skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
"To create anything humans must utilize their labor. That is where the real value lies. The "market," "capital," and the "financial system" are nothing but totems (created by our labor) that we worship as if they were given to us by the gods."

Careful: this way lies Marxism. The value doesn't lie in the labor itself, because if the labor was just as valuable as the product of that labor then why not save the labor and sleep in? The value lies in what is produced. Which is why using less labor to produce something more useful is more valuable than using more labor to produce something useless.

"once you name any created object beautiful, that beauty is rife with cultural baggage that defines what is and what is not valuable"

You've gone through a loop and said nothing. I think a rainbow is beautiful because (by your account, which spuriously dispenses with the possibility of individual taste or universal beauty) my culture values pretty colors. But in what way does my culture value pretty colors? Answer: we find them beautiful. You basically said "we think things are beautiful because our culture defines what we think is beautiful", which is a simple, testable, false statement (some standards of beauty are shared across cultures, other standards can differ within a culture).

"To call one object beautiful necessarily means that other objects are not beautiful, or are less beautiful, or are beautiful in a different way. As far as I'm concerned there is nothing "harmonious" about this act. Thus, how can beauty and harmony be intrinsically valuable or "good" when beauty necessarily excludes harmony?"

You can have harmony without everything in the world being harmonious. By analogy, can't we only call a system or an interaction "harmonious" if it is something distinct from disharmony? Isn't there a difference between two instruments playing the same pitch (or harmonious pitches, such as the same note an octave apart) and two instruments playing completely disharmonious pitches? (The answer is yes, and this can be scientifically demonstrated.) Likewise, when a group of people act in concert to achieve more than the sum of their individual efforts, is that not more harmonious than a group of people warring with themselves?
Javascript might be a little bit confusing for the casual book-picker-upper: "wait, is this bit on the server or in the client?"
Interview with CEO Peldi Guilizzoni about the growth of Balsamiq
> 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.

This is not ridiculous. I think it's perfectly valid to consider the question: "Why do journalists (in general) have low salaries?" -- More down below.

> "Until journalists can redefine the value of their labor above this level, they deserve low pay."

> there will be people willing to fill those positions. It's not the responsibility of journalists to correct this situation.

I think the article is actually quite sympathetic to journalists -- the low pay is seen as a bad thing, and it raises the question of what journalists can do to be better-compensated.

> For example, there is no mention of the value of investigative journalism or the historical value of well-written, unbiased content.

I'm not sure what you mean by historical value, but the article was quite clear that deeply-researched, well-written, 'hard' journalism is rewarded -- because it has special value above and beyond the noise floor of the 'average' journalist.

I think that your position and the article's are actually quite close. There is a lot of 'average' journalism out there, and it does not provide much value in today's world. The exceptional journalists with an understanding of value _are_ being rewarded -- the investigative journalists you mention come to mind.

Below I have pasted what I believe to be the thesis of the article -- I don't think you truly disagree:

If value is to be created, journalists cannot continue to report merely in the traditional ways or merely re-report the news that has appeared elsewhere. They must add something novel that creates value. They will have to start providing information and knowledge that is not readily available elsewhere, in forms that are not available elsewhere, or in forms that are more useable by and relevant to their audiences.
No, Roosevelt threatened the court to vote his way to to add more justices to make the court vote his way.

Micronations that allow for easy migrations would probably work with a BDFL. It's like a company really. You're free to move from Microsoft to Google, both organizations work really well, and neither is anything close to a democracy.

If there is no money to spend, the need to vote is far reduced. How much would congress even have to do if the budget were $100B and not $3T?
Cappuccino 0.7 Released
a TwitterRank would only increase the number of spammers to reply to their own spam to increase their rank artificially just like it's happened with Google. Google has seemed to move away from PageRank as the primary indicator for its searches anyway as you can have page 5 results with the same PageRank as page 1.
Even better, give each user a fixed set of random urls each day, and only allow voting on those.
related: cassandra's use of bloom filters

http://spyced.blogspot.com/2009/01/all-you-ever-wanted-to-kn...

and also related: murmurhash, a hash which is well-suited for bloom filters and that is much faster than SHA-1

http://murmurhash.googlepages.com/
Memcpy() banished at Microsoft
Most anecdotes I have read online indicate that they work, sometimes as a short-term boost to sales, sometimes longer-term:

http://www.wired.com/gadgetlab/2009/02/shoot-is-iphone/

http://candycaneapps.wordpress.com/2008/12/09/the-insouts-of...

http://www.streamingcolour.com/blog/2009/04/27/the-numbers-p...

http://148apps.biz/app-sales-coorelation-between-demo-and-pa...

http://www.veiledgames.com/blog/?p=374

http://www.antairgames.com/blog/2009/02/02/hows-that-lite-ve...

As near as I can tell, a lite version is the most cost-effective form of marketing available, probably better than making a webpage for your app, or making a YouTube video of it, or getting your app reviewed on review site (all of which, I am told, are also very good things to do).
Maybe, but if that is the only issue, it might be easy to resolve.

I am more worried about talking to a database or generating server side HTML. Javascript web frameworks exist, but I don't really know them yet (ie Helma). In theory I would like to be able to do everything in Javascript - why learn two languages if one could suffice? But I might be too ahead of the time for a book targeted at the average web developer.
Why is the alphabet in alphabetical order?
simple. implement a solid, clear-cut spam policy and include a button on a tweeter's page to flag the account for review by admins. kinda like we do it here :)
> Tarbells, Sinclairs, or Naders

Then there's the fact that many of these muckrakers didn't actually do good.

Take Nader. While the Corvair was made by "evil" GM, it was significantly safer than comparable cars of the same era, especially the VW bug/beetle. The bad publicity that Nader created out of whole cloth chased GM out of small economical cars.

> After Watergate, every journalism group seemed to jump into investigative journalism with both feet.

It's not so much investigative as "change the world". It turns out that journalists don't actually know better and are very easy to capture by folks who have their own agenda. As a result, journalists have driven their credibility towards that of used car salesmen.

Oh, and Watergate doesn't actually make journalists look bad. When "Deep Throat" was revealed, we found out that it was just revenge by someone a vindictive crank who thought that he should have been appointed head of the FBI.
I recently self-published (via http://Lulu.com ) a 730-page book of stories in hardback. I disabled Download as PDF. This means someone would have to scan it in and proofread it (the difficult bit) to get it in a digital format. I like that barrier to piracy.

[Additional] Also, Xlibris.com is not as convenient as Lulu, but it's much much cheaper.
Is it possible to install OS X on say, my Dell desktop? How can I find out?
Not my app, sorry for any confusion. Just happened to drop by the blog (on a totally unrelated search). The app looked fine, the devs nice guys, and I thought both sides (the devs and HN) would profit from a look-see. Didn't warn them, though, they'll figure it out ...

I took their word for it on the GTD thing. It even had the 'registered' glyph somewhere ;-)
Yeaaaah! Cappuccino Rocks Da House!!! :-)
It's different. Twitter search is essentially the [new] view here. Which, if you look at it, does contain lots of spam.

Once someone has seen the spam, the aim has been met. If they close the account, it's not a big deal to open a new one.
Rate My App: blueTunes.net -- a cloud music service
how's it look? what's it missing/need? anything else?
I saw this link, and hoped that it would be something other than a 'environmentalists are biased because they hate capitalism' Ayn Rand style rant. After reading it, I unfortunately found that that's exactly what it was.

The author starts with a rant about the local weather show. It quickly switches gears, accusing environmentalists of making 'correlation implies causation' logical fallacies. I don't mean to defend environmentalists, because I often agree that they make this fallacy. Unfortunately, the author offers no single point of evidence to back his claim. If he could cite just one case of an environmentalist making this fallacy (c'mon, there's got to be one, right?), then I'd take the article more seriously.

the article concludes: "[environmentalists] have contempt for science. Nor are they concerned about human wellbeing or even the environment itself. Environmentalism is not a scientific movement; it's a political movement. Environmentalists hate capitalism. Their goal is to destroy capitalism and all of its benefits. They'd like to see all of us living in mud huts and starving to death before we could have more children."
true, but page rank still a key, there's a difference between PR2 and PR7. Spammers can rise up to PR4 their pages, but PR7 or PR8 will be impossible.
I can't find the article now, but in the same issue of the Yale Law Journal in which Levinson's "The Embarrassing Second Amendment" was published, there was another article arguing that nuclear weapons were a violation of the 2nd amendment because they allowed war-making without real-time human involvement.
99cts ebooks.

No need for publishers.

Write your own book and sell it on AppStore alikes.

Everybody can be a writer.

Convenience wins.

Everybody wins.
controlling millions of tweet a day is barely impossible
Has the internet made you a  jerk?
Has using the internet made you more impatient? Do you find yourself less likely to help people? I'm doing a survey, and your opinion would help a lot.
I'm not a big Basecamp fan - I'm forced to use it for work where we have 40+ projects running on it and sometimes for larger clients when they have their own Basecamp setup.

Maybe we don't use it to its fullest but all it ends up doing is archiving conversation threads and being a file repository. Just looking now there are 3 month late todo items that I don't think will ever get closed. After a while every project seems to drift off of it and end up using a combination of email + bug tracking.
You can @reply the @spam account to tell them about a spammer, or just block them. Lots of blocks alert the admins too. There are certainly some auto kill features too.
It was called iTrio. I've since removed the Lite version from the app store. Its only handicap was that you were limited to easy mode -- to play in regular mode you had to buy the full version. You can get a pretty good idea of the app from its site at http://www.itrioapp.com.

For my upcoming asteroids-inspired game I'm thinking of imposing a time limit -- let the player play for somewhere between 2 to 5 minutes and then it's "game over" and "please buy the full version".
on this level, the level of an individual trying to get a single link seen, if they really want to spam a link, there's very little that can be done to stop them.
What other order makes sense for 'realtime search'?
If you hit a certain level of chargebacks (5%?) then you get penalized with higher fees by the gateway or get removed completely.
> how can formatting/data layout be protected by copyright?

It's expression - that's what copyright covers. (Copyright doesn't cover facts or ideas.)
Engineering it is simple once you have enough high-grade material. That was partly what that book was about. It was simple in the 70s, and it's totally trivial now, because the state of the art in ordinary manufacturing has made it so. No geniuses needed, or even engineering degrees, for the simplest designs.

Yet it hasn't happened. It's not clear to me whether this is luck, heroic yet mostly secret effort by various national governments, something systemic to terrorism, or some combination. Well, we know at least that the CIA used to buy fissionables, no questions asked and no consequences meted, but I, at least, don't know how much they actually got that way.
I believe the Jailbreak still works.
Except the publishers...
That was my upvote, yes.
I've actually found that the Internet, and movements that I've been involved with via the internet, have given me more opportunities to help people and voluntarily contribute to society. Taking advantage of these chances made me realize how much I love teaching and inventing new things.

Thanks to the anonymity of the Internet, I have found myself saying things I wouldn't dare say in person, but those times are in the minority. Actually, having had intelligent conversations with people via the internet, I've become good friends with people whose views I strongly disagree with, and that has made me a more open-minded, accepting person. At the same time, it made me feel more comfortable with my own views, and the reasoning behind them.
Unless they're planning on training on how to use these assessments, I see loads of fun ahead for all involved!!! NOT

I have taken personality assessments at work both as part of a management course and for another course in persuasion & influence. In both cases only I saw the results The point of the assessment was to understand your personality type and see how it could affect your behavior. Part of the class's purpose was also to determine someone's personality type so you could change your interaction with them. This was what we were being trained to do

Just giving someone this information with no knowledge of how to use it is a complete waste of time.
true, true. but how many of your average users know this? i'm just saying, your options and the process are not common knowledge.

it would go a long way if the whole twitterverse were policing spam instead of just the more savvy users
The paint in your analogy is the data behind Wolfram|Alpha. W|A are the ones that organized the data into a usable form, then created a tool, which is theirs, that we can use to access the data.

It is as if you were at a party and were shown to a room with an easle, brushes, and paint, none of it yours, and were told you should feel free to create anything you wish. Oh, and you may use the Star Trek matter generator in the corner to make an exact copy for yourself before you leave.

Attribution sounds reasonable to me. Especially since anyone who sees WolframAlpha as the source will understand that you were the one who querried the data out.
We started this way and was fine at the start, but problem is that we have many 1000s of customers now, and any bug that affects service causes us lots of hassles to clean up after.. (we had bad email problems and currency issues last month which took us a few days to recover from)...hence the need to test at least somewhat thoroughly..
The Dollar Redesign Project
The irony is that StackOverflow is set to become the premier source of copy/paste code.
That is exactly what I meant when I said 'swindled' :-)
Compare this piece of writing with the same coverage by a NY Times blog:

http://bits.blogs.nytimes.com/2009/05/20/pushed-against-wall...

"After all, our own poll shows that given the choice between keeping Craigslist or South Carolina, most of you would choose Craigslist."

Ridiculous.
You can "learn" Python in a day or two. Of course, becoming proficient takes longer, but it has the shallowest learning curve of any language that I have used. A big plus, it like JavaScript/JSON has literals for arrays and hash table, allowing easy configuration and data transmission.
I wondered about this questions for ages. I should have searched the web for the answer earlier.
A few things off the top of my head after seeing this.

About the business model:

1) The interface seems almost like anywhere.fm (albeit less polished), which was bought by Imeem, which itself is rumored in a lot of debt right now.

2) The "sharing" aspect of the service kinda reminds me of playlist.com, which means if you gain any traction, you'll have lawsuits from the record companies

Regarding the technical aspects:

3) Back to the interface, the "play" and "rewind" buttons..etc looks badly aliased and ugly, I think it would have been better if you copied itunes more completely like anywhere.fm did.

4) As a fellow flex developer, I'm sick of seeing flex being used for simple applications like music players, you really don't need the 200+k framework code for something simple like this. It just adds to the loading time.

5) As I mentioned before, the interface doesn't seem polished, you have kind of "aqua" styled button but other parts of the interface uses the default flex Halo theme, it doesn't seem very coherent together.

6) I'm sick of seeing the default flex loading screen, do something more interesting like fotoflexor or picnic.
Online Poker Rake Back Deals
Your survey sux. I refuse to participate.
Which is exactly the wrong attitude.

Any company that emphasizes how long the employees are working in this industry is clearly misguided.

The correct goal should be how much is the employee accomplishing, not how long his ass is stuck in that seat.
As someone who does not use Twitter, and cannot see why I would ::

I feel like a person who, caught unawares, has to take refuge[1] when the tide comes in. You then just have to wait while the sea rages and eventually recedes.

it is amazing to watch the swirling currents of Twitter news around HN/Slashdot/Regular Press.

-----

[1] http://www.flickr.com/photos/7765409@N06/3483551927/
Google's Android Will Become the Default Mobile Platform
Hiding new accounts (7 days, for example) from appearing in the real time search would be a partial solution.
Microsoft Expected to Show New Search Engine Next Week
Ask HN: Bank suggestions. 
Hey all,

I'm looking into opening an account and would appreciate any suggestions. I'm in California, 22, do not have a steady income, enjoy playing with puppies and the occasional romantic dinner. I thought you all would be the best to ask as many of you are penny pinching your way through startups, and are generally very resourceful and quick to find problems in any system. I have several hundreds to start out with, and am looking for the most transparent, fair, and preferably most advanced with respects to online banking and mobile access.

Also, there is a big chance I may be studying in Europe for an extended period of time, so I'm also looking for suggestions as far as accounts that could possibly be accessed on the cheap whilst I am abroad.

Thanks.
I think Jeff wrote an article with similar idea a few months ago.

http://www.codinghorror.com/blog/archives/001178.html
Other researchers suggest just not building the weaponized robots in the first place:

http://noevilrobots.org
Another good article on the merchant account setup process: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=530055
I agree that the original author's argument was no good. However, you're wrong about the $9.99 price.

The price should be set by supply and demand to maximize revenue. Selling three ebooks for $9.99 is better than selling one ebook for $26.99. Period.

Now, where do supply/demand curves maximize ebook profit? I don't know. But there is every reason to think that in the current market, the intersection point is much lower than the hardcover prices.
This is exactly what I'm lookng for. I was thinking that people like you would be the minority, but asking hacker news, I have no idea what to expect.
i use HSBC direct and have been happy with it. i've heard ING direct is probably a little better, but its rates are typically a little lower.
Interesting, but unfortunately the author missed an opportunity for a great title:

"The Top 10 Ways to Use Popularity Lists to Influence Your Users' Behavior"
Bridgeport CT medical billing, Bridgeport CT medical consulting.
Bridgeport CT medical billing, Bridgeport CT medical consulting, Danbury Ct medical consulting, New Haven Ct medical billing, New Haven Ct medical consulting
I believe there are chargeback fees from most providers. Refunding the money directly saves him this.

Also, getting a chance to talk to your customer is never an opportunity one should pass up.
A Discussion on Code Reading
As a longtime Cocoa developer, I'm thrilled to be able to use Cappuccino. The .7 release is a great leap forward, particularly the new theming capability. I've literally dreamed of the day that I could deliver a true desktop quality experience in a web app: Cappuccino will let me get there.
What Imamd said.

In addition, each chargeback costs you an additional fee, in my case $35.

So my total loss would be: the cost of the product(usually under 20 bucks) PLUS $35 chargeback "fine".
It's ironic that the author complains about a contempt for science on the part of "environmentalists," but then goes on to recommend the following rule for setting safe levels of some toxic substance: Wait for a major kill-off of a marker species, such as fish, in response to some level of that substance, then set the limit "an order of magnitude or so" lower.

The author correctly points out that it's unethical to perform controlled experiments with suspected toxins. However, his response seems to be to give up any attempt to gather evidence (short of watching for massive die-offs of fish). For instance, he complains about the impossibility of conducting experiments to learn about arsenic poisoning, and concludes that one therefore cannot "obtain valid data" about the effects of arsenic.

To make this argument, he mis-characterizes the Bayesian position as, effectively, "perform controlled experiments." He evidently never heard of epidemiology, which attempts to make sense, statistically, of all the millions of experiments that nature and chance play on people all the time (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Epidemiology).

While epidemiological evidence does, in fact, require careful analysis, ultimately one can back out valid inferences, given enough data. Sadly in the case of arsenic there are no end of data, provided by people drinking from contaminated wells.
I always thought it was because A = Alpha, B = Beta, Z = Zeta and the rest were fillers in between. Thanks Cecil!
We'll be putting up some tutorials on how to use nib2cib and all the new technologies in the coming weeks
Seems cool, but Id watch out for the man! If your not funded to pay royalties and you gain a smidge of traction they'll shut you down.

Allowing the share option is a big no no in this regards.

The tech and idea are cool, but it's risky. Good luck!
Linux on a Netbook? Intel thinks its all about the User Interface
Unfortunately, defamation has become one of the more often dredged up pretexts for lawsuits in the you can sue anyone, for any reason, at any time American legal system.
Time of course has to be a factor in the sorting of the search results. But that doesn't mean that it has to be the only factor.

Other possible (negative, antispam factors): ratio of following to followers, number of duplicate or near dupe posts, etc.