skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
#1: I don't see anything that is truly unique, or that presents a barrier to entry for competitors in Facebook. I've often called it the GeoCities of Gen Y. So there is no valuation that I'd likely invest in FB.

#2: The biggest reason here is likely because I am thinking about it in terms of MY money. Most VCs are working with somebody elses money, and I think this can affect a persons judgement and cause them to take chances they wouldn't ordinarily take.

I would invest $0 of my money in FaceBook. But, I'd gladly invest $10M of YOUR money. And I could talk it up in a manner that made you think I was doing you a great favor. If I turn out to be right, then I look like a visionary. If I turn out to be wrong then we were both fooled by them, or snookered by the economy, etc.

More information does not always enable you to make better decisions...
i have to admit, gaming the poll is kind of silly, but this is a pretty interesting recap of the process.
I wouldn't invest simply because FB doesn't provide any service that's of value to me. Google does, Microsoft does, Craigslist does, Amazon does, my local dry cleaner does. FB does not.
Transportation costs my be cheap now, but consider what would happen if fuel prices rose or the cost of containing the pollution produced through the transportation increased.

New Urbanists aren't saying yards are a waste of precious urban land. They don't really even say urban land is "precious". They mostly just think living in closer proximity to others is good for the economy, the environment and people's social lives.
Design Tutorials, How-tos, and Resources for Photoshop and Illustrator
The second part of a series of articles that focuses on providing readers with a colossal list of links to bookmark and tag for easy future reference. Chock full of design tutorials, resources, how-tos, and techniques.
How to Save $5000 on Your Logo
Entrepreneur, author, and musician Jim Leff argues that creative types aren't always that creative and that it's better to come up with a rough idea and have them tweak it than to go to them with a blank slate.
I'm not sure whether or not I agree with this, but it's thought provoking. Interested in what others think.
That is how I thought it usually works. When you start filing paperwork with the state, eg: getting a driver's license and renting, they try to tax you.
as i told Paul when he sent me this essay, he's got it all wrong. silicon valley's rate of startup growth is slowing and the rate of startup growth in many of the leading cities of the world (london, bejing, mumbai, banglore, new york, tel aviv, berlin, etc) is increasing. i think Paul's view has been skewed by living in Boston and Silicon Valley. Boston's startup ecosystem has been in decline for almost ten years now and when compared to Silicon Valley, it looks like game over. But if you chart the number of new startups funded by angels and VCs in all these cities since 1995, you'll see the right picture. I did that for my web 2.0 keynote and if i can find the chart, i'll post a link here
It is a poor teacher who is not eclipsed by his students.
I thought every browser used tabs now, I don't see the purpose of the DiggBar. I could see the purpose 10 years ago when you had IE and you had to open up a new instance for a new page.

I rarely open up two instances now, I use tabs. The occasions I do open up two tabs are usually work related, when I'm working I like being able to compare two pages at once. Usually a before and after, or what I'm currently working on and my notes or research or something.

I personally want one of the ultra-wide monitors, which can play true 720p, because then I can get two full pages onto a monitor instead of two smaller pages. Alas, step by step I guess. Still 16:10 kicks the but of 4:3 for work purposes.
I am made to understand that the IRS will accept tea bags in lieu of the balance owed.
I really don't see much of this in reading (or writing, hopefully...) papers in astrophysics. The prose is generally dull and impersonal, sure, but it's also simple. Obfuscating your own papers won't buy you anything, because published papers don't count for much unless people cite them. And to do that, they need to know what they are about.

Of course, there's always a certain degree of what's known as a "community of practice" in very specialized writing: Words have special meanings and there are customary ways of expression that makes it hard to penetrate for outsiders. But that's not because the writing itself is necessarily bad, it's because you don't know the code it's written in.
I think of this as the acquaintance paradox. Social networking sites are best at keeping you in touch with your acquaintances (after all, your close friends already know where to find you and what you are doing). But someone who I am already acquainted with and who is not a close friend is merely an acquaintance for a reason - I don't click with them, I don't have time for them, whatever.

The paradox is that I am therefore more likely to find a stranger interesting than an acquaintance, especially a self-selected group of strangers. I think that is why you prefer HN to your facebook buddies.
Regardless of whether you pay your taxes or not, make sure you file them. Failure to file has much larger penalties associated with it than paying late.
Not quite, the employment population ratio is (100% - unemployment) x labor force participation. The labor force is everyone who has a job, or is actively searching for one.

Incidentally, both employment rate and labor force participation rate are poor indicators of the economy. Some people don't want a job. That number varies based on all sorts of factors which are unrelated to health of the economy: number of retirees, women's lifestyle choices (stay at home or not), number of children (the little brats don't participate in the labor force), etc.
I get the feeling we must have not read the same article as the one I read was all about what the studies show (or rather don't in this case).
Words, trying to suggest they have meaning beyond means of communication makes a huge assumption.

PS: The idea that magic could work is linked to the assumption that words have power beyond what they do inside peoples heads. As computer people I would hope we can understand that power of "software" is all about moving electrons is some useful fashion. Talking about programs absent the compiler and hardware is missing the point.
Actually it was completely reasonable to have made those loans and I'd have done it too given that Fannie Mae was willing to guarantee it.

If that's all that you did then you'd be fine (everyone else is of course another story but business is business).
If the logo pictured therein represents the mockup he gave to the designer, I hope he'd be prepared to have it entirely modified or discarded. The logo is busy, repetitive, and difficult to digest.

Designers, musicians, and others make a living at their craft because they're good at what they do (ideally). Logo designers have spent hours learning what's good and what isn't.

I wouldn't want someone who has a "compositional idea" to come up to me (as a piano player myself) and ask me to morph their idea into a masterpiece unless they fully understood that I might change their idea entirely, or that their idea might not even be feasible.

Same goes for startups -- you can't present an idea to a few developers and expect them to roar back with a great startup. It takes persistence, experience, and inspiration to create something good. But inspiration itself comes from having experience at a craft. Not all inspiration is created equal.
So, is that why it hasn't been updated for 3 days?
Catting weird things to /dev/audio
Hmm, that's interesting. I take back my initial assumption. The link numbers on the second column (inbound) are too low for what I was thinking. My initial thoughts were that it was the other way around (the third column, outbound), that these sites were considered important because they're hubs that link out to n other sites. Maybe some combination of both, or even of all the numbers.
As someone who spent quite a bit of his youth farming: these people are doing it wrong.

Hoeing weeds in a field that hasn't even been disced or planted yet? Sorting beans by hand? Planting wheat by hand? Fertilizing by hand? Digging ditches by hand?

That's some seriously medieval stuff. I'm sure it's traditional, etc, but it's not efficient, and it doesn't scale to large populations. I don't even want to think about what they aren't doing regarding soil chemistry, pest control, etc.
No children, but if I did I have the feeling I'd one of those parents welcoming the findings of this researcher.
My point is not about studies. Maybe you haven't read my comments closely. Which part of this do you disagree with:

There exists at least one parenting technique which completely negates the influence of peers, namely not letting the kid out of the house.
The good news is the internet will put an end to this type of argument by intimidation in academia. The university system is toast just like the journalist and newspapers. No one knows what will replace it but that is the process underway right now. Do a search for Clay Shirky and his article on newspapers and journalism, its the same principles.
2.6 is a bridge to 3.0 -- it implemented some 3.0 things, but kept a lot of backward compatibility. If a project can't convert to 3.0, they could convert to 2.6, which would then make the eventual 3.0/3.1 migration easier.
They do that in New Zealand. Your employer(s) send all your income details to the tax department and at tax time the tax office just sends you a bill. Pretty convenient by the sound of it.
People with different degrees of "smartness" are on opposite sides of many issues. Sadly, it is not as simple as smart=correct.

Apply your same reasoning to pets.com in 1999 and it does not fare very well.

Does facebook have value, yeah I think so. Does it have an intrinsic value in the billions? I think skepticism is warranted.
It's a really clean site that feels responsive (even from .nz) and isn't too cluttered -- great work!

A few bits of feedback:
- When I was adding a new site to check, it wasn't immediately clear whether you support sending text messages to non-US mobiles. The only example provided is formatted US-style (1-xxx-xxx-xxxx). I put in my NZ mobile as 6421xxxxxxx and it did in fact work. I'd suggest adding a second example number formatted as e.g. +44xxxxxxxxx and perhaps a link to a page listing the countries you support.
- Perhaps an option to send a second text message when the site comes back up?
- The subject line of the email which is sent when the site comes back up is simply 'SiteCanary: accountname:'. It'd be good to have this be 'SiteCanary: sitename is back!' instead.
The problem with Facebook is that they make very bad decisions at an executive level. Facebook is clearly not worth $0, but I don't think I'd invest in it at any valuation, only because I wouldn't trust Zuckerberg to manage my capital.
I wonder if these rules are worse than useless.

Everyone agrees that "clear" is better than "not-clear", "concise" is better than not concise, etc.

But not only does this blog not give a clear, concise description of how to implement these qualities. It is doesn't even give a clear, unambiguous way to determine whether a given interface has these qualities.

He could have been more concise and just as clear if he'd said "make it rock, dude!"
I was surprised to read how easy it was to game... at the heart of the success seems to be a real lack of quality coding on Time's behalf.
Thanks for the link. Quite good, far more than the blog post. Your link gives concrete, nonobvious clues - like feedback.
Let me argue the other side for the sake of discussion. Designers, musicians, etc. make their living because they're good at what they do, but what is it that they do?

Designers are good at playing with visuals, writers are good at playing with words, musicians are good at setting harmony to a melody. Sometimes, those people are good at creating something from nothing, but it's a different animal.

Having worked as a writer, I liked starting from scratch, but I also appreciated when the CEO had a clear vision and story of what his company was about that I could run with. Many great works of music are derivative of a theme from another composer.

Jim's point seems to be that giving them something to react to and work with is a huge shortcut with little or no loss.
I actually attribute much of my writing skill to a college philosophy class.

The reason was that our class paper assignments were not about arguing philosophical points. Our assignments were to summarize the arguments of philosophers. No personal opinions. Just summaries.

Regardless of the substance of the course, the skill of digesting, analyzing, and summarizing the position of another is surprisingly valuable. It is also surprisingly difficult.

Summarizing is difficult because it is too easy to mix up personal ideas with those of others. This tends to result in a mish-mash of words and ideas that don't fit together, resulting in the incomprehensible academic-speak complained of in the article.

Summarizing is important because it is persuasive. If you can rephrase your opponents' views without bias or argument, and then build on those views to reach your conclusions, your opponents are much more likely to entertain and accept your conclusions, because they feel like their views have been fully heard.

It is unfortunate that so much of writing focuses on making arguments, to the detriment of the equally important skill of understanding the arguments of others.
"They forever tarnished their brand for something that doesn't really seem to be worth it."

Not to be unnecessarily snarky, but: I didn't know Digg had any brand left to tarnish.
Sure, something's better than nothing.

That's what brainstorming is all about -- creating ideas without having any expectation that any particular idea will succeed. Starting with something might spur an idea forward, or it might not. An initial idea's good; multiple ideas are better. As long as the person understands that collaborating with an expert will necessitate change, perhaps back-and-forth consultation, etc., until a good, agreeable conclusion is reached.
What I find scientifically dishonest is when scientists leave open the possibility that science may one day shed light on subjective experience.

It never will, because subjective experience by definition lies outside the boundary of what scientific experiments can detect.
Thanks kiwidrew -- great feedback. We'll these fix things and they should be out soon.

Cheers!
Am I Fit for Startups?
I want to clarify that I don't mean it's foolish to make a scene about real book banning. I mean that it's foolish to get so up in arms over an accusation of book banning without waiting for evidence.
I believe Japan has some serious tariffs on food, thus allowing small scale farming to exist.
We used Shneiderman's "Designing the User Interface" book (3rd Ed) back in Human Computer Interaction class. I kept the book and still use it. The link was a lucky find because the usability post list looked a tiny bit familiar.
The problem with 3D interfaces is not the 2D display.

There are two major problems with 3D interfaces: Your best input devices are fundamentally 2D. Fully 3D interface devices exist but are unusual and generally tuned for a specific purpose. (Even if you want to jump up and say "The Wiimote!", from what I can see it is typically used in a 2D manner. Those 2D are not the conventional 90 degree angles(), mostly in a way to make them easier to use with wrists and arms, but it's still a lot of 2D motion with rare forays into true 3D that get old fast.)

The other major problem is that full* 3D is virtually incomprehensible; we live in a 2.5D world. Try to train a "normal person" to play Descent. (If you think full-3D interfaces would be awesome, go play Descent to be sure!) We can't use the full 3D. What we can use is a 2.5D plane stretching out into the distance. But, as long as we're using 2.5D, why not place it perpendicular to our eyes and see the maximum area, instead the 3D-engine view that moves all but a very small part of the 2.5D plane out of our field of view and range of action?

Fully 3D interfaces are fundamentally and deeply flawed. We've had the hardware to display them for at least a decade now and there's a reason there isn't even a halfway decent prototype... and it's not for lack of trying. It's just a really, really bad idea, one where you can't even overcome the fundamental flaws with brute force and ideology.

(*): Recall that dimensionality is not constrained to the traditional three 90-degree rotated planes, it is a measurement of how many numbers need to be specified in a given situation. Hold out your arms and fingers straight, and move only your wrist around. As you move your wrist around, look at the surface defined by where the tip of your middle finger is. It is piece of a vaguely spherical shell which curves in 3D space, but is itself a 2D surface; given the situation I laid out I need only two numbers to identify a point on that plane. The Wiimote is capable of being used in full 3D and it certainly is in some cases, but the human body itself imposes constraints on how you move that thing around and full 3D gets tiring, fast. Even the ones that use full 3D still strike me as using 2.5D; a full 2D for the wrist motions, and .5D for just thrusting backwards or forwards with no meaningful wrist interactions (just serving as a tactile button). Another example: Using the Wiimote as a steering wheel, as nifty a use case as it is, actually cuts it down to 1D, as only the angle matters.
I rang HSBC, no good unfortunately. They don't offer merchant services -- ie, they'll bank foreign currency but won't let me accept card payments. I'm a bit shocked by that actually.
quite surprising, since time's poll has historically been a target of similar attacks.
Fighting America's 'Financial Oligarchy'
As a designer, there's nothing I hate more than clients who come to me with preconceived notions of what they want or need, nevermind actual sketches of their "vision". It often leaves little opportunity to improve on the idea, or a hell of a lot of nudging to get them to accept something better.

My last logo job had about a hundred sketches, further refined to a dozen candidates, from which I presented the top three. The idea that an artist/designer/musician can't be called upon to think up fresh ideas is laughable. Any truly competent creative can pump out ideas a fast as they can draw/write/play.
Unfortunately, the XMPP feature that is what Laconica should have been based on was only relatively recently specified and implementations are still stabilizing, which is a necessary step before we have clients that support it.

I'm speaking specifically of "PubSub", where you can publish your updates and they get sent out only to subscribers.

Note that twitter does not otherwise match a conventional IM message, nor does it match a conventional conference room. It does precisely match the PubSub use case, and I still hope to see something based on that. Laconica isn't wrong to ignore it, per se, but they will end up having to do (or have already done) a lot of very, very redundant specification as a result of ignoring it. (I'd think they'd still have been better off taking an existing XMPP server, fixing the pubsub to do what they want, and building from there.)
I've seen people get great-looking logo designs for $300 using http://99designs.com

I'm sure it pisses off $5000/logo designers as much as iStockphoto pisses off people that used to make a good living from stock photography, but welcome to the 21st century.
I think there is substantial doubt that this was true.
The article just seems strange to me. How is it different from an article called "The 50 Most Brilliant Christians of All Time" or any other label for a group of people with a specific belief?
Which bank are you with? They may have an Australian partner / subsidiary / branch.
I think sufficiently advanced voice-recognition could replace keyboards.

<oop>Imagine a world with truly ubiquitous computing, augmented reality and a predominantly voice- and gesture-driven interface. Everyone would appear to be wizards, especially hackers, because surely, new programming languages would appear where combinations of arcane keywords and gestures take special meaning. Sorry, imagination just ran wild here.</oop>
Spec work sites like 99designs are ripe with stolen illustrations from stock sites.

Should you ever get caught with a logo using stolen works, you're setting yourself up for some really hefty fees regardless of where you obtained the work. This isn't conjecture, it's happened before:

http://www.thelogofactory.com/logo_blog/index.php/anti-spec-...
Can we please not bring this type of stuff here? No offense to the OP, but Reddit has it in spades and a bunch of Hackers are not going to be able to logically deduce the answer here. Code, finance, web design/development, writing, major events are all great topics.
Sigh..(Re: the para on Jawaharlal Nehru, former Prime minister of India)...

Hindi is a language, Hindu is a religion. More importantly, all Hindus do not speak Hindi

People who quote eminent people and get their facts wrong (spelling Gandhi as Ghandi) automatically lose credibility.
I really enjoyed reading this article. Zero Cool would be proud.
I could care less about the 5k logo designers, but spec work is horrible and if you use sites like 99designs you are getting exactly what you pay for. No GOOD designer is going to spend hours tweaking a logo to your liking when he's competing with 100's of other designers and no guarantee he's going to win, ESPECIALLY for $300. Try convincing a developer to do anything remotely close to this and you'll be laughed at as well.
I'm always amazed by what lengths random people will go to hack software. Half my developers don't even understand SQL injection attacks. There's not one of them that really understands buffer overflows. So what chance do I have of getting a secure product out?

Those sorts of things really should be part of every programmer's education.
It's the US only. It's from a report by the US Bureau of Labor Statistics, based on surveys of American employers:

http://www.bls.gov/news.release/empsit.nr0.htm
Science contains the reduction that two physically identical objects are equivalent: a kilogram of pure iron is the same as any other kilogram of iron (if such a thing existed). For the purposes of physics and biology, it's a valid reduction, and a necessary one, since it'd be impossible to reason about organic chemistry probvlems if individual carbon atoms had "personality" or "identity" that needed to be taken into account.

Subjective experience, or "consciousness", is a property for which this reduction doesn't hold, since an exact physical clone of oneself would hold a different consciousness, even at the zero moment when they were physically identical.

This isn't a discrepancy that can be reduced through better equipment and more complex models. It's a fundamental gap.
Where is step 7?
This is by far the best zc.buildout tutorial out there.

Zope community has lots of cool technology, but completely unknown to outsiders. They should get more Django people to write documentation for them.
People might click on ads that are properly targetted. As it is now, every ad I've seen on FB are way, WAY off base for me.

FB perhaps needs to find ways to upload more of the personal activities and data in order to make ads more accurately targeted.
Any designer worth his salt is going to spend some time going through a discovery process with you. This is where he or she would find out exactly what you are thinking and then translate that to good design. You may think this ugly ass dog looks good, but I can promise pretty much no one else does, so you're doing your brand and yourself an injustice to pretend you're the expert, when you're obviously not.

I am constantly baffled by designers and developers not understanding or appreciating each others craft.