skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Great idea. It's not so much treating pollution the way we approach transportation/infrastructure as it is changing the way we approach transportation/infrastructure. While the technology would have made it impractical to implement, why wouldn't we but electronic tolling on all roads on a pay per use basis? We could even privatize most of them. The whole reason we have urban sprawl is because highways have been underpriced. One great example is Hong Kong's MTR system that charges you based on where you started in the system and where you got off. Incredibly convenient and efficient. Heck, even China tolls practically all its highways.

That said I'm not sure this type of stuff will help us get out of a recession but at least it makes people pay for the services that they use. We may even get better roads and highways out of it if the owners of the roads (be they governments or otherwise) are incentivized by the revenues from them because they'd be better tracked.
(Downvoted for the personal attack, not disagreement with the first bit)
The sad thing is you're likely correct. The even sadder thing is that foreign markets don't really have a good bargaining chip. There isn't going to be any "I'll give you this, if you give us that" going on when negotiations start up, because the US imports virtually no show. It doesn't help that any show that is imported has to be 'americanized'.

At least I can get most of my favorite shows here through other means. I thankfully stopped watching broadcast television almost five years ago now, and I have little interest in discussing television in the workplace (when you work with electricity or on roofs, it's generally a bad idea to get distracted with something with as trivial importance as last nights TV). So I'm usually good to wait till a DVD release, and if I'm not I can usually wait a day for it to get online (usually before any syndicated show premieres on Canadian TV).
I think the keywords are "who do make the headlines". It does seem to be the extreme in every segment that makes headlines. Personally, rather than calling them 'religious conservatives' (There isn't very much conservative about them) I prefer calling them religious zealots (fanatic, extremist, whatever).
New comment notification or comment count on "Threads" feed?
Think it'd be good for discussions if the "Threads" feed had a notification of new comments on the main submission?

dunno, would that just be annoying for more of you power users? I tend to be a lurker, myself.... get the vibe and get involved when I can or feel the need to. So I haven't got a lot of threads I follow, I just wonder whether there is a solution in how I use the site rather than the code?
U.S. Colleges Bask in Surge Of Interest Among Chinese
How to Build a Lean Startup, step-by-step (live, starts at 1700 GMT, 10am PST)
This also illustrates how difficult it can be to judge the validity of information on the internet. Information is getting distorted and twisted in a complex game of chinese telephone, and defining authority and truth are left largely to Google. How often do you check other pages after you find an answer on Google (especially if its a Wikipedia page)?
The main draw of the Pickaxe book is that it's the only book out there that includes the complete reference for Ruby and all the new features introduced in Ruby 1.9. While the book isn't a straight walk-through of the language, and lacks some explanation with some of the major language niceties, I'd say this book is an invaluable addition to any Rubyist.
Visualization and social data analysis - the IBM way.(Many Eyes) Swine Flu Cases
Visualization and social data analysis - the IBM way.
just because an exception exists doesn't mean that it was an unreasonable statement.
this was a complicated procedure....if i remember correctly, i installed ie8, then i opened firefox and it said "make default browser?" and i hit "yes" -- that was the end of it.

good thing people write articles to help people with this
This is a specific case of something that has held for a while, namely that it is never economical to spend more than an extremely minimal amount of time "cleaning up" a disk. It's always cheaper to just buy another bigger one.
The Wolfram Alpha Demo Returns, This Time With Actual Footage Of The Service
The creator is also responsible for PyCap, a Python wrapper for the PopCap Games Framework: http://www.farbs.org/pycap.html

The World of Goo creators used the PopCap framework when prototyping their game.
"People tend to overvalue the skills they have, and undervalue the ones they don’t. Even the most knowledgeable, intelligent people around are rarely experts in more than one or maybe two unrelated subject areas."

Very good point. I might add that people whose expertise provides a comfortable income are especially likely to think of themselves as experts on things they know nothing about. I hope that they learn to contribute their intelligence to doing nonprofit community service and solving intractable social problems.
The bigger question is... When the AP is gone from the Internet, will anyone notice?
It helps that Andy's been teaching the course for a few decades now and has a number of TAs to help out. It's polished and well-organized. I highly recommend it.
If it can self-replicate (without humans having to manufacture hardware for it), yes.
"Nanite : A self-assembling fabric of Ruby daemons"
Nanite seems to be laying the foundation for something similar to Heroku.

http://brainspl.at/articles/2008/10/11/merbcamp-keynote-and-introducing-nanite

http://github.com/ezmobius/nanite/blob/b9f5af0569abf25c43602ade51c1da2964fa98e1/README.rdoc
The curious thing is, this post is an instance of what it complains about. Matt is not so far as I know a formally trained psychologist. So to the extent he's right, he disproves his own argument.

The truth is, while intelligence isn't knowledge, it can be rapidly converted into it. In fact that would do fairly well as a definition of intelligence.

And in any case, credentials aren't knowledge either. Ultimately you have to judge any argument by what it says, not who said it.
Are you honestly arguing that $2,000 in software costs is a big enough price tag to sway your technology decision?

We run a box that cost ~$4k all in ($2k hardware + the aforementioned software costs), and stash it in a cage that costs $400/month to keep it connected power and a fat pipe. Assuming it lasts us 4 years, that's $23,200 in server costs over the life of the box.

Now assume we'd skimped on a LAMP stack and pocked ourself a cool two grand in software costs. At the end of that 4 years, we'd still have spent $21,200 keeping our servers alive.

And it scales out exactly the same way. We can throw hardware at the problem every bit as easily as you. It's just, what? 9% more expensive over time, depending on your math. And that's on top of a ridiculously low price tag anyway.

Web servers are dirt cheap, regardless of which stack you go with. The price difference between commercial and free databases are just noise. In the end, it's certainly not something you should consider when choosing a technology.
Upvoted for the personal attack, since Fiorina deserves it
The Swiss have been doing this for a while. Saw a herd back in 2000 in Thusis munching on the grass near the railway station.
We're just not as smart as he thinks he is.
I made it most of the way thru the first season of Lost doing exactly that. Then I found the options menu and unchecked a box. Now I'm back to my preferred state of lethargy.
Is this really lower-impact in climate change than traditional mowing? I think it's far from obvious.

With the goat solution, we must count the cost of the goat transportation. And I suspect that the methane emitted by goats -- a worse greenhouse problem than CO2 -- may actually have a greater effect than the exhaust from a lawnmower.
Ask PG: What was the topic of your Ph.D. dissertation?
I'm a big fan of your technical essays, so I recently became curious about what you did your Ph.D. on, but a quick Google search didn't turn up anything helpful.

(sorry if this question has been answered before, i'm new to this site)
Yes.

There is simply no way to stream TV or Movies to Europe. There's not even a way to pay somebody for it, and let me tell you, I would. I'd be quite happy to give Netflix ten dollars a month to stream movies online.

As it stands, Netflix, Hulu, Abc and the rest are essentially performing a 301 redirect to thepiratebay.org
I don't disagree that livestock are a serious greenhouse gas factor, but goats may have multiple uses as a stock animal, including mowing, meat, and dairy. If these animals are raised as, say, a dairy herd, and incidentally feed on grass at corporate offices rather than private ranch land, that would seem to me to be a net win in terms of carbon emissions.
If you scan the internet, you'll find most comment threads on this topic get the Brian W. Kernighan quote posted to them at least once:

As Brian W. Kernighan and Rob Pike put it in their truly excellent book "The Practice of Programming":

* * *

As personal choice, we tend not to use debuggers beyond getting a stack trace or the value of a variable or two. One reason is that it is easy to get lost in details of complicated data structures and control flow; we find stepping through a program less productive than thinking harder and adding output statements and self-checking code at critical places. Clicking over statements takes longer than scanning the output of judiciously-placed displays. It takes less time to decide where to put print statements than to single-step to the critical section of code, even assuming we know where that is. More important, debugging statements stay with the program; debugging sessions are transient.

* * *

http://logging.apache.org/log4j/1.2/manual.html
Well, I didn't mean it was literally a mental disease, that part was more tongue in cheek. But that's pretty funny. I am, at best, a very amateur psychologist.

You're right about credentials though for sure, but how do you judge an intricate argument on its merits when you just don't know much about the topic? For instance, read some of the articles for and against anthropogenic global warming written by scientists. I can find very convincing arguments on either side, full of lots of facts I probably can't easily verify and lots of conclusions drawn from them that I can't easily validate are sound logic, because I know so little about climate science.

Without me spending years rapidly converting my intelligence into domain specific knowledge, as the people making those arguments have done, how do I know which side to believe when I step into the voting booth? It's an epistemology problem, and a tough one.
Everything I read seemed to draw on experience and common sense rather than psychological theory. But I must confess, it was long and I skimmed halfway through.
It was my understanding that representing foreign keys as URLs is a basic principle of REST. The URL is the canonical representation of the object in question. The URL is needed for all actions upon it, not just fetching.
IPhone Developers Regroup After ‘Anything Goes’ Era (Update1) - Bloomberg.com
Indeed, unless the goats are walking to Google, I imagine more fuel would be used. Maybe the goat transport vehicles are electric?
Unfiltered Feedback Tracking
Matt, you might be interested in Thomas Sowell: http://www.realclearpolitics.com/articles/author/thomas_sowe...

His entire political philosophy is anchored on the observation that knowledge is dispersed and that no one person's knowledge of the world entirely eclipses that of 12 random people.
Very thoughtful post, thanks for sharing. One observation:

If, as Matt describes, an executive at a major music label realized the emerging trends of the industry but chose the path that would maximize his stock options over the next 2-3 years at the long-run expense of the stockholders, this would be illegal, and not constitute the "no-brainer" decision that Matt describes.

Executives have a fiduciary duty to stockholders to place long-run stockholder interest above their own. In fact, if this was found to be the case, he would most likely lose these options as well as suffer other legal ramifications. (disclaimer: not a lawyer, I just read blogs about lawyers :) You can argue that executives rarely do this, but nonetheless the legal obligation exists. I would like to think that those executives who take the attitude of "i just want to get my money and run, who cares about the long-term state of the corporation" is the minority, rather than the majority.
The main reason people don't want to put the output format into the URL is that URLs are supposed to represent canonical consumer-independent foreign keys in REST.

If you want to put the output format into the URL, I like the .json .xml extensions better. Not that there's anything wrong with the request parameter approach, but the file extension approach also plays nice with user OSes.

Also, I'd ideally use both approaches. So the consumer can pick between using /resouce/1 with an Accept header, or just using /resource/1.xml /resource/1.json directly. The nice thing about the Accept header is that file extensions can have some ambiguity whereas the MIME types are pretty standard and come with RFCs backing them up.
Continuations. It was actually completely wrong. I "proved" that you didn't want continuations in a programming language, because there were only a few possible uses of them, and they could all be more cheaply implemented using special-purpose operators. The good bits got re-used in On Lisp. The rest was crap.

What I should have written about was macro hacking and embedded languages and so on. That was what I really studied in grad school. But it didn't seem theoretical enough to be a thesis topic.
> Why is a stack based language any less able to do that?

Having to juggle the stack at every step (i.e. FORTH) is a mental burden. It forces you to organize your thoughts in a certain - not necessarily harmful - but very specific way.

> Other than that, well, it's a Lisp

A Lisp unworthy of the name; one which encourages users to pepper their code with opaque routines which have no underlying Lispiness. A Lisp which barfs Java stack traces.
Reading comprehension failure. He wrote $20k. You read $2,000.
Matt, good fellow that you are, this post had many excellent points about the music industry and how last year's executives were incented to not get it.

However, I must take issue with you singling out "intelligent" people for thinking other people with expertise are idiots. I invite you to have a drink (on me) at any sports bar in Toronto and we will trip over people who think that various professional players, coaches, and analysts are idiots.

And likewise if we seat ourselves on any transit bus or train we will have no trouble earwigging a dozen conversations in which people with no experience or expertise in government will denounce their elected representatives as idiots, and then toss in the unelected civil servants as being twice as dumb.

I suggest what you are seeing on HN is a fairly common phenomenon. So while I liked your insight into the executives and their entirely rational behaviour in beating a reluctant and bloody retreat, I take issue with the title.

It's simply Peanut Gallery Disease.
This is accurate.

Surely, I opened my mouth too early, you offered "a couple hundred bucks" - I said $250 would be sufficient, I clicked "send" and then thought - "Oh crap! wait... a minute..." and followed up telling you $250 is unreasonable.
Indeed I had the same thought reading it.

On his specific example he assumes that his sequence of events (1,2,3 and 4) actually happened. Without knowledge of the IP lawyers Warner hire, which one (if any) decided on that course of action and the process that it went through. Without that information he falls foul of his own fallacy.
"while intelligence isn't knowledge, it can be rapidly converted into it."

For subjects with depth, this is wrong. And I think that's part of the reason why HN discussions of many subjects with some depth (politics, finance, economics, legal issues, and so on) often seem shallow. I'm not an expert in any of those areas, and maybe my judgement is wrong. But I am an expert in the physical sciences, and Matt's post looks pretty spot on as a diagnosis of what's wrong with some of the HN threads related to the physical sciences.

None of this is to say that HN isn't still a great forum. But it remains at its best on the subject of startups and (to a lesser extent) related technical subjects.
Let's not forget the culture we thrive in, both here at Hacker News and in tech in general.

Many of us are mavericks, non-conformists, even revolutionaries. We may be that way by nature, may have become that way in the field, or more likely, a little of each.

Why? Because it works.

I know people who have slaved away in the same "paradigm" for years, with a cynical view of the world, and an "acceptance" of the status quo.

But not so much for us hackers. Especially those of us starting our own businesses. It's not only acceptable to go against the grain, it's often necessary for great success.

That certainly doesn't give us carte blanche to question everything, but questioning too much without benefit of background and experience gives rise to "Hacker News Disease".

That's the price we pay for pushing the envelope too hard and too often. We overstep our bounds once in a while and have to be put back into our place. Frankly, I'd rather have it this way and ruffle a few feathers along the way than to never make a mistake and fade away into oblivion.
Very good point, and I'll be taking you up on that whenever I get back to your lovely city.
So if your not a political expert does that preclude you from voting in an election?
Kevin Rose and Tim Ferriss Discuss Angel Investing and Naming Companies
"I can’t tell you how many times I’ve seen someone post a legal question on Hacker News, and get dozens of replies from people who aren’t attorneys."

The only problem I could see with that is if the one posting the legal question has any expectation that he'll get replies from attorneys. I think that's unlikely.

The part about dozen of replies from people who aren't attorneys is completely expectable given that it's Hacker News, not Attorney News.
Obviously, if the simulation says "daddy? where am i?", then they've succeeded.

What I argue is that the method they are using is like putting monkeys to bang on a typewriter, but they are promoting it as "the next Shakespeare".
There's also the huge mistake of assuming that people and organizations always make well-considered and rational decisions. This is particularly true with strategic decisions made by large organizations.
while intelligence isn't knowledge, it can be rapidly converted into it

This is a reasonable statement about what mainstream psychology says is a consequence of IQ (the operationalization of "intelligence" among psychologists). Having some of the mental faculties tapped by IQ tests generally results in more accumulation of the kind of knowledge imparted by school lessons or self-study, so that adult IQ tests have a lot of item content that consists of tests of knowledge.

But cognitive psychologists point out that intelligence (I would say "IQ") does not imply rationality.

http://yalepress.yale.edu/yupbooks/book.asp?isbn=97803001238...

http://www.amazon.com/What-Intelligence-Tests-Miss-Psycholog...

The behavioral economists who study judgment under uncertainty repeatedly replicate results showing that high-IQ individuals are very capable of making irrational, inexpedient decisions. And even when challenged about those decisions, most people persist in their irrational thinking.

There is also a widely replicated result in psychological research showing that most people overestimate their competence in most domains.

http://www.apa.org/journals/features/psp7761121.pdf

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dunning-Kruger_effect

So it shouldn't suprise any of us that most online discussion consists of people expressing opinions that they are more confident about than is warranted by the evidence supporting the opinions.

Ultimately you have to judge any argument by what it says, not who said it.

This is the best cultural way that HN can support the development of rationality among its participants. It happens that I am self-taught in the psychological literature I have just mentioned. I am fortunate, in my community service work, to have acquaintance with several Ph.D. psychologists who provide me with reading suggestions and bounce ideas off me. They like the working paper on IQ testing I presented in public in 2006, and they encourage me to keep on researching. I in turn like all HN participants to feel free to ask follow-up questions asking for evidence and checking assumptions and logic as each HN participant posts opinions. I think Matt's point in the submitted article is well taken--law is a specific body of knowledge (a body of knowledge in which I DO have a credential and work experience), and many guesses about what the law is made by laymen are not correct. If someone makes a statement about a verifiable fact, it is a good idea for other participants to check the fact and verify what the best course of action is for a hacker trying to build a start-up.
If what's in essence the same article gets posted a couple of dozen times, am I allowed to make the same cynical/snarky comment each time?
No. It without a doubt precludes me from ever being 100% certain I'm voting the right way. But I feel comfortable voting because I think I'm more frequently correct than the average voter.

On the other hand, 80% of men think they're an above average driver.
I don't think "self-replication" is the key of life as our empathy would understand it.

Killing a sterile person doesn't deserve punishment?
BuddyPress - build a social network on top of Wordpress MU (Multi-User) blog installation
Why did you call this "hacker news" disease? While I read the article and enjoyed some of it, you're still making a point that has been said many times before: smart people tend to think of themselves as smart, and think of others as inferior to them. This happens in a lot of places, it's not just hacker news. So I'm still a bit puzzled as to why you did this--it seems these days that sticking "hacker" or "hacker news" in front of a title is meant for readership and less to make a thought-provoking point that might not have been made before.
Espresso Mono gets my vote nowadays. Prior to that, I was using Consolas for the prior year or so.

I think I used Monaco or Inconsolata before that. Can't really remember.
If you asked a simulated brain how it felt, would it answer any different than the brain being simulated?
Any time they want, they can remove their content from google using a robots.txt.
This is the gayest crap i ever heard. You guys are a bunch of douches.