditionally girl's instrument in band (flute; later went on to get a degree in it), and suffered a lot of hazing as a result. There are still quite a few psychic scars and if I had to do it all over again, I might choose differently. (Perhaps. On the upside, once in college being a heterosexual male flutist sitting amongst a section full of girls did offer certain advantages. ;))

I sometimes wonder whether our modern, looser gender roles actually make this sort of thing worse. It's as if kids are reacting against ambiguity by becoming increasingly rigid and intolerant. I'm not sure what the solution would be if that's the case, because I wouldn't want to go backwards in terms of equality and opportunity for women and whatnot.

I'm also curious to what extent other countries experience this and how it varies by socioeconomic class.
Lots of reasons why, but mostly because the buyers aren't the users in most cases. If users got to pick what they could use in a big company it'd be a WAY different story.
While it's true that IE6 and IE7 can only handle 2 concurrent persistent connections per server, IE8 can handle 6.

Firefox 3 by default handles max 8 persistent connections per server, and max 15 connections per server in total (persistent and non-persistent).

This goes against RFC2616, but I guess the capacity of both servers and clients have increased enough the last 10 years to warrant such changes in default behavior across browsers.
Do I get a cut of the revenue when my friends pay up to see the other half of my photo album?
You clearly don't understand package management. Package dependencies is actually a pretty complicated problem. Dependency solving is an NP-complete tree searching problem. Lots of fun.

Anyway, the new guys in rails-core (i.e. the merb-core team) have been working on this and they do have a preliminary solution to the problem.

This is something that wycats (dev lead of merb-core) has been complaining about for a while now.
Mere coïncidence.
Ack! It needs to be normalized by the active user population at the time of submission.
Synopsis: young boys are frequently cruel to other male peers, young girls have been observed to exploit sex at an increasingly early age.

This is hacker news?
didn't even cry. RTFA, and you see its a useless exaggeration.
The age of ubiquitous computing is finally arriving, though we no longer call most of them "computers" anymore -- at least, not most people.

Like with AI, we keep defining down what is a "computer" and what's not as we cease to notice their advance.

And, heck, maybe one day the paperless office will come to pass. In 2500 or so.
Also, in some cases, the inventor / creator might miss a huge opportunity which other resourceful salesmen might see.

Take the example of fingerworks. They were making touchpads, touch-keyboards, etc before Apple came along and used that technology to create one of the most popular products in the market right now : the iPhone
I'm about to skedaddle from the Bay area, and can't say it's really worth the expense of living here. You know when people start spouting off about the supposed virtues of living in an area they're probably in real estate; at the very least, they likely have financial interest in property. At least the Internet does one thing very well, and that is expose greed and stupidity. With such a high concentration of greed (high rents) in an area, it's not surprising to find such a high concentration of stupidity. There are at least 49 other states far more deserving of my tax dollars.
[video] Pirate Bay: 'We cannot pay'
Modeling Trust and Influence in the Blogosphere Using Link Polarity
Bill Gates' full name is William Henry Gates III (which sounds old-money and is). "Trey" is a common nickname for children who are III.
I like how the related articles at the bottom all have pictures of Gateses with hands flung up in the air. (Granted, there are only two distinct pictures, but...)
5 reasons why Susan Boyle is different from your usual overnight sensation
Honest question: are you on drugs, or not a native English speaker?
That could work too!

There are profitable businesses charging for photo hosting, so if Facebook -- the largest photo hosting site -- needs revenue to cover expenses, it would be a logical thing to charge for.

Riffing further on your idea: you could get a discount if more of your friends are paid up, to emphasize the sharing-the-costs-among-all-who-benefit theme. If you're the only person in your clique who upgrades, you pay full price; if everyone does, everyone pays less. This could ignite viral peer pressure for paying up.
Hulu For The iPhone? Yes, Please. But Don’t Get Your Hopes Up Just Yet.
Gmail Now Tells You Who You Want To Email
> the browser can only make 2 connections at a time

This is slowly becoming not true anymore, decent browsers like Opera and Firefox have defaulted to 8 for a while now, and IE8 defaults to 6.

Although all your points are still valid.
Because zero is obviously a temporary value, whereas 500K could potentially be forced into a standard income.
While this blog post certainly rings pleasantly in my ear (based in ATX), I think there's more to being in the valley than simply the success rate of a startup. I'm very envious of the enthusiastic community and people you meet in the area, whether you're at the bar, having a cup of coffee, etc. However, I'm not envious of the cost of doing business and basic living.

RE: 2008 stats, I think it's a reasonable assumption that the economic downturn is certainly being felt first by the east and west (capital capitols) before it hits other tech satellites like Austin, Boulder, etc. It will be interesting to see who bounces back first and at what velocity... Compared to Web 1.0 => Web 2.0, things could be drastically different this time around given the market's significant retraction, and displacement of VCs in web startups.

One thing about business here, we haven't had the luxury of big VCs so most startups here have a different challenge that generally results in a profitable web business, not big exits.
QCon Presentation: "Null References: The Billion Dollar Mistake"
No, I'm not.

My explicit disavowal trumps your implicit-ness argument.

Go back and read it. I haven't edited it since you posted this, and it's not actually part of the point. It reads just fine without that.
Umm ... why do you need conference room schedules on the conference rooms? I've never worked anywhere that needed that.

How a "zero impact" policy of "look it up on your computer/phone"?

(Neat device though; there are other electronic sign age applications that I can imagine it being useful for).
I think in the parent to which the insulting reply was made, there was a statement that was actually TRUE (not made up) in the parent post's author's jurisdiction. It is, of course, helpful to add other facts that pertain to other jurisdictions, but there is no necessity to add any personal dig in such a reply. Yeah, I think I would enjoy having a beer with and making mocking comments in person with most people who post on HN, but while we haven't all had the privilege of meeting one another, we may as well follow the civility guidelines here. (Upvoted comment downthread expressing apology.)
Out of curiosity what was the reason for using a custom webserver?
Piracy hurting anti-drm companies...
Well, if Google trends is any indicator of interest: http://google.com/trends?q=porn
It also links to ELMAH, which I didn't know about, and which doesn't seem to exist for Java/Clojure.

That's news to me.
Tabela
tabela companiy web sites tabela decupe , sing desing
This is the video: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9lp0IWv8QZY

Posted 6 days ago, over 20 Million views, 96,000 ratings, 108,000 comments, 580 video responses...

Those are amazing numbers to be sure.
Ukraine.

I guess the situation is the same in any region where providers are small region-based ones: that, and high bandwidth cost for external access spawns strong local communities, with lots of services from chats and forums to huge file sharing storages, game servers, etc.
Worthy link from the site's comment section:

Zawinski's Law

Every program attempts to expand until it can read mail. Those programs which cannot so expand are replaced by ones which can. Coined by Jamie Zawinski (who called it the Law of Software Envelopment) to express his belief that all truly useful programs experience pressure to evolve into toolkits and application platforms (the mailer thing, he says, is just a side effect of that). It is commonly cited, though with widely varying degrees of accuracy.

http://catb.org/jargon/html/Z/Zawinskis-Law.html
I hope this is not true, but it looks like you have pretty good evidence. I've been a happy emusic subscriber for years. I don't mind spam so much only because Gmail's filters are pretty good. But, I do get quite a bit of it. > 1000 in my spambox right now. And it's totally uncool if emusic is responsible for any of it. Upvoting in hopes this catches the attention of emusic. I might even submit a support request with the link. I'd love to hear their side.

UPDATE: I submitted a support ticket with a link here.