skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Mice want cheese. If you put a mouse at the start a maze, and cheese at the end of it, a mouse will likely go through a maze to get the cheese. It will likely pay attention to the maze to try to figure out how to get through faster next time. But if the mouse can figure out how to get around the maze, maybe by climbing over a wall, don't be surprised or angry. The mouse doesn't like the maze at all; it's just an obstacle. The mouse just wants the cheese, not the maze.

Advertisements are like the maze. In early days, people were forced to sit through them in between parts of shows on the radio. Print ads had to be looked at so that people could find the articles. Nowadays, people are able to get around these 'mazes'. Morally, people might want to support the content-creators, but if you ask any newspaper executive or journalist, guilt can't get you very far for very long. Technology has enabled the blocking of advertisements, and a few mice have had a taste of the easy-to-reach cheese. These mice will almost certainly not go back to trudging through the maze as they did before.

Many critics offer a better solution: Make the mice want to go through the maze. This is certainly a more difficult solution than making a banner ad with a logo. It requires a fair amount of creativity, time, and effort. But some advertisers are already doing this. Take a look at the Burger King games: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mt2do5oV2-8

Burger King has made their brand fun and engaging, making the consumers want to consume the advertisements. In fact, they pay for them! Now isn't that ingenious?

Another example is woot.com. People want to buy stuff, suppliers want to sell stuff. They connect at Woot, and are directly engaged with the product.

This is the way marketing is supposed to work. Plastering noise and garbage on a webpage will drive your users to clean it up. They will find a way around your maze.
So there's this guy, and he goes to prison. It's his first day there, and everyone is lined up for roll call. Suddenly one of the prisoners shouts "seventeen", and the others all laugh. Another prisoner shouts, "one hundred and five" and, again, the prisoners laugh. The new guy asks his cell mate, "hey, what's going on?" The cell mate replies, "oh, we've all been in here so long that we know each others' jokes. So we just gave them all numbers, so that we can just shout out the number instead of telling the whole joke." So the new guy decides to try it. He yells "thirty two". Nobody laughs. Puzzled, he tries again. "Nineteen". Again, no laughter. So he asks his cell-mate "I don't get it, why didn't they laugh?"

"Oh, it's all in how you tell it."
As a person from Ireland, I feel sick at how much we're being taken for every single day. This is just another scam that we will accept and pay for if approved. UK here I come
The blog post doesn't really add anything to the article it cites. I would have up voted it if there was some commentary on how this related to economics, business, or technology (there's not even a mention as to why China and Taiwan have tensions); which leads me to wonder if the people who up voted the link even read the blog post before they clicked on the up arrow
It's quite simple to detect and block only adblock users if you wish. It's about 6% of firefox users on my webapp. Or you could show them "Donate here if you're not prepared to see my ads" links everywhere.
There's a new CS107 this year (along with a few other classes; they just redid the undergrad curriculum). One of my friends is a 107 TA and he is actually sitting next to me right now. Apparently 107 no longer includes anything on Lisp. :(
Not really, but even so a bunch of wrongs don't make a right.

Also in this case the wrongs make up the vast majority of viewed content. Live video is much harder to police from a content owner's perspective and they know it. The lawyers gotta be out documenting shit during an event. Look what they require to take something down:

http://www.justin.tv/user/dmca

All that for stuff that a ten year old could tell is stolen. I have no respect for startups that base themselves on theft.
When my ex-wife was going to Florida Institute of Technology 10 years ago, she was required to do this. It might not be that way now. :)
One second there partner; I think you need to go back to law school on that one. It is certainly "illegal" to violate copyright law.
It's impossible. Baiting titles are annoying.
> (with (topi nil topscore 0)
(each-loaded-item i
(when (and (astory i) (> (realscore i) topscore))
(= topi i topscore (realscore i))))
(list topi!id topscore))
(459289 521)
I never liked this argument. Doesn't have any inherent limitations, or proper evidence. You can just as easily say "you should not use a washing machine until you understand the pain of washing clothes with cold water". Or you should drive stick before going automatic. Or start programming in assembly, everything will seem easier afterwards.

Yes, modern languages are better then C. But they are not perfect. Programmers using them still have a lot of problems to solve and things to learn. It's just different things then with C, or assembly, or wiring transistors by hand. You have to face it, pointer arithmetic, while tremendously important in C, isn't really very useful in other languages. Knowing when the gc likes to start collecting on the other hand may be a good piece of information.
Hmm, okay. I don't know why you wouldn't consider bottom up models to be computational (and it doesn't seem to be a standard term; Google's second result is this comment thread), but at least I see what you meant now.
Hey! Thanks a lot for trying out. I haven't tested it in IE8. I can see you submitted a test so in the end it went well!
His suggestion makes certain sense, but ...

It's not the ads on a specific website that I don't like, it's the specific ads on all websites. Also it's not just the ads, it's also the tracking contraptions including javascript bloatware and such. It is far easier for me to just keep blocking them altogether than to rely on a subjective opinion of a webmaster if his ads are annoying or not, and not know what it is exactly that gets unblocked.
That actually sounds fantastic. Do you remember what book(s) you used in the class?
I button holed (read: stood up and asked a question of) Dan'l Lewis, the big muckety-muck at Microsoft in charge of the program, about BizSpark. The question was: "we're a LAMP shop, what do we get out of BizSpark?" His answer: "we can help you move to Microsoft tools when you have scaling issues. That's what we did for MySpace."

More fail: http://www.sachinagarwal.com/microsoft-bizspark-is-a-joke
Is there any alternative "app store" where users can get applications without Apple's censorship?

I don't need Drivetrain in particular, but there seem to be many good app ideas that Apple does not like / approve.
The next logical step would be to show a timeline of how sources pick up a stories, so you could determine who is getting the best scoops.
It wasn't the first mover advantage with the 1.8" drives that made Apple win- although that was a necessary ingredient. You can see this because the device didn't get popular right away. It was the second mover advantage of iTunes, which avoided the first mover's problems (Napster) that led to Apple's dominance. Apple went with closed tech on the iTunes store, which combined with device lock in to drive the iPod success. It was as if they had all of the music, and you could only play it on an iPod. They made the player compatible with MP3 (the open part Stringer refers to) so you could use all of your old Napster downloads easily, and made the iTunes client capable of ripping CDs easily. Once they made the iTunes client available for Windows it was off to the races. The iPod is a great design, but on its own, it would not have been dominant.
You have no idea how good you have it. I spent a week on vacation in Ireland last year and spent some time studying your politics and listening to your talk radio. The political astuteness of your median Irishman is lightyears beyond the norm here in the States. The things that still pass as an outrage in Ireland wouldn't even be worth a mention here or in most of the world.
Y Combinator’s ReMail Finally Brings Full-Text Email Search To The iPhone
Nitpick, but wouldn't "eponymous" imply that the framework was named after the company? In fact, it was the other way around. "Qt Software" was just the renamed Trolltech as it became a division of Nokia.
Ask YC: How do I admin my own (windows) server?
I'm looking into getting a dedicated server to host a number of asp.net based web apps that I have.

I have no experience with running my own server and I'm wondering if there is any online resource that you recommend so that I can learn everything I need to do to admin my own Windows 2008 dedicated server.

I would be running SQL server on the same server as well.

I've searched, but couldn't find guides for windows. Only for *nix based servers.
You have $3000 speaker cables suspended from the floor on little plastic feet, don't you? :)
Doesn't gmail already allow me to do much of this without having to trust another company with all my email content. Plus nothing to download as its a iphone optimized web app and nothing to pay in the future(unlike the proposed $3.99 monthly fee).
A tale of two dentists
Most people don't think like this. People click on ads every day. millions of clicks. That doesn't help them get the cheese, it helps them find out about new cool products they didn't know about. Those adverts are useful to them. They are glad to have adverts.

That's why people who block ads stand at 6% of firefox users, which amounts to maybe 2% of total users. Hardly worth worrying too much about.

It's like the people who tell you every second how they haven't owned a TV for years, yet fail to grasp the fact they're nothing like the average joe.

For some reason adblock users seem to consider themselves as 'early adopters'. They're not.
Not to want to sound snobbish, but £80 headphones are kind of wasted on mp3s in any case - if you compare listening to an mp3 and the same track on CD (or in a lossless codec such as flac), you'd definitely notice the difference, and appreciate the headphones more.

This being said, I have an iAudio and, using the same headphones, the sound is noticeably better than my girlfriend's (more expensive) iPod.
I don't buy it. This is the guy who pushed crazy DRM and Blu-Ray only Playstation 3 to make his side of business, media, profit while the traditional side of Sony (electronics and gaming) paid for the party. This looks like another of his power plays.

I miss the old Sony.
...I would believe this if it came from a more reputable source. Maybe a newspaper that isn't a tabloid? Check out the sidebar, it's full of celebrity gossip and other trashy articles.
Seattle Hacker News Meet-up?
I'm anxiously awaiting the next hacker news meet up in Seattle but I've got no place to host it but I'd be happy to help organize.

Anyone else interested?
[Cydia Store]
Stupid job posting requirements are a sign of evil HR in an atherosclerotic or otherwise clueless company.
NYTimes.com Announces Map/Reduce Toolkit
Yes, I think you just have to jailbreak the iPhone
How do you do so? I am not a programmer although have some experience of it, just a curious guy who happened to stubble upon this place with people which seem at least able to share a love for umm 'thinking' :P . I do not plan to implement a blocking of them guys, as I said fair to them, they have the knowledge and are not quite a threatening statistics. I'll save the time load for this thing I am trying to figure out of how to automate the change of the most viewed articles.
What does that have to do with the question of whether it's possible to infer types in C++ at runtime? What does it have to do with the question of whether it's possible to have garbage collection in C++?

This debate is becoming inane. I challenge you to name another language that allows for arbitrary references to blocks of memory, while still guaranteeing that the data type of said references can always be correctly inferred. You're just nit-picking.
Many actions don't have a clear party (parent, teacher, boss, etc.) waiting to reward or punish, though, and the research is specifically about self control. While some people will take advantage of others' responsible behavior, self-sabotaging behavior probably has a greater overall impact on most peoples' lives.

Good example, by the way. I hadn't picked up on it reading the article, but the study really does assume an immediate observer is going to be rewarding the child, rather than more abstract forces such as the job market. The latter is hard to duplicate in a self-contained experiment, of course.
BBC - In Pictures: Hubble's Best Images
> I've searched, but couldn't find guides for windows. Only for *nix based servers.

Maybe that's a hint?:-)
This article will make you dumber. At least he linked to the jemalloc whitepaper, which he clearly didn't read.

http://people.freebsd.org/%7Ejasone/jemalloc/bsdcan2006/jema...

I especially like the part near the end of the post where it says, "It could be that different implementations excel in different scenarios" as if that wasn't completely obvious for anyone who has thought for more than a few minutes about a malloc implementation.
Interesting that it's built in Ruby. I was under the impression that NYTimes did pretty much all of their dynamic language work in Perl.
Free Search Term Suggestion Tool by KeywordDiscovery.com
Im not convinced that would have helped. A group like you suggest does loosely exist anyway without Sony, and it fails in a similar way - it is lacking is a cheap, sexy content delivery system & an "integrated experience".

Apple has a system from the music distribution right down to the playback device. It's an exercise in consumer manipulation.

Open formats wouldn't have fixed that problem. Look at the other digital music player makers: they suffered the exact same problems. IF Sony had pitched and sold an economic model and open format that worked from the distribution side right down to the player then maybe it would have worked. But they would never have sold that to the media companies and music rights holders. Apple got the mass content it did by using the proprietary format to make the rights holders feel safe. NOW such an open model would work (and Apple are heading that way, right) but Sony are too far behind now for it to be worth the investment.

They messed up, IMO, by trying to compete full stop. Once the Ipod had market traction as an iconic piece of tech they had lost that battle. They should have focused on more niche markets (sports markets for example, or REALLY high end devices etc etc).

EDIT: what you suggest in terms of the PC style eco system potentially might occur. But I highly doubt it for 2 reasons. Firstly because the Ipod has got so much more market traction that Macs ever did. They are the height of cool and always leading the way. Even the awesome might of Google is struggling to beat the Iphone into submission even though it is a technically superior more hackable infrastructure. Secondly because the market isn't as extensive as the PC one.
Others should learn from this: free/unlimited inbound bandwidth encourages people to upload data into the cloud. Sounds like a nice platform for building crawlers.
Direct link: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=459289
Understanding Git submodules
Yes. Several of the feed sources we read from publish a headline with barely anything to say within the article, then as the info comes in to them, they republish the same story, each time with minor changes in the headline and adding more meat to the story. The Associated Press is notorious for this. That's how they beat everyone else to the punch every time.
This part I found particularly interesting: (if true)

"War had been extraordinarily profitable for the German economy. By 1948 - despite six years of conflict, Allied bombing and post-war reparations payments - the capital stock of assets such as equipment and buildings was larger than in 1936, thanks mainly to the armaments boom."

I had always thought it obvious that war was a disaster for the german economy. Many german cities were burnt to the ground. I wonder what the source is on this.
Thanks, yish. Gmail has an offline store of the last 50-100 emails on your phone - reMail has hundreds to thousands. Also, keep in mind that, unfortunately, not everyone has Gmail - reMail works with non-Gmail accounts as well. Also, we think that people will prefer a fast, native client to a web client that takes some time to load in Safari.

That being said, I'm a big fan of Gmail (and worked on it myself way back in the day ...)
Doesn't gmail already allow me to do much of this without having to trust another company with all my email content.

because you already gave up all your privacy to google and have none left to spare?
rationale is what I meant. "rationale based decisions" would be a better way of putting it (there is an important distinction between that and a "rational decision")
Links: The NYT is pretty schizophrenic about links - most of the time they'll link to their own information on a link (ala Wikipedia, but nowhere near as useful), sometimes they'll link to an external resource (Marketwatch for companies), sometimes they'll actually link to the site under review (wolfram alpha) - all of them, of course, require internet access + your browser.

The good news is that all of these links are somehow maintained in the "Time Reader" version of the article - I have no idea how they accomplish that. Makes me think that the paper version is now a _derivative_ of some primary electronic version. Interesting.

Re: Same Experience in Web Browser - After I used Google Maps, I realized that Javascript can do pretty much anything, so I have to believe if someone really, really wanted to, they could create an application that would simulate the "Times Reader" in a browser. I'm guessing that the design team that did this for the NYT probably looked at the toolsets that were available, and that they knew, and just decided that AIR would be the fastest, easiest, and provide the best user experience. I'm guessing here.
The day they add this feature and enable it by default is the day I fork ABP and distribute it without that feature.

Yup, I know this is "stealing". I don't care.
Interesting that they are currently getting their clock cleaned by Amazon on the ebook reader side of things. The Sony eBook reader has been more open than Amazon's.
Nope. If they're not careful (or don't know), they'll just merge in the bad commits on the next pull. They'll have to know in advance, and do some manual resetting or use a rebase call.
There is also a flip side to "must know X language" which are job posts that is in search of applicants who must have 2+ years of Scrum and Pair Programming experience. I've found that this is especially common within Ruby on Rails job posts. Eventually I will get around to trying to practice those techniques on my own, but I don't see how not having those skills disqualifies me from being a potential candidate. I've also been flat out rejected as an applicant for not having experience working on a public facing website, but oh well. I will just have to get around to build a massive public facing website on my own too.
Dude, RTTI only works for classes with virtual functions or their derivatives.
Hypothetical: if I were to tell you that, say, 75% of the net ad revenue on many ad networks was generated by clicks on ads served by adware and spyware, but only, say, 15% of total ad impressions were served by adware and spyware, would you revise your reasoning as to how useful the clickers are finding the ads?
Virtual Cocoon- VR By Stimulating All Five Senses
To be fair, what did you expect him to say? Your question might as well have been, "We don't use your products and have no interest in doing so. What can we get out of you offering your products for free?"
Why isn't there more investment in new media startups?
If anyone is curious on how they structure their data you can look at the SQLite database files which are stored here (on windows at least):
%USERPROFILE%\Application Data\com.nyt.timesreader.78C54164786ADE80CB31E1C5D95607D0938C987A.1\Local Store\

"newsreader.db" contains all the article information and eventRecorder.db contains records of all the actions you take in the application.
Anyone out there trying to get a new media startup off the ground and raise money for it? I'm working on a tech startup and there seems to be a lot of interest in early stage tech. But new media doesn't appear to have the same appeal.
If this feature becomes popular among webmasters (it should, as many use only Adsense which is usually far from intrusive), it will become annoying for the user.

I see a possible solution in tracking users' decisions to show or disable supposedly unintrusive ads. This way ABP will be able to see which websites likely abuse this feature and which websites are likely fair in claiming non-intrusiveness. So, in 'obvious' cases ABP could make an automatic decision to show or hide the ads.

P.S. I hope the above is readable.
Not really

Can you be more precise? What are they doing that's different?
No, they do quite a bit of PHP now as well,and the Interactive News team uses Rails and Django a lot as well.
yeah, I really doubt it's true. Reparations were paid mainly in machinery and plants and there was a serious attempt at deindustrializing Germany.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/War_reparations#Europe http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Morgenthau_Plan
We're not discussing adware/spyware. And no, I wouldn't revise my thoughts. All you've said is the obvious - adware+spyware is very effective at generating revenue. Obviously more effective than unobtrusive advertising mingled in with website content.

edit: still not sure I quite understand your point here (Or why the downmods). You're saying that adware/spyware generates lots of revenue for ad networks. What does that have to do with the usefulness of advertising on websites?
I don't know if there's a common term for anti-FUD (hype doesn't quite cover it)

Some people have a name for this particular case: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reality_distortion_field
"Most people"? Really? I think you should read this: http://www.smvgroup.com/news_popup_flash.asp?pr=1643

"Heavy clickers skew towards Internet users between the ages of 25-44 and households with an income under $40,000," the study said, and they "are also relatively more likely to visit auctions, gambling, and career services sites – a markedly different surfing pattern than non-clickers."

"heavy clickers represent just 6% of the online population yet account for 50% of all display ad clicks."

Sure doesn't sound like most people...
What technology is the server-side 'guts' built on (search etc)?
What did you want him to say? They know how to scale IIS and Asp.net. If they are going to help you, that's what they are going to help you do. If you don't want to use that tech, then don't.

But the key point you seem to be missing is that not all startups are web apps. I agree that if you are a Lamp stack web app -- or most any web 2.0 startup -- Bizspark probably can't offer you much. But what if you write Windows desktop software?

There are entire business (some quite large) which build nothing but Office plugins. Never mind the wide range of vertical applications for businesses that almost exclusively run windows. Microsoft's ecosystems is huge and very capable of sustaining quite a few startups. These startups need Windows, Office, and Visual Studio licenses. Of course they will include IIS and Asp.net in their list of benefits. Besides, Asp.net really isn't all that bad of a choice if you just need a company homepage or some kind of low volume or limited access web service.