skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I suspect(and hope) most people don't believe lynch mobs should be permitted in society. What I don't understand is why the electronic equivalent is socially acceptable?

"it was stupid to take as long as they did to dribble an explanation out."

Didn't they answer in a day or two? That is fucking fast, esp for a giant corporation.

and "it was stupid to speak in PR-ese to the public about something that really matters;"

What I remember reading sounded very un PR-ese. Trying to find their press release to reread... They don't have one / I can't find it. That is bad. This is what I read http://blog.seattlepi.com/amazon/archives/166329.asp I guess that's not official release.
Google App Engine Blog: Early Look at Java language support expanded to 25,000 developers
I've always been inspired by David Gelernter's Mirror Worlds and LifeStreams projects. You can see parts of his vision/ philosophy in Apple's Time Machine backup UI and even Twitter:

http://www.cs.yale.edu/homes/freeman/lifestreams.html

"Life is a series of events in time -- a timeline with a past, present and future. The events of your life and the memories in which they're recorded aren't parceled out into directories, or typed shoeboxes. An information beam incorporates documents of all types into one (focussable) beam. The question "where did I put that piece of information?" always has exactly one answer: it's in my beam.

Life isn't static. New information arrives constantly; time flows. So my beam has to flow. Or, in other words: the elements that make it up flow. They move at the rate of time. In this respect the structure is more of a "stream" than a "beam."

The stream has a past, present and future. The future flows into the present into the past. If I've posted an appointment or reminder in the "future" part of the stream, eventually it flows automatically into the present where I'll notice it and be reminded, and then into the past where it's part of the permanent, searchable, browsable archive.

When I acquire a new piece of "real-life" (versus electronic) information -- a new memory of (let's say) talking to Melissa on a sunny afternoon outside the Red Parrot -- I don't have to give this memory a name, or stuff it in a directory. I can use anything in the memory as a retrieval key. (I might recall this event when I think about Melissa, or sunny afternoons outside the Red Parrot.) I shouldn't have to name electronic documents either, or put them in directories. And I ought to be able to use anything in them as a retrieval key.

I can "tune in" my memories anywhere; I ought to be able to tune in my information beam anywhere too, using any net-connected computer or quasi-computer.

Those are the goals of our lifestream (or "information beam") project. In our view of the future, users will no longer care about operating systems or computers; they'll care about their own streams, and other people's. I can tune in my stream wherever I am. I can shuffle other streams into mine -- to the extent I have permission to use other people's streams. My own personal stream, my electronic life story, can have other streams shuffled into it -- streams belonging to groups or organizations I'm part of. And eventually I'll have, for example, newspaper and magazine streams shuffled into my stream also. I follow my own life, and the lives of the organizations I'm part of, and the news, etc., by watching the stream flow."

http://java.sun.com/developer/technicalArticles/Interviews/g...
How to Puff Up Earnings, Goldman Sachs Style
That seems depressingly accurate.
Thanks for the feedback. We'll be adding a 'join' option to widgets so you don't automatically join groups when you're logged in and visit a page with a widget.
You observed where you would be without your parents?

You have an abstract theory, partially supported by some observations you haven't detailed, and which you haven't argued for or clearly stated.
I would have assumed prior to this past Sunday that nobody would be stupid enough to think that Amazon would maliciously, openly, and unapologetically de-list all material pertaining to homosexuality (or categorize it as "adult").

I'm not going to say that you're wrong. You're not wrong: That was a crazy conclusion for people to come to, because it is something that Amazon would never do.

But I am going to take a wild guess: are you significantly older than thirty? I'm guessing the answer is no.

Those of us who came of age before the Internet were raised in a world where it was intuitively obvious that GLBT literature would be openly, unapologetically classed as "adult" and kept hidden away from the general public. That's the way the world worked.

It's easy to retrain the front of the brain. It's a lot harder to retrain the instincts that you learned as a kid. Especially if those instincts were forged under stress. And gay people and their friends, especially those over a certain age, are intuitively aware that it is (or, at least, was) entirely possible for big, public entities to wake up one day and decide to screw LGBT people over. That used to be the norm.

I sincerely hope that we reach the state where open maliciousness towards gay people becomes unthinkably weird, but it's going to take at least a few more years.
Twitter isn't a chat system, even if people abuse it that way.

Interesting level of abuse then. Those hash-tags seem to be mighty popular, probably only topped by "replies".

There is a difference between a status update (which people already organize their days around in big companies) and a chat message.

And what would that be?
Twitter presents your "status updates" in exactly the same way that chat clients present their chat messages. Okay it's crippled as in you are not supposed to reply - but people are obviously not using it that way.

Furthermore you ignore the fact that nobody in your company has only a single, canonical status that could be summed up in 140 chars. Everybody is involved in multiple projects and teams, each of which has a different status.

There is a reason why all ticket- and project-management systems are project centric and not people centric. It's because the former makes sense and the latter doesn't.
Twitter accounts are not domain names. Right now, the hype is all about large follower accounts and how you get them by following followers of existing popular users. However, a follower is not worth as much as a website visitor, because they are passive. I know first hand that notification based content has very low response rates when compared to active content (search being the best example of active).

So... the power of a great domain name is that people who type it into the browser are active. For example, if you have a good typo-squatted domain, you can get active visitors who, although mistyped the name of the desired website, are nonetheless interested in your content and are (relatively speaking of course) very likely to click on your ads.
Why do you think that sports icons know anything about what influenced their lives?
No tabs.

((begin-rant)
No tabs. As part of installing Firefox, I turn off tabs.

because...

- most people that I've asked don't want tabs

- most people open one browser window at a time, may be five, but that's pushing it.

- the tab bar (and all those other bars) use up screen space, valuable screen space, really really valuable screen space on hardware you don't know about.

- there are already a number of various alternatives to the tab bar:

windows: the Windows task bar, the Mac OS X Dock/Expose, and whatever your Linux does which is usually similar to the Windows task bar

screens: Linux workspaces, Mac OS X Spaces

But, none of these reasons will stop you.

because...

You like tabs. And, you installed Firefox yourself. And, you are a power user, uber-geek, hacker extraordinaire. You gravitate towards the most popular user interface of the year which may at the moment be tabs although they were kind of popular a long time ago in Lotus Notes but Lotus Notes is definitely not popular, anyways you may even decide to use this one type of user interface for everything because you are an egoless hacker god. So go ahead use tabs, just remember the rest of us, and remember that tab stands for Take A Break.
(end-rant))
Only 59.9 percent of the population is working. 
Are you one of the lucky (or maybe unlucky) one?
Call me old-fashioned, but it's hard for me to understand how something like Facebook is worth any $billion amount. That's a lot of money for an intangible product.

(I'm equally stumped by Google's wealth too, though.)
Intel upgrades to fix SSD performance flaw
"There is perhaps no more reliable indicator of a society's ripeness for a mass movement than the prevalence of unrelieved boredom." -- Eric Hoffer in The True Believer, a 1951 book which I find to be extremely relevant in the era of so-called "smart mobs".
Genius forklift design: Sidewinder
Welcome to Fuffland
Wikipedia page on the wheel design: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mecanum_wheel
yes! lifestreams offer a much more useful abstraction than the desktop metaphor. i'd really love to see a lifestream OS/filesystem... unfortunately, it doesn't seem likely to come about in any consumer-friendly realization, at least in the foreseeable future.
I've never really questioned what was going to take the desktop's place. 3D UI's have been created and honed in the game and Visual Effects industry for several decades. It's only a matter of time before OS's start to make use of some of the metaphors that are standard in game UI's.

I'd argue that the reason that they aren't popular now, is because we haven't had enough processing power on cheap, generic computers to make adding 3D elements to a UI worth while. When we all have 16, 32 or 64 cores, sitting under out desks waiting around for something interesting to do, it is going to make a lot more sense to include more animations, videos, composites and 3D elements into our UI's.

3D and graphics heavy UI's also answer the question of, "What can we possibly do with 64 cores on a CPU?" This question was answered long ago: render more video and more graphics. Gamers haven't tired of having more parallel processing units on their GPU's over the past 20 years. They get more processing power, they just crank up the triangle count in their models, turn particle rendering to "high" and set rail guns to "awesome".

I have no doubt we'll be doing the same with our OS eye candy soon. I can't wait to use a CPU cycles for particle dynamics on my OS. :)

As far as loosing the desktop metaphor == backwards compatibility problems... That's becoming a non-issue with virtualization. With virtualization, you can have backwards and cross platform compatability with pretty much any OS out there except for Apple OS's. <kvetch>Apple is the exception because they don't want you to play with their OS software unless you buy it with their hardware.</kvetch>

It's good to thing about these things, though. Thanks for the article.
Damn it - you beat me to it by a few seconds!
At least google is in the black though.
So, I suppose the method is to learn the 20 5-letter words and the key that goes with it?

The thing is the words don't mean a thing and are not necessarily easy to pronounce. It doesn't really feel like less work than learning the digits straight.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Clay_Shirky

(or was that a rhetorical question?)
Survive the Apocalypse, a blog
Google solved the problem of "find me the best webpage" in a clearly better way than earlier tools. Facebook solves the problem "find me a friend to chit-chat with" no better than any listserv I am on, and notably worse than my cell phone. So I think Facebook is in more long-term danger of running out of runway. Google reduces annoyance for searchers as it spiders more websites, while Facebook increases annoyance for subscribers as friends add other friends.
It's actually 13 million Mexicans: http://www.upi.com/Top_News/2009/04/15/Study-13M-Mexican-nat...
Great Time To Be a Web Programmer
Having sat on both sides of the recruiting table I can tell you that most companies will pay the market rate to get the right person. Trying to save a few dollars to get someone 'cheap' is usually disastrously expensive. On the other hand, often the correlation between what someone gets paid and how good a fit they are for a job is quite loose.

If this company thinks enough of you to offer you a job then unless they are mad they are prepared to pay market rates to get you on board. You have established that they're prepared to pay ~50% more to get your friend, and there's no obvious discrepancy in your attributes, so there must be room to negotiate.

Having said that (like others have said), whether you get more depends on whether you are prepared to walk away from the job. If they know you're desperate they probably won't offer you more.
It's a big world. $1/user/mo * 800 million users is a lot of money.
I am pretty sure I would be a different person, perhaps even better, but my character, as I understand it, has been shaped by my parents. Part of that comes from them staying out of my way when it came to certain decisions that would impact the rest of my life (in India parents can get very pushy about going into certain field) and allowing us to have our disagreements (and we have many).

I don't need to argue for my observations. I experienced them and quite enjoyed growing up with them.
Thank you! That was amusing and interesting. I'm amazed that Apple continues to have such excellent user experiences despite such abysmal quality problems.
Google's valuation is pretty simple, they make a lot of money. Their service is no murkier than a consultant, or an interior decorator, or anyone who scratches an itch without manufacturing or retailing.

Facebook is worth a large amount because of their scale. If they find a way to monetize it well, they too will make lots of money. That's a big "if" at the moment though, which is why they aren't worth what Google is, despite the fact that on a pageview basis they may one day be an order of magnitude larger.
This isn't all true, What about the SSL providers that we hardwire in for security?

What about the Microsoft update domain..
And for that matter all automatic packaging systems

It is conceivable that if someone was to have enough access inside these services and then take over the domain they could cause havok!

But really that's just another alexa (:
The fear that they instill in others from the expectation that they will be audited if they cheat or mess up is worth more to them than the actual taxes collected.
Why do you think they don't?

They are at the top of their game. The effect of years of passion, skill and above all, hard work. Pretty much exactly like an entrepreneur. One would think that along the way they have been able to surmise and account for many of the things that got them there.

I've yet to see one that doesn't have extremely dedicated and supportive parents, notably fathers.
Google and Facebook do many things, but what they sell is advertising space on very popular webpages. They charge you for click-throughs to your website. People want click-throughs, and they pay.
His theory however is supported by Occam's razor.

Presenting the alternative theory requires evidence to support it, otherwise it too is nothing but an abstract theory.
BumpTop strikes me as more of a slick tech demo more than it is a real product - sort of like way back when someone modded DOOM to display system processes (and can kill them with the shotgun). Amusing, gets oohs and aahs from the audience, but ultimately doesn't really increase anyone's productivity.

I'm not convinced we need full-3D graphics and physics simulations just to work a computer.

What we do need, IMHO, is more pervasive hardware acceleration at the OS level, and rich support for animations. Windows fails horribly at this, but they're making promising strides - motion is one of those important UI bits that has basically been ignored up until now.
Take the data at face value (irrespective of whether it's the right data). More deals are going to SV and by a significant margin. You can parse causality any way you'd like (funding, connections, etc.) but that's a correlational point in the Valley's favor. Given everything else we know about the region, we don't have to work hard to see the effect.

More problematic, the data doesn't show N% because we don't know the denominator. It could be that SV is terribly inefficient at exits relative to a place like Austin or Israel. Still, the magnitudes are so different it doesn't really matter one way or another.
But other social networks have actually lost users over time, even though supposedly a network becomes more sticky as more of your friends join it. I'm finding Facebook more off-putting, not more useful, as Facebook keeps trying to invent ways to draw me into the site. I spend way more time on HN than I spend on Facebook, because I find smarter discussion on HN.
Ask HN: When did you first get confirmation that you were doing the right thing?
I am nowhere as far down the line as most people that frequent this site, in terms of skill or of success at a startup, in fact I am still at the very start of earning my CS degree. But today I received confirmation that I am following the right career path by working towards one day building a startup.

Let me fill you guys in.

About a week and a half ago I had an idea to take the freely available information from my university's Student Employment Center (http://www.finaid.wwu.edu/studentjobs/index.php) and create my own site that would let student job hunters actually filter the jobs based on pay rate, on- or off-campus, category, employer, etc... Which the Student Employment center is pretty lacking in. In fact the Student Employment site is pretty lacking in any sort of usability; it is essentially just a list. I decided to focus on catering to what student job hunters need out of a list of jobs. Mainly easy but strong filtering/browsing and usability, usability, usability!

I made a quick and dirty site in my free time (http://western-jobs.com) but I didn't finish almost all of the features that I wanted to. Why? Because I realized that the Student Employment site does have some of the main features I wanted to implement (durr) such as automated emails and browsing jobs by category (not pay though) but they are hidden away in the corners of the site. Again, highlighting how it is not very end-user friendly, and lacks usability, but they already had all the eyeballs and I felt defeated.

I figured I might as well just throw what I had together and put it out so I could be done with it, and move on to the next thing. So I posted it to the WWU forums (http://forum.wwu.edu/node/4203) and that was that.

That was yesterday, today I received a phone call from the head of the Financial Aid department (which runs the Student Employment Center) offering me a job, and we had a good conversation. Unfortunately, due to privacy concerns, they are blocking incoming traffic from my site. No hard feelings, I am not joining their team because I already have an awesome job, but I agreed to sit down with their developers and share my opinions on what their site is lacking, and let them do all the work. Now I can have a positive influence on many more students than I ever could have by running my own site.

Sorry, I know this is a bit long but it feels really good to get noticed and receive attention, something that I haven't done with web development yet.

This elated feeling I have can't be unique though, so I pose a question: When did you have your moment of confirmation?

I'm sure there are some great stories of motivation out there.
Without your parents, you would have died shortly after birth.
I have my doubts about Facebook's business potential, but I don't think it's fair to compare them to listservs or cell phones.

For one thing, Facebook is clearly not a chat platform, nor is it a venue for in-depth discussion (try doing it sometime, the limitations become apparent).

It's a way for you to keep tabs on friends in a passive way without engagement - which is something that I think will only increase in the coming years, for better or for worse.

Where you only had time for a close circle of friends before, and knew essentially nothing about your many brief acquaintances, now you can keep a much better track of your social network without nearly as much effort. Your old coworker John? He's at Google now, and you didn't even need to email him to find out - in fact, you didn't have to ask anyone at all. It allows what used to be your "peripheral" social network to play a larger role in your life than it used to. Think of it as a tool to improve your general social "situational awareness".

[edit] Another strength of Facebook is that you don't have to participate to derive value. I don't post status updates to Facebook very much, but I enjoy keeping up with friends who do. They're in a unique situation where a small group of hardcore users can keep perhaps an order of magnitude more casual users coming back for more.
I suspect they usually don't because human psychology is non-obvious, and most of them don't spend much time learning about psychology.

I think you will agree with me that even many experts make large mistakes in their views on human psychology, as the linked guy has done.
Ask HN: Please review our project SiteCanary
https://sitecanary.com/

Hi everyone,

We've been working on SiteCanary for the last couple months. SiteCanary alerts you when your site goes down via email, SMS or instant message. It lets you configure various tests - "asserts" - to make sure lots of things are looking good (http status, mime type, IP, dns server, etc), and you can configure things in the request like cookies and user agent.

We realize the idea isn't very innovative, but we're working on related products that will be targeted at the audience (small-business website owner), and wanted to solve a simple problem first.

Create a demo account so you can play with it for free at: https://sitecanary.com/demoaccount
(currently hidden... but you guys are friends)

Let us know what you think!
_The real meat of philosophy is arguing over axioms._

Says whom? You're engaging in the very practice the parent is complaining about -- you're attempting to define philosophy in terms suitable to you. In other words, attempting to limit the domain of philosophy to exclude discussion of definitions is an attempt to define philosophy and thus a self-contradiction.

This is all besides the point. The original article is a critique of obfuscatory academic writing, and I would assert that one can discuss semantics -- and philosophy generally -- without necessarily being obfuscatory.
His theory is supported by arguments he didn't give. I agree. I even posted one in comments.

I am more concerned with the quality of arguments than with whether I agree with their conclusion.
I'd love to see an answer but intuitively it feels like you're entering dissertation territory! I wonder if the Valley is less efficient than other locales, but like Hollywood, I wonder if investors would really care one way or another.
We've heard this argument before - but as history shows, extracting this $1/user (in profit!) per month is harder than it seems, especially when the nature of your product is not monetizable easily.

How many businesses have failed that staked their entire existence on "we'll get tons of users... and show ads!"?