skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I apologize- I thought that for a post specifically about using one's names more, it would be an appropriate way to inject humanity.

I'll remove them. Upon re-reading the thread I can certainly see how that might be frustrating, and counter to the intent.
Didn't intel have a license to Produce ARM CPUs? Didn't they end up producing StrongARM after they acquired it from DEC (or was it already Compaq).
Great interview, as always. I like his mentality about taking risks.
Thanks for posting this. It was a very interesting read.
How is it more complicated than ending prohibition?

I agree with all the comments on things being done iteratively and slowly makes sense as well.
What's the difference between browser chrome and the digg bar? Firefox "brands" every page with its logo. (It doesn't use its own URL-space, but it could. What would you do about that.)

Anyway, I see why people are upset, but I don't see what they can do about it. It's like ad-blocking... you can't control peoples' experience when viewing your site, it's just not how the web works.
AlphaTweeters “sell out” for free cars?: How to save social marketing from spam
Is the 4 core limit really an issue? Really big deployments, where they are most sensitive to performance per watt, are finding it more cost effective to go with fewer cores per server because it gives a more optimal balance between processing power and memory bandwidth. Look at those google compute containers, each node has pretty modest specs.

Lack of 64bit support is likely a bigger issue.
This is one of the best things I've seen on HN in a long time. What a great idea!

(Doesn't work when I increase the size to 50 though.)
I like the idea behind suggestion, though, because it increases the "weight" of your online username. If you act inappropriately, you bring shame not only to yourself, but to whomever recommended you.

Metafilter and other communities have used such tactics with reasonable effectiveness, but I think that it may be a bad choice.

If I were interested in the Startup Community, but were based out of Louisiana, I might not have anyone who would 'vouch' for me, even though I might be a very productive member of the community.

Further, I were a new member, and able to convince you to sponsor me, unless I know you outside of the forum, there's no incentive for me to respect that I might make you look bad..
If I make you look bad, I can just disappear, and all is forgotten, at least so far as my username is concerned.

That's why I had hoped we might find a way to give usernames more weight, either by using the same username as multiple other projects, or by using birth names.
Wizards of the Coast sues Scribd user for copyright infringement
very cumbersome and inefficient compared to the old ways

Okay, I'll bite on some of this.

marketing over Twitter

Compared to email marketing? For which I cannot enforce opt-in? Which deluges me in content that I don't necessarily have time to read? Shall I even bother comparing it to telemarketing -- is there any question what will win that comparison? Advantage: Twitter.

customer support over Twitter

I've never heard of one-to-one customer support over Twitter. Surely email is better, except when the spam filters intervene. For FAQs there are wikis and forums and good old web pages and new-fangled ticket tracking sites.

But what about generic, time-sensitive or high-priority hints, suitable for a sizeable fraction of the userbase? "Sorry for the outage; we are working on it." "Everyone should know that there's a security bug that has just been fixed." "Today 50 people have asked about Feature X. It's right there in the Bookmarks menu. Read the updated FAQ." These are the kinds of messages that aren't a good fit for bulk email. There's never really been a good venue for them before. [1] Twitter is going to spawn a lot more of them.

I'm not sure about payments over Twitter, but I know better than to laugh: I remember when PayPal was hilariously funny.

---

[1] Okay, RSS feeds. But Twitter is, among other things, an RSS feed that non-technical humans can understand. And that is constrained to be blessedly short. And there are other semantic and social differences.
Atlanta is a beautiful place in the summer. Come hack with us!
I am a Java programmer in Chicago. I do corp-to-corp contracts. I am currently getting $58/hr for subcontracting with a Chicago consulting firm for a six-month gig. I was getting $67/hr at my previous gig. I wish I were making much, much more like some of the folks here. I have been programming professionally since 2002.
Mid 1980s one would have predicted Unix/C and distributed computing using Internet protocols would soon dominate, and would have been wrong...about the "soon" part.
Besides it running on Linux not a whole lot. But its $200 that was the whole point.
When did Evan become 'Ev'?
>I question what’s the point? It solves a question that nobody asked, and feeds the narcissism that pervades our culture.

The question contains its own answer, partially. I can see wanting lighter blogging tools, but what I don't quite get is why so many people want something limited to such short messages. Does the majority of the population want all conversation reduced to soundbite-sized posts? What am I missing here?
Hey, no problem; I took it as you sincerely acting on your beliefs.

I guess you could do it by changing your username (though you can't take your karma to your reincarnation - unlike real karma). But I like your present username.
Says the article is no longer available.
Reznor is a great guy, but I hope there's a future where people who make awesome stuff can get paid based on that, not based on charity, limited editions, and tie-ins. We need a new economic model for goods with real production cost but no reproduction cost.
I actually own crunchpad.com, wonder if I should do anything with it
"Would you agree that under ideal conditions, if everyone behaved, it would be better to be a larger group such that you could share disucssions, or would it be better to remain small, so that you know all the posters?"

I am not sure if everyone behaved it would be better;

Comments would be better - there are two types of disruptive comments; people that are just being jackasses in comments, if they are over-the-top and constant, I say smoke them out of their cubes or basements and boot them off the site. Make it possible to just kill a comment chain. The others are either new or stupid and not much you can do to these people except mentor them and give positive re-enforcement.

Stories are the biggest issue because they are the basis for what I think is the most important part of hacker news and that's the comments. One reason I really like hacker news is the "Ask HN" feature. This allows me to skip the story and read the concept, question... and dive directly into the discussion.

People are not malicious in their story submission - It's not like there are links to child porn or nazi sites. So people aren't knowingly misbehaving. The problem is that there are lots of things that a lot of people won't find interesting.

I know personally I won't be offended or concerned because you or everyone thought my submission wasn't interesting. The reason being is that I most likely didn't write it, if I did then pride-of-ownership would come into play would I would be disappointed.

---

The topic of online community preservation has many parallels with "real-world" communities and even biological diversity, which means it will need to be solved by someone more advanced than me. If we could come to a conclusion on this for hacker news and apply it to the real-world we might get a noble prize.
http://www.flickr.com/groups/webopsviz/

http://www.flickr.com/photos/allspaw/3213755561/in/pool-webo...
BTW because redditors can belong to many subreddits, you get the benefits of both small and large groups.

I agree that the small communities have worked. FWIW, I've had more pleasant conversations in the quiet backwaters of reddit than here.

It seems to be a very hard problem - I'm just thankful that something has been found to help.
wonderful, I want to email this to some of my old professors.
Thanks.
That's part of the problem I'm currently stuck on, however.
My current username is more expressive, and more "weighty" than my resume or linked in page.

If you google "e1ven", you see 14 pages, most of which are about me. My posts about the Zimbra mail server, the Freenet project, Slashdot comments, and the like.

That's far more expressive of my body of work/experience than my Facebook page, which I seldom use for anything, or my linked-in page, which I use as an addressbook which updates itself automatically.

The only advantage that those two do have is that they are specifically tied to my offline identity, which I can't easily change.
Instead of a frame, why don't they stick the DiggBar at the top of the page but then have it scroll off? Seems like a good compromise to me.
The most important thing for keeping HN useful is not making sure that the front page is a pristine pond of Erlang essays, Rails optimization tips, and innovative ways to monetize iPod apps. (Though I prefer a frontpage which is, oh, about 80%+ that kind of stuff relative to generic intellectual curiosity articles.)

The most important thing is that the comments are kept useful by constant vigilance on the part of the community. Did anyone see the reddit t-shirt thread yesterday? That sort of thing needs to remain unthinkable here. Not just the sophomoric sexualization and laughter-excuses-any-misconduct, but the parts of Internet culture which aren't relevant to programming/business/etc. (I like lolcats, anime, and politics myself -- just not here.)
This is one of the reasons that I think newbs fuck up OO design so often; the way it's sold and the way that it can be used effectively are almost entirely divergent.
Locally-run clouds can rent their capacity back out to somebody else who doesn't care about these issues as easily as they can migrate services and push data around (again, all depending on software not written and with a lot of people who don't want to see it written). Definitely another advantage to outsourcing your cloud operations.

If you're getting a gut reaction against the idea of people running around on your hardware, that exact same gut reaction should be applied to your stuff running around in somebody else's cloud.
10ren I'm real. sorry for not writing more and for waiting 403 days :). I've just found my old account...
In a few years time those will likely take less than a second to upload though.

If anything, Internet has been getting slower and slower due to congestion and server overloads. Upload speeds still haven't reached 100Kb/sec for 90% of the population after 10 years of affordable broadband arrival.

Pushing everything into a centralized location makes absolutely no sense. Not every byte on my hard drive needs to be shared with other people.

Instead we'll be moving towards rich browser runtimes, to allow on-the-fly downloaded&installed code to effectively work with local data.
"But for example, look at my user account, e1ven. If you Google it, you'll see work I've done with Zimbra, Freenet, SQ7, and a dozen other projects."

yes and if you google my username you won't find any connection to the "real me". Yet I (like to think I) am a responsible and constructive member of this forum.

"How else do you think people could be encouraged to have "weighty" reputations, so they don't want to give them up?"

I don't know. I don't even know if it is the right question to be asked.
Will Arrington's CrunchPad beat Apple's tablet to market?
How to block the DiggBar
Ah, so naked recursion is recursion.

EDIT: I was going to criticize your idea that there is anything lacking in "naked recursion". It's a really powerful technique and in fact I just wrote a recursive function for production code an hour ago. Comment continued here: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=555714
I don't understand why so many similar programs automatically excludes single founders like me.
50% laid-off US workers have found new job
I didn't think about the same username across different sites - but of course most would do that. Makes what in some cases might have been a frivolously chosen name very sticky as you say.
What is the Risk in Forex trading?
Hear hear. I do not doubt that shit ain't easy. But that doesn't stop politicians from doing half-assed implementations of much more difficult projects, so I don't think that's any kind of excuse for not legalizing pot.
thanks erlanger...
As a not-so-famous blogger once said, the government will give you 200k of debt to go to college, but not to start a business. For some people, one might be more beneficial than the other.
1. What does this have to do with "Hacker News".
2. I don't remember where but I read this article with the exact same picture over a year ago. Perhaps the author just updated an old article of his? I find it odd that it was just now posted to nypost.com so far after it was written.
Oh man, I'm sorry! I feel so embarrassed, I'm going red and my face feels hot.

I'll never doubt your existence again. :-)
Could someone reply to this instead of downmodding me? This happened in the last article about the Digg bar too.

I really don't understand why everyone is upset.
Awesome I have been waiting for someone to do this for awhile now. This looks great. I will integrate it into my blog soon after learning a bit more.

Congrats to the teams this will fill a huge need for bloggers who aren't able to follow the discussion they themselves start.
long time; /* know C */
Having multiple founders greatly reduces the chance of a startup being abandoned.
I've been saying this all along.
I'm also crossing my fingers.
This would make my startup MUCH more easy to get going.
String of Positives Leads Wall Street To Good Friday
Thanks for the background.

Nice also has multi-methods (late binding by argument type), and a nice discussion of the "Shortcomings of the Visitor pattern" to present it: http://nice.sourceforge.net/visitor.html
Or just use 301 redirects...
A: XMPP doesn't keep a public log of your status updates.
Mostly:

* They have the top branding on your site, users know if they are using a browser, they may not know why Digg is in the URL and on the top of the site

* They get all the search engine love. No browser in the world steals pagerank.
The picture was on boingboing I think. I remember reading it. It wasn't a year ago though. More like within the past three months.
Everyone is upset because Digg is stealing SEO juice by jacking the link to your site and making it point to them (and additionally running ads on your site through the diggbar). I think people are downvoting you because this was clearly explained in the article.

e.g. if people on Twitter start linking using digg instead of tinyurl (et. al) the person loses all the SEO juice because while tinyurl does a 301 redirect (search engines don't index the tinyurl but instead index and pass PageRank to the actual URL.) Digg does not.
What to do with those idle cores?
Googlers Got Together To Do Something Special
We outsourced the physical data center but owned and operated the servers. There would have been no issue with other people's stuff running, and the company had even considered it (for simulations, etc.). Our costs were much higher than Amazon's, I suspect. While we might have bought a couple hundred servers at a time, Amazon probably buys thousands. They can buy bandwidth cheaply and probably even power.

Open standards are nice and all, but worrying about running a datacenter stinks. It's a huge management overhead among the zillions of other problems. Even signing the contracts to have it managed is a pain.

"Locally-run clouds can rent their capacity back out"

I'll buy capacity from Amazon, but probably not from Joe Blow. More management overhead to sell capacity back. There would have to be an intermediary, but even then it would be a pain.

Amazon's lock-in/switching costs are mild problems compared to the issues of dealing with one's own datacenter. Everybody I worked with would have much rather spent their time making the apps better.
What has got me to (occasionally) use twitter is interacting with celebrities. I had a small interaction with one of my favorite rappers which is neat. And if you ever want a 140 character response from Craig Newmark, send him a tweet, the man is a machine, he answers absolutely every single message. And if you say "craigslist" without directing it to him he'll still probably say something.
> I've never heard of one-to-one customer support over Twitter

Comcast
http://twitter.com/ComcastCares
I don't understand why they think they're entitled to that in the first place, though. It's how the web has worked, sure, but times change. (This reminds me a lot about how VHS tapes killed the movie industry. Yeah.)
What a complete and utter piece of corporate stoogery. The first two sentences reveal the author's intent from the start: "Some people, usually community activists, loath Wal-Mart. Others, like the family of four struggling to make ends meet, are in love with the chain."

Which I read to say, "Some people, like dirty fucking hippies, loath Wal-mart. Others, like normal people, are in love with the chain." "Some" and "others" are the classic hallmarks of absolutely lazy, shoddy, yellow journalism. Don't get me wrong, I don't think there's anything wrong with dirty fucking hippies, but I get the distinct sense this author does. Are we to believe that because this guy had a good experience, all the other employee complaints are invalid? Do a few pennies off socks justify Wal-Mart's behavior in other areas?

Now, admittedly, I'm not up to date on the latest practices and it sounds like things have improved somewhat. I'm not even anti-Wal-Mart, although I try to go to Target instead whenever I can because I find it a much more pleasant atmosphere. This article just smacks of corporatism run amok.
TechCrunch Tablet makes an early debut
Microsoft's white paper on the "Apple Tax" uses configurations that no longer exist.
This was already posted here 2 months ago:

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=462531
Thanks so much! If you find the plugin isn't for you, or you want something for non WP blogs, Wesley over at www.improvingtheweb.com made a great new app with our API (convotrack.com). Check out the button on the left side here: http://www.micropersuasion.com/2009/03/social-networking-dem...
I sometimes wonder if the sky is blue.
That's just a brief bit by the same author at boingboing - the nypost article linked here is much more detailed.
Short term vacation rentalsHilton Head SC .
Hilton Head Vacations! Sea Breeze Maximum Vacations offers beachfront, pet friendly Hilton Head vacation rentals, condos, and vacation homes at affordable cost.
From the article -- "or accept a fair market valuation to be acquired and become a part of something that’s more interesting." The problem is that as a feature it's worthless. It can be recreated relatively simply. It has no value beyond the network effect, and it's been demonstrated a bunch of times that the network effect doesn't follow acquisitions (dodgeball anyone? jaiku ftw?). That is the unsolved problem - not how to build a community, but how to monetize one. I think that facebook (at least until they decided to ripoff twitter) was the closest to solving that problem.
The thing that really pisses me off is that Digg struck a deal with Twhirl/Seesmic - Digg.com is the DEFAULT url shortener in the latest version of Twhirl.

I'm adding some frame killing code to any of my content sites that have been on digg before. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Framekiller
Frame-breaking code redirects the user to the proper url. So traffic may still go to the digg.com/whatever page but it will redirect to the original site.
I think its quite a good site for css layout examples...

I remember discovering how position:absolute was in fact _relative_ to the enclosing div/element, ayaaay!

another css layout approach given here - http://www.digital-web.com/articles/everything_you_know_abou...
[ although ie6 seems to be broken wrt tabular divs, eek ]
Just a random prediction. It'll be gone, or non-framing in 2 weeks. Digg is dependent on all those sites out there with "digg this" widgets for its page rank, all it will take is a significant proportion of those sites to say "bye digg" and digg will say "bye frames."
now this six week rally has stocks up 30%+ since their lows
You either have a tenuous grasp on the definition of "one-to-one" or vastly overestimate Comcast.
I worked at one of the competing discount retailers some years ago, and this was interesting information about what makes Wal-Mart different for career employees.
> Keep in mind, however, that "making it trivially obvious to the rest of the world, Google, future investors" is exactly the point of the proposal!

Which is exactly the problem-- it's important not to throw the baby out with the bathwater. There are good things and bad with attaching real world identities and that was not considered in your post. It's not a panacea and has real and (to me, at least) severe consequences.

I happen to work a great deal with gaming communities which are notoriously trollish and awful. In my experience, physical identity would help with those problems, but it's overkill. It's like the "nuclear" option, in a sense.

What we've found works best is the general act of tying the identity to something the individual does not want to lose casually. The real enemy of the net is casual trolling out of boredom or random flashes of meanness. The highest return on investment is found by eliminating that one aspect-- it doesn't require the "nuclear" option of turning us all into our public personas.

For example, we've found that physical/real-world identity is not nearly as important as the combination of:

* Tying access to something people don't want to lose, such as months of their time/effort, their reputation to people they respect, or to their wallets. Note that reputation can be based on limited identity revealing to key people, or even simply reputation amongst people they associate with under a particular identity (even if they whole group is using non-real identities-- for example, a gaming clan).

* Broken window theory (i.e. http://ta.gd/broken )-- hiding/fixing trolling as quickly as possible. This is one of the best methods we've found to keep incidents down and people behaving. If they don't see it as commonplace (as trolling is on Reddit/Digg) then they aren't going to dive in as readily.

* Having strong, respected moderators/spokespeople encouraging respect and frowning sternly (and directly) upon negative behavior. This ties into both of the above points.

My company is actually investigating using some of these techniques in a service to reduce griefing in games, but requiring physical identities in that case is a deal-breaker.

> Instead, they have far more incentive to contribute, in order to increase their reputation.

This is only true if you believe that people want to increase their reputation solely tied to their real world identity. This is a motivator for you, but it is not for me and others-- otherwise people would already be using their own names 100% of the time on things they are proud of.

Anyway, I agree with your desire to keep HN strong. I actually think HN has been doing great for the while I've been here. It has its ups and downs, but I think we have other options to improve that don't include tying Facebook Connect into every aspect of the online world.
Unpaid Internships: A Loophole To Avoid Labor Laws
Many, many, years ago, internships were called apprenticeships, and my dear departed grandfather used to call them.
Now I just have to figure out how to waterproof it so I can read The Economist in the tub.
Mike, I've got to hand it to ya. That's pretty fuckin tight. You've certainly proved me wrong. You've got talent, a sense of design, and most importantly, alotta balls.

This will certainly keep Apple on it's toes.
Love it: http://digg.com/d1oNOZ

For some reason I like this method better than frame-busting. To make it useful you could add a link to your homepage on there.