skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
> They got you by the balls. They spend billions of dollars every year lobbying... lobbying, to get what they want... Well, we know what they want. They want more for themselves and less for everybody else, but I’ll tell you what they don’t want... they don’t want a population of citizens capable of critical thinking. They don’t want well informed, well educated people capable of critical thinking. They’re not interested in that... that doesn’t help them. That’s against their interests. That’s right.

> They don’t want people who are smart enough to sit around a kitchen table and think about how badly they’re getting fucked by a system that threw them overboard 30 fuckin' years ago. They don’t want that. You know what they want? They want obedient workers... Obedient workers, people who are just smart enough to run the machines and do the paperwork.

-- George Carlin
Well in Germany & France, bachelor is already in 3 years, though most students do a master then. So the discussion is probably worth it. I have no strong opinion for 4 or 3 years personally
Benefits, job security, and often sexier products.
One issue that I see with that is that sometimes even software engineers can benefit from a theory course (e.g., algorithms), which requires a whole bunch of other theory to really understand.

And then you're back where you started, because that isn't really a few survey courses.
Next up at TechCrunch, how Twitter killed Google... Twitter rumored to be acquiring Apple... Apple rumored to be releasing a budget mp3 player priced at $10... How TechCrunch killed the entire newspaper industry...

Seriously. It's just getting ridiculous now. TC - get back to reporting news - you know, facts.
My bad, the Nausea hit the night before.

It's funny, I wasn't crazy about the fade-out feature (Though, I did find it witty as hell.), but after pulling a ctrl-a on the above... well I'm actually a huge fan of it these days! ;)
What other option does he have? He's going to face criticisms and calls that he's lying whether he does or doesn't show a screencap of the email.
oddly enough, if RIAA sues everyone who scrobbled pre-release stuff on last.fm, they don't gain anything. it won't stop file sharing, it'll just stop scrobbling, leading to a less representative statistical sample of people's listening habits. that'll hurt last.fm and RIAA more than anyone else.
i don't have a yodlee account, how do they stack up?
My advice: get and train an imagination, don't outsource the job. Read all the hard core stuff, read the fantasy stuff.
i think the biggest hook for mint is that they'll eventually have most of the info they need to do my taxes for me (a service they don't currently offer, but i hope might eventually offer through a partner, or on their own.)
Various Object-Oriented Design Dilemmas
I use Windows to build Ruby gems, for a smart-card simulator, and to see my sites in IE.

Therefore I install the following: disable anti-virus warning, disable firewall + warnings, all updates, Firefox, Safari (also gets me Bonjour), One-click Ruby, Eclipse, Aptana Studio, Git (the msys port), Visual Studio 6 SP6.

Caveat: my latest Windows (XP) installs are in a VirtualBox VM.
Exactly, so why bother showing the email at all?
Ask HN: Testing the market before manufacturing the product?
In the 70's, shrewd book publishers would take out ads in the back of magazines for books they had not written. If they got more than 300 orders, they would write the book in a week. Otherwise, they would mail back the checks and say: "Sorry, it's out of stock."

This is according to Marc Andreessen, when he was on Charlie Rose, (http://bit.ly/marca).

You have an idea for a physical good that you think a sufficient number of people would be interested in. How do you perform the analogous process on the internet, when selling a physical good?
Step 1. Mock up an image of it, and set up a website.
Step 2. ...
Step 3. Take pre-orders.
Step 4. PROFIT! (or, return everyone's money if there aren't enough orders)
Step 5. Manufacture.

What is Step 2?

What merchant solution should you use to take pre-orders? Can you use PayPal for this sort of setup? Or someone else?

How do you promote this product? Besides Google AdWords, what are other cheap promotion methods for testing the market? Trying to get a link on digg.com?
Pretty sure Yodlee is getting paid. In fact, Mint should be concerned they are so dependent on Yodlee.
I live pretty close to this place:

http://www.hgrindustrialsurplus.com/

As a software guy, I've found that I could spend endless hours in here looking at industrial machinery. For no rational reason, I'd love to buy a 50's era metal lathe. So, I agree on the curiosity point.
Am I the only person who actually wants a full and balanced education?

There is more free thinking contained in one Hacker News thread then you'll find in most college academic departments. An institution is its selection process. And the selection process for a college is that of a priesthood ( which is not surprising, considering the ivy league colleges originated as seminaries). As one Swarthmore professor writes: "Graduate school is not about learning... Graduate school is not education. It is socialization. It is about learning to behave, about mastering a rhetorical and discursive etiquette as mind-blowingly arcane as table manners at a state dinner in 19th Century Western Europe." Paul Graham writes: "In order to get tenure in any field you must not arrive at conclusions that members of tenure committees can disagree with."

Recently I went to a forum about the education of history. The audience comprised professors from around the country. It was stunning just how uniform their views were. And I could actually watch their views become more synchronized real time. There was far, far less diversity of thought, and far less actual information, than is found in a stable of good blogs and discussions sites.

Hackers value a full and balanced education. But college does not provide that education. The university produces bad philosophy ( http://www.paulgraham.com/philosophy.html ), bad poetry ( http://unqualified-reservations.blogspot.com/2007/11/tryfon-... ), bad English http://www.paulgraham.com/essay.html, bad history ( http://unqualified-reservations.blogspot.com/2007/10/how-daw... ), bad architecture (http://www.2blowhards.com/archives/2009/05/architecture_an_6... ), bad economics ( http://unqualified-reservations.blogspot.com/2008/08/de-gust... ), and bad business ( http://www.theatlantic.com/doc/200606/stewart-business/ ).

The university could be forgiven it it was just wrong. But it is not only wrong. It teaches you only its narrow interpretation of the subject, but tells you that it has taught you a full and balanced view. That is unforgivable.
Sorry to go grammar police on the writer of the original email (see screenshot), but its "their" not "there" when talking about their "pov"

Also, glad to see Michael fix it in the quote, although then technically the quote is wrong :)
Random Meetings in a Car
Payment should be centered on how engaged one is across the spectrum of metrics that you offer. I'd offer a "light" first one for free and then require payment beyond that first metric.
The Scribd tactic, mentioned in this article, is particularly shitty. Linking to articles under Google search terms increases SEO, but it still feels dirty.

I've never heard of Twine before, but I'm writing them to tell them in advance to bar content from my URLs. Is it a big site that I've never heard of before? Also: How would one set up a content policy on a web site forbidding use of the text published within? Certainly it's possible to make an attempt to persecute these copiers?
Well, for one thing, it lends more credibility to the story.

But to go on your initial point, why bother writing a follow up piece at all? Because that's what it takes to make a blog that people want to read.

As far as they know, the source has been reliable in the past. The source provided them with a good story, they published it and the companies in question danced a jig to make TC out to appear like a bunch of liars.

If the story is correct, last.fm providing the information to CBS who then turned it over to the RIAA is essentially the same thing as last.fm giving the information to the RIAA.

If its not correct, people will call Michael out on it, no big deal - it's what gets readers.

It's the same situation that makes abominations like Perez Hilton exist... people thrive on drama. Drama drives traffic, traffic creates revenue.
A field-based approach to trusting expertise
Some guy launches some small site with the sole intent of slapping google ad sense and google custom search on it to cash on the people who stumble on his site off google search.

How is this relevant here on HN ?

PS: Is it that some people blatantly upmod anything with the 'startup' keyword in the title ? Kinda reminds me of the Swineflu t-shirt story which ran a week or so ago :)
How is the RIAA using this to find people who pirate music? Doesn't it look the same as normal music?
I think there was a post on Mixergy about this recently. Let me dig it out for you...

Here you go:

http://blog.mixergy.com/direct-marketing-techniques-launch/

I didn't actually watch it, but it appears to be a step-by-step guide to what you're asking.
I have no problem with him writing the follow up story. Heck, I'm glad he wrote it, as I am not one of those who automatically hate Michael Arrington.
If I recall, there is a certain user point threshold over which downvoting is enabled.

Downvoting comments or downvoting submissions? (The latter is the subject of the thread. I'm not aware of anyone other than curators having any power but flagging submissions.)
So the answer is less education? There is already a two year program in the US. Problem solved. This is a bit much. You can already go to a diploma mill and save yourself the time. Why do in 2-3 years what can be done in a couple clicks and a laser printer?

This is just lazy. Also, the idea that "people want education that will make them money do they need to skip traditional education" seems even more ridiculous in a time when very few are studying technical fields. Also the argument that many students take classes just because they are easy is stupid and I think those proferring that argument were probably the very same students. Many students are interested in an education.
Agree. I was just suggesting that, presuming people wanted to purchase computing power in units this small, people could sell 1/500th of a EC2 slice with a gig/month of bandwith or whatever. It's proximity to non-networked IO that makes this thing necessary/useful.
Wordoid.com checks domain availability by querying a DNS server. This is not completely accurate, since some domains don't have DNS records. The right way is to query a whois server. That's tough, because i don't know of any whois servers that would allow me send bulk queries.
Ebay wasn't killed by Facebook or YouTube.

Ebay was killed by its own ignorance and avarice -- in that it first began to ignore and later became actively hostile to the very things that had made it popular (small, private auctions), in favor of letting large businesses dominate the site, removing all value for people like me.

I haven't been there in years, and I used to sell my old computer hardware there regularly.

Now, I use Craigslist, and will for the foreseeable future.
Ebay killed themselves when they alienated the small sellers, and Amazon helped matters by offering used sales on a lot of its products. Ebay is now trying to be Overstock.com-ish rather than its original self. They still make lots of money but I for one never shop on Ebay for anything I can find elsewhere.
This idea is about as old as google itself.
Aaron, if you're reading this, I have a question for you from this release: what happened?

Was it just a verbal/written confirmation that you did, in fact, contribute to FB from Zuck, or was there an exhange of some monetary value for the resolve?
The second bomb is more difficult to justify than the first, true, but I do find the morality of the first bomb ambiguous. The article itself indicates that to the Japanese military leaders, surrender was not an option; with civilians considering killing their family when the enemy invades, I don't think that surrender was being considered.

The amorality of the atomic bomb is sometimes attributed to civilian casualties, but soldiers are humans too, and saving soldier lives actually has value. And although some might say that soldiers chose to be in the war voluntarily, this should not be used against soldiers. Otherwise less soldiers will volunteer, making the draft inevitable.

And having soldiers and an army in a large country is a necessity. If such a country has an inadequate army it does not get peace, it gets invaded. I do not like to imagine what would have happened to the US if its army were not stronger than the Japanese army.
Chris Pirillo likes Tonido.
Since it wasn't mentioned in the thread: Man, Economy, and State by Murray Rothbard. By far the best economics book I have read.
Ask HN: Which bloggers are blatant plagiarists?
I was looking up articles on a particular subject, to respond to an HN participant who asked me to please come up with a new source for a new idea, and by a Google search I came upon an article by a researcher on that idea. I also came upon a blog post by a college professor who quoted just about that entire article, but without any citation to the original author's article at all. (Wouldn't that violate the standards of faculty conduct at any accredited college?)

I'm wondering how often you do a search for good articles on a particular subject, and find not only the original article by an eminent scholar but also blog posts that plagiarize that scholar's work. Which bloggers are especially likely to steal other people's words and work?

Naturally, I'd like to submit primary sources to HN whenever possible, so I'd like to know where NOT to look for original, thoughtful articles on important subjects of interest to hackers.
He looks too excited about this.....
Configuration management? Why not just teach "software engineering" majors how to use publisher and a laser printer to just print the degree off and be done with it?
too bad they won't change the dated logo they have now. i understand they have "equity" in it but the elementary typography, photoshop beveling, and color palette leaves a lot to be desired.

nevertheless, I really like what Google (and artists) have done with the logo around important events, etc.
There certainly is a way of stopping people from printing those copies wholesale on their web sites. If I put up entire albums free for download on my site, I'd have some angry bands after me.

I'm fine with the things I put online being passed around, but when a site replicates it all and takes my traffic, it means I lose viewers and popularity. I dislike things like FriendFeed as-is, because I don't like that there's no way to track conversations about me online. (Somebody ought to make a solution to this so I can give them some money.) It's much worse if they're actually stealing my writing rather than just linking back.
Ask HN: do you know of any commandline usability / improvement research?
I'm looking for some serious articles about commandline / console / text-interface usability issues / ideas. It doesn't really matter if the ideas were implemented anywhere or not. I couldn't find anything that's not gui-related so far on google-schoolar and others. Just to be clear - I'm after proper papers, not "10 tips for better bash".

Do you know of anything related and not trivial?
I have heard good things about Tonido from my friend (she is a geek). based on comments from Chris Pirillo, looks easy to install and use Tonido... anyone else has tried?
As I've previously posted, they did (http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=618707):

Microsoft included Digital Locker with Vista allowing you to purchase applications from 3rd parties via Windows Marketplace, but it has since shutdown, presumably due to lack of popularity.
Eric Ries at startup lessons learned has also written on this topic.
Thanks, I was just about to post how biased the results were by using a Chromium nightly and outdated Firefox and WebKit betas.
What's the legality of last.fm transferring any data from it's UK servers to CBS in the US, under EU data protection?
One reason is that it would be hard to ensure no bad stuff slipped in with the free apps. But Baseshield solved that problem by building a vm the apps live in.

http://baseshield.com
Maybe I'm missing something, they still have the monopoly over the online auction don't they?

And no, I haven't read the story. It's on techcrunch.
Thank you for your extensive feedback, JunkDNA!
I will take your suggestions into account while making the webapp better.
I don't believe that lack of fun killed eBay.

But I would agree that the disappearance of fun was a key symptom of a deeper problem: eBay's management team focused on maximizing profits rather than promoting the wellbeing of the eBay community (buyers and sellers).

The equation here is simple: people stop going to eBay when the user experience is frustrating (otherwise, people stick to their habits) and when other sites perform the same service better (Amazon, Craigslist, etc).
Does anyone have a source for the history related in the submitted article? I know routine aseptic precautions were opposed by quite a few doctors in the nineteenth century for quite a while, but I've never read anything about detailed reasons (other than convenience) given for not washing hands regularly or sterilizing instruments. How much of this is on the historical record, and how much of this is story-telling by Dijkstra, who was quite an able story-teller?
We don't consider these or any other metrics when deciding who to fund. The only way HN affects interview decisions is when we recognize the username for making smart comments. But since there is no way for software to detect those (if only), it's necessarily informal.
If you don't like Techcrunch, don't be a dick about it in Techcrunch articles. Either don't comment, or don't mention explicitly that you didn't read the article, so that you only get called out for it when you say appallingly stupid things that the article happened to address.

This might be irrelevant, though, since I don't actually read buro9 comments.
I don't get why people don't like the Google logo. It's playful and it's simple. It's a bit childish, but it gets away with that since it appears on a blank white page and so it's not conflicting with any other elements.

I do prefer their white-on-color logo that they use with products like Chrome, though.
http://pdnblog.palm.com/2009/05/a-predevcamp-update/
If a submission is offtopic it should be killed. Hence flag. If a submission is on-topic, you have to depend on votes to rank it. It seemed from watching Reddit fairly closely that downvotes were, on average, made more reflexively than upvotes. So we just use upvotes.
This previous blog post by him is totally crass:
http://www.whattofix.com/blog/archives/2009/05/allison-stokk...

"For a $10 donation, I'll scour the internet and send you all the Allison Stokke pictures that you can find."

Followed later by: "I know that Allison definitely did not want in the spotlight -- that was one of the points of my original article."

No, actually the point of your original article was to drive traffic to your blog, which is why you keep saying her name over and over, intentionally including certain misspellings.
Personally, I find the Arduino IDE so incredibly sluggish that it is difficult to use. This seems like a much better alternative.
Collaborative web development
Hi,
with other two (or possibly more) guys I am going to build a web application. We live in three different cities and we would like to find a good way to work together.

We would like to use some version control system, but we are not sure that this would be a good idea for web development. I know about Git and I thought we could use Gitosis to make a repository on our server, but we think that this may slow down our work.

Often, when we have to adjust some code, or some graphics, we quickly modify something, save and refresh to see what happens. How can we accomplish this with Git/Gitosis?

How do you usually work in team and mantain code?
Anderson is so incredibly misunderstood. He makes the same, single point over and over: interconnectivity makes niches easier to reach. That's it. No "the blockbuster is dead", no "throw away everything you've ever learned about running your business", nothing even all that profound. He simply points out that niches are easier to reach, that they function a little differently than blockbusters, and by the way, there is a long history of established business techniques to address them. I don't understand why anything he says is even controversial. He's not saying anything new, simply making an observation. Weird.
I don't have a rigorous source, but there is a marvelous historical-fiction account of Ignatz Semmelweis's discovery of the importance of hygiene in 19th century Vienna, and the ridicule and professional scorn he was met with, called "The Cry and the Covenant." There's a fairly good synopsis at http://www.doyletics.com/arj/tcatcrvw.htm, including descriptions of the reasons the doctor's opposed his innovations.
Not my favorite kind of argument: (1) Show in detail how "the establishment" in some historical controversy was spectacularily wrong. (2) Use this as proof for the superiority of your own position in a completely unrelated modern debate.

There was a submission some time ago which used the same device to argue against global warming. Since "the powers that be" had been wrong in the case of Galileo, then obviously the mainstream belief in man-made climate change was the same kind of wrong-headed belief in unscientific dogma. I have seen the same kind of argument for Creationism - since science was wrong in the case of the ether and frenology, then obviously the theory of evolution is also wrong.
I think the accusation was that they were looking for people who had scrobbled the as yet unreleased U2 album.
you could control the standardized tests for IQ, which would cancel out noise. The problem is that you now need to administer two tests, and the errors implicit in assigning raw numbers to such fuzzy concepts as teaching ability multiply.
The guest author is really well known and a former EVP at PayPal. He knows what he's talking about.
> The university could be forgiven it it was just wrong. But it is not only wrong. It teaches you only its narrow interpretation of the subject, but tells you that it has taught you a full and balanced view. That is unforgivable.

I don't know about that. Imagine if schools taught evolution, but then said, "well, this isn't a full and balanced view, but merely a narrow interpretation."

The point being, it's more important for educators to be correct than it is for them to be humble.
The college I'm attending makes owning a Macbook Pro mandatory. I wonder how many colleges actively deny use of a Mac, especially considering Boot Camp.
The three-year degree is the common model at the University of Cambridge and Oxford University in England

Not only that but pretty much all British universities. I was surprised to learn that the US traditionally goes for four. Given the similarities of the final qualification, the extra year seems more like a money making opportunity than anything else, so I'd more expect the fourth year to appear in the UK than the US going to three ;-)
they compete by giving their students access to better jobs or academic positions than they would have had by attending a different school. college is a prestige and credentials game.
Am I missing something? They're asking for the keys to my bank account -- my username and password for online banking, something that should never be given out to anyone under any circumstances. That, to me, is an issue I just can't get past, no matter how many people sing their praises.