skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Let me put it another way:

1. Benjamin Franklin wrote that when colonial era children were taken by Indian tribes and were later found again, they usually didn't want to come back. Their lives were too easy and carefree now.

2. Egyptian society didn't change for thousands of years. The weather was mild and the Nile would flood every year, providing them plenty of easy food. There was no need to strive for anything.

If happiness is the most important virtue to optimize in society, then I'm forced to believe that pre-colonial American Indian society and ancient Egyptian society were far better than modern societies. But I don't believe that.

Believing in happiness as supreme is a first principle. You can't prove it, you have to accept it as a given and the rest of your philosophy descends from that. Personally, I don't accept this assumption. I think happiness is important, but I think other things like beauty and truth are just as important.
I think that's a compelling irony of the data if it can be taken as accurate. Perhaps material goals are the most efficient means of (material) progress, but is there psychological cost associated with that achievement? Reminds me of "Death of a Salesman" and the "illusion of the American dream" school of thought.
Do I lose when I get a soda from the soda machine at work instead of purchasing it in bulk?

Do I lose if I purchase it in bulk from costco instead of pooling the resources of my friends, starting a company, and buying directly from a distributor?

Is the soda machine a "game of chance"?

The answer to all of these questions is "no". None of them are games of chance.

This would be a game of chance if it was "pay $10 and you might win, but we won't tell you until the end" instead of "pay $10 and if somebody pays $11 we will tell you so that, if you chose to, you can bay $12. This cycle will continue until the item reaches a point that nobody is willing to spend more for the item"

This is not a game of chance because you get to CHOSE if you are going to win, and they TELL you if you will before the conclusion of the auction (or game, in your description).

You ARE simply confused about this, because it isn't possible for a rationally thinking person to make the argument that you are and mean it.
Is it honestly that hard to learn a language, and its own particular idioms and best practices, rather than forcing the idioms and best practices of another language on it?
Wow, I think you just went meta-Ecclesiastes!

What has been, that will be; what has been done, that will be done. Nothing is new under the sun.
Even the thing of which we say, "See, this is new!" has already existed in the ages that preceded us.

Ecclesiastes 1:9-10
Most commercial movies don't have intermissions.
I'd say it is also more aligned with people in poor areas who find it cheaper to upgrade, rather than replace.
High-Tech Start-Ups Put Down Roots in New Soil
There's a reason they call it the Bible.
Ah, NorhTec! Quirky little Asian/Canadian company. They do lots of interesting simplifications like this. A few years ago I was seriously looking at filling a datacenter cabinet with 200 of their 5W microservers.
I wrote a server side version of Sinatra in JavaScript called Roundabout:

http://github.com/boucher/roundabout/tree/master

My co-founder also ported Rack to JavaScript (called Jack)

http://github.com/tlrobinson/jack/tree/master

Roundabout is in the process of being reworked to sit on top of jack, rather than requiring Jetty like it currently does. It's actually super simple thanks to the power of Jack.
It's fixed in Vista's Notepad, btw.
I think the solution is to not allow the domainbyproxy services anymore [like some cctlds have done]. Having valid whois contact information (especially abuse) is can be very useful. e-mail often isn't always sufficient.
Theoretically, these auctions could (and should) continue indefinitely, because every time a new bid is placed the remaining auction time is extended.

Because of this indefinite extension, and because the way most people play this auction game is by spending up to a certain percentage of the value of the item (<= 100%), it's definitely a gambling game. You're gambling that some other new bidder will not happen upon the auction before your bidding allowance runs out. If they do, you're screwed. If they don't, you can win.

That's the most important reason Swoopo funnels as many bidders as possible to as few auctions as possible - it drags out the auctions, allowing them to collect as many bids (dollars) as possible for the fewest prizes delivered.
Smart guy and he gets to the point - great article and thanks for posting.
I'm surprised to hear such bitching about Flash. Actually, this is one of the few Flash-heavy sites I've seen in recent memory that didn't (a) crash my vintage 2.0.0.20 Firefox running on Fedora Core 4, or (b) warn me that I needed to download a new plugin.

It did, however, break the Back button in an interesting way: after I clicked on "Classic Movies" and "Raiders of the Lost Ark", clicking the Back button several times took me through the pee times of several other random movies.
Egyptians and Native Americans certainly had happy times, but I don't think anyone then or now would trade that life for ours. If you lived more than a few hundred years ago, your life would be, in all probability:

- If you are male, your main job is to do hard, backbreaking labor, six or seven days out of the week, all day long, from sunup to sundown. If you're sick and can't work, you might be able to call on a relative or friend to help, otherwise you're screwed; there's no medical care, no life insurance, no disability insurance and no paid vacation. Every so often, someone will come along, hand you a sword, and tell you to go die for the Emperor; if you aren't killed in battle, it's quite likely that you'll die of disease or starvation hundreds of miles from home.

- If you are female, you basically have no rights; you are legally the property of your husband, who may have three or ten or twenty wives, and are required to do whatever he says. Your main job is to take care of your children; since there is no birth control, you will probably have ten or more, of whom a good percentage will die before their first birthday due to the sky-high infant mortality rates.

- And, of course, in any case, there is no electricity, no telephones, no televisions, no air conditioning, and no computers. Running water and books are, with a few exceptions like imperial Rome, luxuries available only to the rich and privileged. Depending on where/when you are, you might have decent sanitation, or your streets might be literally overflowing with sewage.

- If you want to live like this, for whatever reason, you still can. Go out into the middle of nowhere and purchase a plot of land (such land is generally worthless). Build a house on it, farm it for food and make all your tools yourself. Strangely enough, most people who talk about the virtues of the simple life never do this (although a few do, and I admire them for their non-hypocrisy).
Now we only need one that go the other way so I don't have to use git to clone stuff from github.
What a Texas town can teach us about health care
Contextual Twitter Bots - A new frontier
I was recently in Paris for a few weeks and I can say that:

- There was zero anti-Americanism and zero rudeness. People were very cool and especially nice once they heard the words San Francisco come out of my mouth.

- The food was great but it's difficult to find ethnic food in many parts of the city.

- Everybody loves Obama. They want to strike up a conversation with an American just to say "Obama".

- Vending machine coffee is quite good.

- Baguette/Brie at the gas station is better than what you'd find in most French restaurants/Boulangeries in the US.

- Paris reminded me in a lot of ways of a significantly more laid-back New York.

- The 6 euro wine in France was generally about comparable with $20-30 wine in the US. Not sure why.
Bali Holiday and Vacation Packages
Automated garbage collection is rubbish
CiscoWorks TFTP Directory Traversal Vulnerability
Ha, I thought these were going to be observations from Europeans... Kudos to him for admitting that his own observations are random and pretentious.
Someone has been watching way too much Friends,
I'm still confused. unrdln and ycombinator both have black links, but at least unrdln has an underline onhover. And Hacker News has lower contrast in general and poor line spacing.
Jon and kate plus 8 official website
It's an interesting article that has a hint of rant about it.

There's no reason a public-private partnership couldn't work if the motivations and skills were aligned properly. Entrepreneurial competition, striving for riches and fame, and fear of starving next month if things don't go well all play their part in forming the scrappy startup - and are probably key ingredients for success. If governments and bigger organizations can remember that, and build new ventures on those principles, then there's a much better chance of succeeding than the model described by the article.
I do think TechCrunch's articles are getting boring and boring
you are not taking "opportunity cost" into account....
I totally agree. Basic income is a hugely better idea than minimum wage, but politically very difficult to push through.
I agree with you. There are numerous cases when a domain is abused and nothing can be done.

Consider the case that the domain owner has leased out the domain to a 3rd party who are willfully abusing the domain? Without the contact info, it will be much more difficult to get it sorted out
Scaling Memcached: 500,000+ Operations/Second
Poetic but blatantly false.

Actually, you really wonder how Ecclesiastes managed to get included in the Bible, considering that at this point the Earth was supposed to be four thousand years old or whatever. And yet even 4.5 billion years isn't old enough for everything to have happened, not even close. Aren't exponential possibility spaces wonderful?
Dupe: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=607002
Sony Ericsson W595 Walkman-A Musical Thump
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Reading the article, it sounds like the interpretation of results could have been pretty heavily cooked. With someone this hot for a prior theory it's important to know exactly what experimental methods they used and exactly what they found. Article's pretty short on that.
Yes. Unicode is a method of converting between code points and characters. A character is a symbol used in a human language or other written communication. A code point is a number, commonly written as "U+<decimal integer expression of the number>".

There are many different ways to actually store these sequences of code points in a computer. UTF-32 is one of those ways. It takes the decimal integer, coverts it to a 32-bit binary integer, and then splits that number into four 8-bit bytes. As the book says, there are problems with space usage -- in ordinary English text, all the code points will be U+127 or less, which leads to a lot of zero bytes taking up space. In addition to the waste of space, zero bytes can cause problems in C, since they're the symbol for the end of the string. So people invented other 'encodings' to convert Unicode code-points into bytes. UTF-16, UTF-8, etc.
I usually like to take the devil's advocate position in this argument, because I don't think you have to be as smart as HN thinks[1] to understand what you're getting into when you enter these auctions -- but in this case, yeah that's freaking evil.

[1] In comment below: "populace has NO IMMUNITY . . .it will run through them like swine flu". Come on. Has the populace moved to Nevada and dashed themselves upon the rocks of Vegas? Are we a nation of lottery addicts and OTB junkies? I bet if this were about drugs and/or prostitution, few here would be saying "the populace has NO IMMUNITY to instantly available pleasure and distraction! It will run through them like swine flu!"
I am curious, do very many people here browse the web using only their keyboard?

I like the idea, but the keyboard-only navigation is going to be bottlenecked by the actual web page.
In your case, you don't need a FAQ, you need to improve your homepage and focus the product.

I did a quick mockup of an improved homepage: http://poorbuthappy.com/wordpress/wp-content/uploads/2009/05...

Equally important: you need to decide what the main interaction is, and focus on that, instead of making the user choose between 3 confusing ways of interacting on the homepage.
Microsoft try to make Tony Hawk Ride exclusive
For those of you who are not aware of the “revolutionary” step forward in gaming. Well, here it is. It will deliver a completely different experience to the conventional Tony Hawk game, which will be available for the PS3, Wii and Xbox 360 in the USA. Surprisingly, the man himself has put a lot of his own input into the project. Here is more from head of Marketing for Activision Publishing, Rob Kostich who said:<p>“Tony Hawk Ride is a massive step forward for the franchise and the gaming industry as a whole…The skateboard controller will redefine sports games by offering players a true skateboarding experience, hands-free, playing with friends and family at home or online in a variety of different locations.”
This article paints a completely wrong picture of the European startup scene. He's doing the equivalent of comparing European startups to US defense contractors.

Now, what really annoys me about European entrepreneurs is the tendency to just copy stuff. Like "starting europe's first ycombinator-style incubator" and then "travel to the bay area (...) to get inspiration for my next project". That may work, of course, but there's zero creativity in it.
These penny auctions are just a variation of the infamous dollar auction: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dollar_auction

I do hope that people who get taken realize what a horrible deal it is after the first try. Sadly most will keep trying again and again.

As a device of gambling/entertainment these "auctions" would be fine if the returns would be somewhat regulated, that is house take would never be above 200% (even 120% would probably be fine).
wow! here in India every movie has an intermission.
Can you give me some examples?
John knows better than this, so shelf this rant under "blogging while frustrated". It has all the hallmarks of a night of optimization gone fruitless.
I prefer vimperator. It's a firefox extension that modifies a lot of things (looks, key bindings, etc) to make it behave like vim: http://vimperator.org/trac/wiki/Vimperator

Together with Style Tree Tabs it looks pretty cool and minimalistic: http://www.flickr.com/photos/deadsunrise/3501399270/
American == Entrepreneur && European == Government funded.

Creating models to fit your world views is _always_ wrong.
You can also use vimperator http://vimperator.org/trac/
I use it and it works much better than a mouse. Vimperator uses "hints" to let you navigate page links with the keyboard. See: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vimperator#Hint_mode
By the way, thank you for Style Tree tabs !
Geocities wasn't social networking, it was free web hosting for people who didn't care about having their own domain name. LiveJournal is a quasi-social blogging platform, MySpace never sustainably spread past a teenage/preteen/music niche, and Facebook/Twitter are complementary services (Facebook is privacy oriented and Twitter is publicity oriented).
Don't forget Conkeror, something like an "Emacs-erator" but without the whole Firefox, using xulrunner only: http://conkeror.org

Its keybindings resemble the ones of vimperator in some respects ("f" = follow), but reminds you more of emacs regarding things like (mini-) buffers, M-x whatever, ...

// Edit:
Just stumbled upon another one: http://redmine.philpep.org/projects/show/cream using C, GTK+, WebKit, vimperator-like interface
Remember that twitter craze we experienced on hn one month ago ? It passed.
12,000 liters of Red Bull Cola seems to be a bigger threat than one snort of cocaine to me.
No, I wasn't suggesting people from today would rather live in those societies. Part of peoples' sense of well-being comes from a comparison of their quality of life relative to what they believe is possible. American Indians did not know of modern health care, so they were not depressed they didn't have it.

As for your first two bullets, I specifically called out two societies. I don't believe, as you suggest, that all societies more than a few hundred years ago were organized the same. At any rate, I suppose it's possible that Franklin was wrong or American Indian children had it great, but their lives turned into a living hell upon maturity, but I'd have to see more evidence of that.
FLYING CAR - Flying to Timbuktu in a Car
In Hot Pursuit of Fusion (or Folly)
> Are you implying that it is somehow illegal or "infringing" to dump a data stream being sent to your computer to a file?

No, what I'm saying is that if you write a script to dump Hulu.com files and advertise it on the main page of your project as a main feature of how you can use it, you really shouldn't be surprised that people think the main use of your program is to infringe.
I watched Who Wants to be a Millionaire quite frequently, and it's interesting how the crowd fails when it fails to provide the right answer. The problem is always the same. People who don't really know do not vote randomly and they do not abstain. They vote for the cliche and therefore don't cancel each other out.

90% accuracy from hundereds of people is actually pretty bad. A few people in the crowd undoubtedly know the right answer but they have no way of telling the others that they do. The "ask a friend" life line has the advantage that the friend will tell them how certain he or she is. So the contestant can at least disregard that opinion.

So my conclusion is that wisdom of the crowds doesn't even work very well in those areas where it is supposed to work well. We rarely work in an environment that is similar to the cookie jar example. Most of the time we are surrounded by cliches and ideologies. That's why I'm usually very reluctant to believe a source that cannot tell me how it knows what it claims to know.
I've been thinking up some business plans to execute in Germany lately and i have the impression that you can't be more innovative than the US here, because of the culture.

Germany (or Europe) is more conservative, which means that US trends impact a few years later. Web apps are not adopted as fast as in the US. An innovative idea must not be executed too soon otherwise you fail. So when the time for your innovation is right in Germany, it has been right in the US two years before.

By taking an idea from the Valley and copy it, you roughly hit the right time quite well. In the end the company doesn't get big, because the original Valley company will buy or sue it (see for example Facebook vs StudiVZ).

I'm still waiting for a german Weebly for example. They are probably still to small to translate and localize to multiple languages, but there already is need for it. So i think a german copy would be successful.

This is my theory why europeans tend to copy.
If Paris reminds you of NYC, you probably drank way too much 6 euro wine...

Would you care to elaborate on that please? How's Paris like NYC? Seriously.
I disagree. I have a firm belief in that people primarily invent things because they have an idea they just can't silence and NOT because of any future monetary rewards.

There might be individuals who can combine the two to some extent but still it appears to me that most of them would still work on their invention even without the rewards. If the great inventors of all time had been motivated by money they would probably have chosen the financial sector.

Money just places its usual twist into the process of invention. With money comes the idea that an investment in money and time must in the average produce a return, and inventing just doesn't work this way.

Sure it is true that your boss might want to pay you to do research if he can expect you to produce things to be patented, thus giving a company a potential source of future income. But because of the bias towards money and not towards the fundamental answers to the unanswered questions in the inventor's mind, this commonly reduces to aggressively patenting any first thing that you might in some hugely optimistic circumstances consider patentable with regard to PTO's policies. And it seems that this crap rarely brings in any money to the "inventing" company; at best it is just used as fodder in mutual settlements with other companies that have claimed similarly fucked up patents.

I just have a bad, bad feeling about patents. The original idea is noble but I'm not all convinced that it has helped the humankind a single bit over the history of years.
I don't necessarily disagree with you in theory but in actual practice I don't think what you are proposing is worth it.

The way I see it people who aren't causing trouble should have the right to stay anonymous on the net if they so desire. There are tons of reasons for this but the most obvious one is so people on the net can't seek retribution against you for something you say online.

Now I can see your perspective which seems to be that we should limit privacy because of those who abuse it and do cause trouble. But even if you do that at the Whois level these people can still create a dummy corporation or llc and stay anonymous. Which, to my eyes, means we really can't eliminate anonymous troublemakers.

So being we can't eliminate anonymous troublemakers I don't think there's any point in limiting the privacy of people who aren't troublemakers and who just want their privacy.
Hum, funny you say that, that's exactly what I'm working on: http://code.google.com/p/hotrepart/ The idea is to repartition a DB across multiple hosts while it's running. It's only a demonstrator project right now.
Thanks for the legoeducation.com link; I probably wouldn't have found it myself. I've just crawled all over the main Lego website a couple of times and found nothing.