skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Coming from a "poor" entrepreneur who has previously held six-figure software engineer salaries, I can say there's more to entrepreneurship than salary. When I busted my ass working overtime to add cool new features, nobody cared. The company doesn't care, the boss doesn't care, your coworkers don't care either. If I have to spend 1/3 of my life at work, I might as well be doing something I love, even if it puts my retirement at risk.
And, you know, sometimes it's possible to talk about a specific instance of something, without also making a broad generalisation that covers all possible cases.
I think it's more that long, detailed, well-supported points tend to get more karma than simple one-liners. IIRC, PG posted once that there was a big correlation between comment length and score.

I've noticed much less of a correlation between popularity and score than I would've expected - certainly much less than at Reddit, where you can write a detailed page-long comment that completely demolishes the parent's argument, and then have it sit at -1 because voters on Reddit reflexively downvote articles that don't fit their preconceptions. Here, that same comment is often at +10 or more.
I'll ask the question on everyone's minds. Can an ad-blocking extension be made?
I think your point of view is too idealistic. You're attributing too much responsibility to the record companies. Sure, a handful of them dominate the market and their oligopoly has negative effects.

But the economic attributes of the product itself is the origin of the current market situation.

Consider the following though experiment: People form a club or cooperative. There's a monthly membership fee which is used to pay recording costs for artists, administration (legal fees, secretaries, etc.), and the necessary rights to distribute the recordings to its members.

In other words, no large anonymous record company owns the music, anymore -- but just normal people like you an me. But would such a club or cooperative act very differently to a record company? I don't think so:

1.) The club would not allow free redistribution of the recordings. Otherwise nobody had an incentive to be a club member in the first place and the club could not collect enough money to pay artists. In fact, the club would probably also restrict the amount of downloads per month. Otherwise people may be try to become members for a month, download all stuff, and then cancel membership to join another club to do the same thing, again.

2.) The core problem of such a club would be allocation of the collected membership fees. Which artist's music should be bought and recorded? Should the club make lots of low quality recordings or a few high-quality recordings or some mixture thereof? How much money should be spend on advertising of the recordings and club membership? These questions may be answered by some sort of Digg-Style voting but that presupposes that people are motivated to participate. In most cases, though, people have better things to do. This opens a window of opportunity for the most motivated to skew the results, for example, artists. We've seen something similar also happen to Digg.

3.) If a consumer is not sure which style of music and artists he or she likes most, it's most rational to become member of the largest club. In other words, there's also a strong tendency for the large clubs to become the larger, while the small ones are likely to become (relatively) smaller. It will also result in a sort of oligopoly where the largest clubs set the "price" for club memberships. This can also be seen elsewhere, for example in the blogging scene. Although there was nearly no commercial interest in the beginning of blogs, its readership quickly formed a Pareto distribution, as shown by Clay Shirky.

Overall, if people would really be concerned about the recording industry, they have all means to make them go away in the near future -- for example, by starting clubs and cooperatives. Most people, however, don't care that much. Otherwise, they would have already done it, right? ;-)
I'm kind of fascinated with minority shareholders.
Damn. How big are you?
I mostly agree. But there's something to be said for retirement.
I'd definitely agree that it's far worse at Reddit. And I hear you on comment length, but I took care not to mention length because it's possible for well-written, long comments to make a widely accepted point.
The key with preparing fish is that, unlike meat, it doesn't change color when it is done. Instead, you want the fish to flake (this verb will make sense if you try it) when you run a fork along it "across the grain". If you aren't confident the first time, use a recipe to get a general sense of how long it should take, and overcook it slightly, then slowly work your way back (on successive attempts) until you reach a point where you are comfortable with how well done it gets.

Once you are used to how the fish cooks, consider different flavorings, such as orange or pineapple juice (pretty much everybody starts with lemon), and onions (many people add black pepper to fish, I personally can't stand the stuff).

Unless you live close to where fish are caught (not just the coast, but particular parts of the coast for different kinds of fish), the only cheap fish available will come in a can. However, if, unlike the OP, you aren't interested in the cheapest healthy food available you can make a decent fish fillet with a little practice.
Casinos already have extensive systems for doing this through their loyalty card programs, where in return for getting comps (non-monetary incentives to frequent their casino, such as dinner on the house or a free hotel room) you give them observational powers over your gambling that resemble those possessed by the NSA in a Hollywood spy flick.

They're some of the most ruthless users of CRM (customer relations management) technology in the world.

See generally: http://archives.cnn.com/2001/TECH/industry/07/03/casinos.crm...

(Bonus points for being written back when a 200GB database was impressive. :) )

I assure you that they don't need academics to tell them who the biggest losers are -- theories are fine and dandy, SQL queries make the world go round.
I love my wok.
I know many self styled libertarians who really do wish poor people would just wither away and die, yes.

However, pardon my density but I don't really understand how this relates to my previous comment (which I think you are replying to?)
5'11, and my weight varies from 157-160lbs. I exercise every day for 1-1.5 hours(doing that p90x program), so I burn it off right away
Who else thinks they should get the Mac version out before spending time on this stuff...
I don't know if anybody is interested in Qnap TS-219, it's green and cheap

http://tinyurl.com/p5szxs

It uses an arm based 1.2GHz CPU with 512MB memory, it is officially supported by Debian:

http://www.cyrius.com/debian/kirkwood/qnap/ts-219/
I often ask the question - what's the difference between Detroit in 1972 and Silicon Valley now? None!
It's pretty easy to eat healthily and fairly cheaply at a lot of by the pound supermarket buffets. It's faster than cooking, but not cheaper, though not so expensive.

Eating healthily is very simple: every meal should be a piece of meat/fish/egg, with varied vegetables and some whole fruit. Add nuts and cheese to taste. The most important aspect to eating well is simply to avoid starch and sugar: no potatoes, corn, baked goods, cereal, rice, or beans. Avoid soybean oil and other synthetic "vegetable" oils. You too can be ripped like me by following these simple rules. It's easy.
Fresh. Organic. Veg. Seasonal. Less.

1. Everything must be fresh, especially fish, vegetables and fruits. Don't buy many, buy enough for one meal. Each time. Tomorrow it will be fresh delivery on market.

2. Do not overboil. There are two main rules in cooking - 'less heat' (less flame under your bowl and inside your head =) and 'just enough' (long boiling spoils everything - taste and goodness)

3. DRY - Do not repeat yourself. Do not try to eat the same dishes day after day. You will spoil all your effort. Even a pure caviar diet will finish you in no time.

4. Eat local and seasonal fish and vegetables.

5. Learn from the poor. I learned from Nepali and Tibetan people in Hymalayas. They have very smart aproach to cooking.
I think WA will get beat by user curated data, ala Wikipedia: data beats algoritha these days.
Slots, by about a factor of two.

http://pressofatlanticcity.com/business/article_c0ca05f5-ffb...

http://74.125.113.132/search?q=cache:L3TQaSi_1VAJ:www.state....

The reasons aren't too hard to fathom:

The expected value of a single spin is about 92% of what you paid.

The machines let people push money through them at high velocities.

Their effective "uptime" is much, much higher than table games.
It's funny how this story pops up now and then on different sites. It has a 3 year recycle rate, hopping from geek aggregator to geek aggregator. It is a great book though, my wife found ours at a thrift store in palo alto, for somthing like $50.

I'd seen it originally in the mid 80s and was kind not obsessed enough to buy it on ebay but looking it up in rare book rooms to try to find a leather bound edition. Great book to have ,though.
I really enjoyed this, and thought it was a well-detailed account that more than adequately explained the evolution of the grammar we use today.
This is what got me through my startup. Don't skimp on step 3.

2 Cans of Whole Tomatoes
1 Can Lentils (or 1/2 cup dry lentils)
1 Large Onion (peeled)
5 Cloves Garlic (peeled
1 Cup Water
Salt + Pepper
Olive Oil
Parmesan

1. Combine in a Large Pot: Tomatoes, Lentils, Whole Onion, Whole Garlic Cloves, Water.
2. Let simmer for about 45 min. When the middle of the Onion “pops” out or is very soft, the soup is ready.
3. Serve in Bowls, then… Drizzle Olive Oil and Sprinkle Parmesan Cheese on each serving.
4. Enjoy!
Sony Pictures CEO: nothing good ever came from the Internet
I hate IE6 just as much as the next guy, with an absolute passion. However the startup that I work for has a focus on teachers, and unfortunately quite a significant number of schools and teachers are stuck in the dark ages with IE6. 23% of our users are still using IE6, so I have to support it. I found this helpful in debugging our soon to launch redesign.
things that are processed do not easily rot... am i wrong?

take for example this pancake i bought from mcdonalds, i left it in my truck for like 7 months, still looked as good as new, kinda like this

http://aht.seriouseats.com/archives/2008/09/12-year-old-mcdo...
I did not say "I know who you are" - I just got the impression that you are not really interested in the discussion, as you started with strawman argumentation ("Plato held back astronomy for 2000 years").

I think cellular automata provide at least one way to study complex systems, which is a relevant field of study.
Reminds me of The Innovator's Dilemma, but I think that applies only to specific product categories. The fortunes of many companies are tied to a family of products (e.g. Digital), and so the decline of that product category can cause the fall of the company.

The article is talking about companies that are so large that they become more like investors, whose job it is to allocate capital across different product categories. A skillful investor can then offset the tired against the vigorous to ride out the changes. But it seems to me that a company still needs to have some kind of mission and special expertise. This is why focusing on an abiding customer need appeals to me, instead of a specific technology or market. The need will always be there; if you keep on finding new and improved ways to solve, it you will always be providing something worthwhile. That is, if you organize yourself around finding and improving, not around a particular technology or market.

For example, Google's mission, to "organize the world's information and make it universally accessible and useful" isn't tied to PageRank or even the internet. Whether this mission is more than PR, and whether they could make the leap in practice, hasn't yet been tested - though WolframAlpha might give them a workout.
They made pretty much all the money selling web server software. That was the plan, anyway.

A bit like giving away MP3 software in the hopes that it will boost sales from your music store
You're overestimating the amount of effort and creativity it takes to play a song someone else wrote, and underestimating the effort and creativity involved in the kind of sampling Danger Mouse did on the Grey Album.

Kenny G definitely had the easier job among those two examples.
Hear that? That's the sound of a business model being made obsolete.
There already is: http://wolframsbeta.com/ :D
That's probably a bad thing. Good healthy food, like proper cuts of meat and wild fish, is not cheap. Peasant food is cheap. Eat the cheap starch and lousy meat like the peasants and you'll find yourself bloated and waddling around just like them. I drop $150 a week on just me, easy.
Cheese has very little protein. The primary protein source in milk is Whey, and that's filtered out when making cheese.
The problem is that a single upvote-downvote axis has to capture two different, sometimes orthogonal, judgments: (1) is this comment valuable or detrimental to the discussion?; and (2) do I agree or disagree with this comment?

This entanglement is unavoidable as long as there's only one score per comment, given the interface and established practice, at HN and similar sites.

It might work to have a second axis/score that's specifically agree/disagree. (This could take the form of left-agree and right-disagree arrows, perhaps on the right of the comment-meta-line.) Then a comment could be be wildly agreed-with without offering a karmic windfall to repetitions of obvious popular sentiments, or wildly disagreed-with without the current undercurrents of censorship (sinking/fading-out) and karmic punishment via disagreement-downvotes.

Personally, I would expect to find the comments with both net upvotes (valuable) and rightvotes (disagreement) to be most interesting -- because they capture challenging minority viewpoints, but well-presented.
wow.. you'd think a simple math problem would not generate such a wrong answer on Google!
Perhaps they use the Inter processors with the math bug, only this time it affects integral calculations ;)
"
He complained the Internet has “created this notion that anyone can have whatever they want at any given time. It’s as if the stores on Madison Avenue were open 24 hours a day."
"

And this idiot gets paid millions of dollars a year!
I guess I'm just pragmatic about these things, but I find it difficult to think of any sort remix, mash-up or cover that could be done that would make someone an "artistic wrecker". Even your example of belching on top of "Yesterday", while not palatable to most people, perhaps, is still definitely art. It comes down to a matter of taste, not a matter of art. I would argue that this isn't even a particularly recent idea or something unique to music. See: Marcel Duchamp's Fountain (1917).

As far as it being theft: nobody is going to buy Belching Yesterday under the illusion that they are getting a Beatles recording. There is no lost sale. There may be a possible copyright claim, but I don't think even this is completely cut and dry. Belching Yesterday could win in court as a fair use. You never know...
What kind of point is widely accepted and false?
Adblock plus would do as well for FF users :)
As soon as I understood what you were offering (make your own courses online!) I wanted to browse example courses that had been released, and it wasn't obvious how to do that.
The expected value of doing a startup is high -- I think a little higher than being able to guarantee myself $80K/year. If I work on a startup with 1 cofounder for 5 years and it's got a 10% chance of exiting for $10M, my expectation is roughly $100K/year. So if I can afford to take the (rather high) risk of getting nothing, then I should do the startup.

If I value my time differently depending on what I'm working on -- if the startup is lots more fun -- then it's an easy choice.
Yes, exactly. I kind of assumed that adding a second voting axis was a nonstarter, but that would indeed provide more useful information about each comment.
Last night I went out for sushi with some co-workers (we work at a tech startup). We were discussing whether it was really fair that we earned so much more than the waiters/waitresses at the restaurant, especially given how difficult we ourselves would have found their jobs to be.

We realized that it all came down to value. Who has generated more value in the world -- folks working at Facebook for two years (currently valued at a billion dollars, give or take), or someone selling trucks at a dealership (apparent value zero, if this imaginary dealership is downsizing)? I think it's pretty obvious that it's the engineers who've generated more (admittedly, only monetary) value.

So, yes, Facebook is raising money to give back to the folks who made them what they are. What monsters.
People are quantitative when they do their business planning. In this context cheap is when cash flow is running close to break-even or better. If you have employees without revenue, it's probably not cheap. If you'll need employees for an extended period before getting significant revenue, you'll need to figure out how to convince investors to open their wallets first.
I don't know if I buy the consistency answer. There's ways to do that (even with complicated formula), but it is an interesting way to avoid x-browser CSS issues.

My own hunch is they did it to avoid scraping/botting. Hopefully they switch to text at some point in the future.
If it's not a search engine, then what is the significance of it failing as a search engine?

But your suggestion of WA as an ad makes sense - but what is held back in this freemium hypothesis, that will make users need Mathematica?
Rather than provide you with specific examples, which by definition many people would disagree with, I'll just ask you this: Isn't there something you believe to be true which most people don't?

Edit: I can also suggest historical examples. How many things were once widely accepted to be true, but are today widely accepted to be false? Assuming today's view is correct, these things were at one time widely accepted and false.
nice idea, if a user creates a course will another user be able to modify it? because that might be helpful.
I wonder how much of Sony Pictures revenue is made up of DVD etc sales off internet merchants such as Amazon.com?

I also wonder how much additional merchandise they're also selling as a result of this global marketplace?

Similarly, netflix has boosted rentals of their movies by how much?

And lets not forget the direct download rentals aswell, off stores like iTunes.

It's not as if the Internet is making much of a dent on their bottom lines (in terms of ticket sales), I mean, this year, so far has been Hollywoods biggest year in terms of ticket sales/profit in the cinemas.

http://articles.latimes.com/2009/feb/02/business/fi-boxoffic...

Quote from the article:

"An increase in ticket prices also helped boost January's box office. The average ticket price was $7.29 last month, up from $7.18 a year ago. But attendance surged in spite of the higher cost. Audiences bought 141 million movie tickets in January, up 16% from the 121 million sold during the same month last year."

Yep, that internet stuff, really killing the movie business.
He must feel really insecure about his job. I don't envy him.
The next generation of media companies must be laughing to themselves at how easy its going to be to eat Sony Pictures alive.
the results are not searchable using the 'control + F' functionality of the browser.
Too right. In most cases if you pirate the CDs and then spend the money on concert tickets instead, you're helping the artist.

Say you like an artist. They've got 3 CDs out. You could buy them all, or you could spend the ~$70 on tickets to their next show. What do you, as the true fan who wants to support the artist, do?

If you buy the CDs and skip the show, they get maybe a dollar or two, depending on their negotiating clout with the label.

If you pirate the CDs and buy the tickets, they could get a good chunk - maybe $20-30. Bring a friend, double that. Buy a T-shirt - maybe about $5 or so. Make sure you buy the shirt at the concert, they'll receive more, usually.

It's true - ethical fans pirate!

This is only true for artists attached to major labels, though - if they're selling their own, NIN-style, buy the music if you really want to support them. Or hell, fedex them a money order ...
What in the world makes WA incompatible with user curated data? They could easily implement http://open.wolframalpha.com add some warning/disclaimer pages that this is user-curated data, and let the world have at it.
Is the comment coming from Sony that different than if it came from the RIAA?

But however stupid the comments, if attention getting is part of his job... not bad.
Actually not at all, This year has so far been the biggest year on record for Hollywood in terms of ticket sales.

The thing that's sucking for them, is that budgets for movies are going way up so that they can compete with other studios (its a budget arms race) and the markets unfortunately can't cope with that.

It's hurting their bottom line, but it's their own damn fault.
I really want to believe that, but we'll have to check later on. I'd like to see the OS community triumphing over commercial solutions.
I think you might be right about the restaurants. While some of them serve food that tastes well, I doubt that many of them use the best ingredients. These days it is hard to tell, for example I think most take away restaurants serve microwaved food that was prepared in some factory.

Maybe we could set up some cooking circles for hackers, that is, take turns to cook. Everybody would be responsible for one day in the week. Might work in the bigger cities? I am in Berlin, if anybody is interested.
I cook everything with fresh ingredients and I'm still able to eat decently. I usually either cook a form of soup noodles with 1 veggie & meat for around $2.50 or a form of spinach/fish/tomato/mushroom risotto for around $3.00 a meal. I buy my food from local asian grocery stores that usually half the price of similar foods bought at Safeway.

I use cheaper beef bones or chicken gizzards for broth, rice or basic noodles for staple starch.
Using Emacs - the good and the bad
Privoxy is pretty easy to set up, and works with any browser.

http://www.privoxy.org/
I don't think that's what this is about, unless the internet is responsible for movie budgets going way up and nothing else.
Wolfram Alpha and Screen Scraping
The notion of having every query answered in a reasonable way applies to all sorts of things -- not just search engines.

I suspect that Microsoft's failure in this regard would play out in many other contexts including this one. Imagine for example if Mathematica were to have a much higher failure rate.

Mathematica works as well as it does because an enormous amount of research has been put into one domain. Wolfram Alpha is not like that at all.
There are another one simple explanation of why it is so beautiful to travel alone - when you are walking alone you can see, instead of being involved in endless and useless chating.

The Buddha said 'If you do not have a company of the wise - walk alone'. It seems like the motto of a introverts.
As for why people would buy Mathematica: companies are not going to give away their trade secrets over the web via queries made to Wolfram Alpha.
Interesting, didn't know about Whey being filtered out.

But 7 grams in a 30 gram (1 oz) serving isn't too bad, right?

http://www74.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=cheese&a=*C.chees...

21 grams of protein compared with 23 grams in chicken
http://www74.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=cheese+chicken

(edited to include comparison to chicken)