skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
In 1901, the most acclaimed tennis player in the world was a man named William Larned.

An irrelevant example. Why didn't the author choose an example from a sport where the poor and middle class had reasonable access to facilities and training?

Perhaps the transition was another result of the gradual democratization of our culture. With more and more people able to participate in games that had previously been available only to the leisure class, the one percent just couldn’t compete.

This is a good guess, but here's another one: Perhaps William Larned was able to devote his life to tennis because he took his place in the upper class for granted and didn't feel like he needed to prove his worthiness. Perhaps the democratization of culture means that the rich now feel more pressure to prove or earn their right to be so privileged, so they put their energy into education and professional achievement.

Devoting oneself wholeheartedly to a sport means neglecting all the more reliable ways of maintaining one's status. In days past, most people who inherited a place in the upper class didn't feel particularly pressed to maintain it or prove they deserved it. They just assumed it was a fact of life. Enterprise and noblesse oblige were only for those who felt inclined to them. There was nothing to lose by devoting one's life to whatever one wanted, whether that was sport, adventure, or partying.
First of all, the article speaks of journalists as a homogenous group which is ridiculous since they are neither created equal nor do they act as a single group. It then describes only one aspect of journalism and devalues all roles journalists play based on that incomplete description. For example, there is no mention of the value of investigative journalism or the historical value of well-written, unbiased content.

From the article: Today, ordinary adults can observe and report news, gather expert knowledge, determine significance, add audio, photography, and video components, and publish this content far and wide (or at least to their social network) with ease. And much of this is done for no pay.

This is a generally correct assessment of the current situation. Where it goes wrong is with the conclusion it draws: "Until journalists can redefine the value of their labor above this level, they deserve low pay."

As long as there are businesses willing to pay for this type of content, there will be people willing to fill those positions. It's not the responsibility of journalists to correct this situation.
How to use popularity lists to influence your users behavior
I think at least some people are upvoting it for the same reason I submitted it: to get a good discussion going on Hacker News, with people (like yourself?) who actually are involved with the pursuit in question.
"Beyond new structures, we will also see new genres or formats of books that are more light weight and easier to produce. These will enable authors to produce more books."

Really? I read mostly science fiction and CS books. I am not sure what these new genres are, but I dont find the idea compelling. Lightweight books? Half a century ago SF books were 120 to 150 pages long. I like the current 300-400 page books better. Lightweight technical? If I want lightweight, I read blogs. The fiction authors that I read produce 2 or 3 books per year. Writing is hard work, and I dont see format changes changing that. Authors need to make a living. The generally poor quality of OSS documentation attests to that.

There is probably room to squeeze some fat out of $50-100 technical books. Safari rents a selection of books for a reasonable amount per month, so that could be a good model. And there are educators working on low cost/free textbooks.

I would hate to see well written books replaced by crowdsourcing.

ADDENDUM: There is a small but growing trend for authors to put out a free online version at the same time the book is published. It seems to actually increase book sales.
A web server in php
Sounds great, but almost a year old. Guess he's writing up.

Download it from here: http://www.malhar.net/sriram/kilim/index.html
Audiobooks are an after-publishing product. Once a novel has become profitable, they can hand the book to a voice actor and say 'read', they then sell the product for $10 because it no longer kills their bottom line.

The reason eBooks don't cost like this, is because people want them here and now like you get with a real book. I'm sorry, but if people want a $10 book, do what everyone else on the fucking planet does and wait for it to come down in price! There's lots of books in book stores that cost less than $10, so why pay for an ebook? You're never going to get a brand new ebook at $9.99 and it cover the cost of the process. Your best bet is a $10 eBook released a year or so after publication like with an audiobook, or discounted mass market paperbacks.
Logo Design Roundup Part 6 - Over 50 Ways Designers Promote & Brand Themselves
I would agree with you most of the time. However I've found that because most of the people I work with have never learned a programming language that forces you to understand the hardware, they just don't understand some problems. Passing by reference and passing by value, for instance. Unless you've used pointers before, you don't get what's going on.

However - I do fail to see why a web developer finds soldering "enlightening" - that's a little too far removed!
No, more that that person needs to flog stories to whoever will take them, even if that means being an X correspondent in country Y, despite their being little link.

There's also a whole side-conversation about diversity of opinion and reporting being key, but that does rely on high quality reporting, which we need more of.
Ask HN: best programming language for a programming book?
I wonder which programming language to use for a book about (web) programming. The book is not supposed to be about a specific framework, but about ways to solve common problems. So the programming language should not get in the way of the concepts.

Example: "Programming Collective Intelligence" uses examples in Python to explain the data mining algorithm it presents.

I am almost tempted to pick JavaScript, as this is the common language every web developer should know anyway.

I would like to use Ruby+Rails, but I fear it might be too complicated to explain. I want to spend as little time as possible on framework specifics.

I was really impressed by the brevity of the Python examples in the Collective Intelligence book. Unfortunately I don't know Python yet.

The publisher who might be interested in publishing the book pointed to PHP as still being among the most popular languages for such tasks (along with Java), but I would like to avoid that.
If ebooks cost 10% of what books used to cost, but everyone buys 10x as many books because of the lower cost, convenience of buying and storing them, etc., then the costs can be covered the same as today.
I left a comment for the exact reason you describe. However, I flagged it because it was a zero-content post, not because of the self-submission (although obviously that didn't help).
I think we'd be in a lot of trouble if most traditional journalism disappeared, so much blog information is just opinion on news generated by traditional journalism or opinion pieces.

While in the web company area that hacker news covers this may not be the case a lot of blogging is.
Startup 124: Term Sheet - Valuation and Dilution
I looked at LiquidPlanner and Wrike recently in a comparison of Basecamp. They are nice products but they make things complicated. In my opinion, Basecamp is excellent for working with multiple clients/stakeholders on small, self-contained projects.

For collaborating on projects with clients, 37S makes a product that has limitations but the overall user experience makes it better than their competitors.

LP and Wrike both share serious access/security flaws (LiquidPlanner grants global access to anyone who is shared a workspace (clients,projects,folders) and Wrike allows anyone who is shared a virtual project folder to go on and share it with anyone - (who can easily delete the entire virtual project folder and all its children). These open, Web 2.0 collaborative ideals don't work well with a company focused on multiple client projects (all of which must be confidential).
I'll concede it is verbose, but having a task oriented guide is much more useful in certain cases than the standard :help.

I was happy to see a nice visual explanation of undo branches. Something that I've known exists but never learned to use well.
Yes, but plumbers don't make their living from people who are too busy, they make their living from people who are ignorant. (In other words, lack of knowledge is far and away a bigger customer).

I didn't say though that it was the only way, just that it was the main reason most businesses exist.
I'm not sure exactly how regulators could force non-Apple smartphone makers to produce non-junk. Or should Apple be nationalized and turned into a government bureaucracy? That hasn't worked well historically, either.
Pandora Media Founder Sees Company’s First Profit Next Year
I'd like to see you rewrite the Mathematica code I write every week - in assembler (on any architecture) in less than a year.

I believe you're missing the entire point of programming languages.

> All languages are equal

Only in the mathematical sense. In exactly the same sense that a pile of small rocks (calculi - where the word calculation came from) is equivalent in processing power to a Pentium.
TwitterSpam
There's been discussion before about spam on twitter, so here's a concrete example.

It seems like people are just looking at the trending hashtags, and spamming, which then gets them into search results. How can twitter solve this? Any ideas?

For example, I did a search for #media140 which is an event in London today. The whole page of results was all spam tweets from the same account, with popular search terms and hashtags in it, (And an affiliate/target link).

eg http://twitter.com/Janet104807/statuses/1859946423

also http://search.twitter.com/search?max_id=1859950510&page=1&q=www.goldencasinoflash.com

Another point is this spam would artificially increase the "trending topics" - feedback loop.

It seems like the search functionality could become useless pretty quickly if spamming isn't stopped in its tracks. It'd be very easy to write an app to create twitter accounts, find trending hashtags, popular keywords, then start sending out tweets with affiliate links. Go through web proxies to avoid any banning by IP. Do they already exist?

Google solved this for website search with PageRank, and other algorithms to detect spam, how could twitter do a similar thing?

Thoughts?
Scary:

"Defamation exists once a statement has been published lowering the plaintiff’s reputation whether it is true or not."

http://www.duhaime.org/LegalDictionary/D/Defamation.aspx
>> I am almost tempted to pick JavaScript

I can't phrase that any better - I have this feeling that using JavaScript for such a project would be evil, but when I stop and think about it - I think JavaScript might have become the "duct tape" of the internet (yes - I know perl already claims to be soo).

I integrate JavaScript with my Flex applications all the time. It gives you a good understanding of HTML, basic programming, and as AJAX becomes more popular, JavaScript becomes more important.

PHP is another good option. It does have some problems, yes, but it's common, free, and easy.
Free WiFi is a pipe dream. It turns out that people don't want strangers to use their network -- if someone downloads child porn through your connection, for example, you're still going to catch some heat even though you have an open WAP. I just bought a Linksys router to run Linux on, and they've got a huge sticker covering the Ethernet ports reminding customers to secure their network lest "unauthorized users" get at it.

This is the same problem Tor exit nodes have, although I suppose Tor is more likely to contain crap -- one of my friends recently ran an exit node at a University, for research, with the OK of the IT dept, and still got a legal request for the machine.
I have no experience with billing or merchant accounts. Why would you not just accept the chargebacks if you have a no questions asked moneyback policy anyway?
Pure functional programming should be a good start for such a system. At least states are explicit (and usually relatively simple) there.
So you can't say anything bad about another person? wtf
1. Make sign up hard so that bots can't do it

2. Block accounts the send out the same URL multiple times

3. Block tweets that contain multiple, popular hashtags

4. Block accounts that send multiple messages over a short period of time with the same hashtag

5. Allow users to flag accounts for review

6. Implement SURBL for URLs
I think the reason is all the things you mentioned, and more.

Most of the other project management software still seems sterile, and you have no sense of who is creating it. As far as features go, if everyone on a team isn't using a feature, that feature doesn't exist anyway.

With the high profile of 37signals team, you get a sense that if anything was drastically wrong with the software, the user base will be able to hunt down Jason Fried and get the thing working again. If they're not gonna fix it, Jason Fried will be the first person to say so.

Thats straightforward, and people use straightforward as a proxy for 'good.'
StarringtheComputer.com: Why wasn’t I notified?
This is a suggestion that people should not be barred from producing or installing applications on their devices.
You can try airtel/tata-indicom broadband - they would install in 2 days time. Will cost you around $20 for unlimited upload/download plan. night unlimited plans would suit you well if your video conferences are going to be IST night. Speed: though the service providers mention these as 2Mbps they really would not be more than 40KBps on avg and be prepared to be annoyed with disruptions once in a while and their annoying customer support.
Ah, but facts aren't protected by copyright. Wolfram Alpha deals a lot in hard facts, so presumably we're also talking about finding facts with Google.
That's the route I took to get my green card. Not sure I'd say I was a genius though.
> Not particularly impressive

Text pattern matching from the mouse in all apps is the real strength of the Plan 9 interface, the chording on Acme is only part of the picture
All software programmers should know, at some simplistic but fundamental level, how the high level code they write actually gets executed. That means familiarity with actual hardware, even if it is in an academic way (e.g., building J-K flip flops, learning a fake ISA, etc.)
Didn't we do this discussion already when the last C++ article was posted?
No, it's nothing about forcing production of new devices. It's simply about rejecting constraints on the legal software that may run on those devices.
5. Don't display results chronologically
If you know any other object-oriented language, it's easy to make the case that you should learn C and skip C++.
That's actually a really good idea. I wonder if PG considered that people might upvote without actually looking at the entry first.
I only vote after I have read a piece.
As a programmer and avid electronics hobbyist, I have a theory which explains some of the appeal, at least to me personally.

Hardware, unlike modern software, actually behaves logically and rewards learning and the construction of consistent mental models. When a circuit malfunctions, there is always a solid physical reason for it. It is because you, the builder, screwed up. An understanding of the physics involved will be rewarded by reality cooperating and the lights blinking merrily. As opposed to software, where most of your work consists of routing around other people's idiocy, and where any results you achieve might spontaneously erase themselves any day as the upgrade cycles churn onward.
1. This would surely hamper growth for real users. No one wants to verify email or catchpa.

2. Tinyurl could help them, but also there's a million affiliate programs out there, you could paste a different affiliate link each time. Also surely a lot of accounts legitimately contain links from the same domain - eg new blog posts.

3. This example was using hashtags, but also just popular search terms - "american idol". I don't see how you can detect that easily.

4,5. Agreed, those I think could work well
I am not stating that 37 Signals products are inferior at all. The classical mindset was that people would move from one product to another because of some killer feature or low cost alternative. 37Signals has seemed to flip this idea and challenge the idea of what better software means. This brought me to wonder how other users felt about their products and their motivations for using them.
I like your distinction between effort and value. I don't agree at all with the notion of the amount of effort put in equals the amount of value to the user. It simply doesn't work in reality. The effort is also a vague concept as it could be related to development time, marketing, customer service, etc. Effort in dealing with users, gathering feedback and iterating on the product based on that feedback is what gains value for a product IMHO.
I would have assumed that their were algorithms which recognize that an article was retrieved from the 'most popular' list and therefore not weight it as much as a 'discovered link'.
I think this looks really cool and useful and I will probably give it a try. I don't know anything about GTD, but I use Ta-da Lists extensively and this looks like a nice step up for me. I would miss the ability to share my lists with others, but I could live with that. Handling text input intelligently is very nice.

The audio on the demo video is terrible. I had to crank the volume on my PC to make it out. I would consider re-recording it, and getting some help from someone who knows how to record sound.
> 1. Make sign up hard so that bots can't do it

That could be overkill...

> 3, 4. Block tweets that contain multiple, popular hashtags. Block accounts that send multiple messages over a short period of time with the same hashtag.

So, would you block these? “OMG I TOLLY FELT DAT #earthquake #sf”

“Someone at the corner of XXX and YYY? Baby crying under rubble #earthquake #sf”.

Why not a simple spam filter like the ones for email? Google seems to have a pretty good one now - a similar technology could be trained on tweets. Maybe not block, but just increase their spam score? A good filter might even figure these rules by itself.
I don't really buy into any of that. How is an eBook more convenient to store versus a book, when I'm not allowed to give anyone else my eBook but there's already well established laws that protect my right to resell any book I own. They also invented these things called bookshelves that store a lot of books and often look very nice too.

People are very unlikely to buy more books because they're cheaper. Yes probably one out of ten people will buy more books, however the majority won't. I don't buy a book because it's priced $9.99 I buy it because of the Author, like most readers do. In fact I bought my wife a book last week that cost $9.95, why? Because I'd been recommended the author, price had nothing to do with the purchase.

Why was the book I bought $9.95 brand new? Because the production cost was lower, because I know for a fact this is the authors debut and the publisher prices it lower to help the author get a following. Her next book is already priced at $19.95.

This is a pointless argument. Go ask Microsoft why they don't price their product at 10% of what they currently do. They'll tell you because 90% of people are stealing their product and when Gates tried lower pricing, 90% of people still stole his software. I'd say 90% of people already get their books new at $5, it's only the fans who are willing to pay $30+ for a new book.
Do you wanted the largest target audience?

Pick a 'scripting language'? Then eliminate based on issues...

I would come down to python or ruby being the easiest for most people to look at and quickly gronk. python being the easiest i would suspect. and i say this as someone who does 0 programming in python these days.

You don't know python however, so ruby would be fine. If you start doing stuff with blocks etc, you might want to explain that as some people would find.

File.open( "a_file", "r" ) { | line | puts "this is a line #{line}" }

a little confusing.

of course all this assumes you target audience is imperative, algol steeped programmers.
This ignores the fact that there might be a fixed cost per book. If it is 10% of the current book price, then you are making no profit. Books don't just grow on trees. It also assumes that I have time for 10x as many books because they are cheaper. Currently, my time is more of a premium than my convenience or money.
Yes, you can, if the the other person is a public figure:

"Under the First Amendment of the United States Constitution, as set forth by the U.S. Supreme Court in the 1964 Case, New York Times v Sullivan, where a public figure attempts to bring an action for defamation, the public figure must prove an additional element: That the statement was made with "actual malice". In translation, that means that the person making the statement knew the statement to be false, or issued the statement with reckless disregard as to its truth."

http://www.expertlaw.com/library/personal_injury/defamation....
B2B CFO Partner - Expert Chief Financial Officer - Business Adviser - Frank J. Gnisci
They do charge per reservation and a monthly fee. The "big" purchase up front is well-known in the restaurant industry as POS equipment is quite pricey, so they may not mind the initial investment. The higher barrier to entry for OT may also help keep up quality. Do you have a particular insight into the restaurant industry that would suggest otherwise?
As a compromise, what if votes made from the new section were weighted to be stronger than votes from the front page?
Depends on the size of the company. I have a friend (an EE with an MBA) who paid $20k for a tiny sensor manufacturing business that he turned around and sold for about $200k two years later. Got that through a broker.

My wife used to have a small housecleaning business that she had to abandon after she became very ill. Had we thought of it at the time, the customer list would have been valuable to someone looking to startup. For less than $1,000 in equipment + the cost of the list, they could have walked into an immediately cash-flowing business. Actually, I'm surprised none of her employess thought about doing that.

None of these are free, but they're cheap enough that they may as well be.
Create a Twitter Rank, people are ranked by number of "replies" from users with high rank ;)
I read that aloud. It was awesome.
Good point... i'd only done the math for both people earning roughly comparable amounts.
-1

The main reason for me following the hacker news rss feed is because it links to quality news. I couldn't care less about the opinions.
Man, that "resister" in the first sentence must have been a tough one to cut.
Robotic wheelchair controlled by thought alone
I just made a similar discover on my own I just posted about this morning. I tried tweeting something like "online dating" and was able to get a follower that was spam in a few minutes. My biggest problem is trying to walk the line between being spam and self promoting your product.

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=618580
There is something terribly ironic about an air purifier emitting potentially harmful levels of ozone.

I've never owned one, is this really true?

Regarding the laptop cooler, I wonder how safe it is to have ionized air molecules around sensitive electronics in a computer. Is this a false worry?
No, but since I like curry, it's a step in that direction. ;)