skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Wealth has increased enormously over the past couple centuries, but, as you say, we've absorbed it. But at some point as the curve trends up, we'll be able to work less and have more anyway on a year-to-year basis. Even though scarcity will technically never end, it might still feel like you can do anything you can imagine, for average levels of imagination.
The company I work for can determine gender based on first name with 80 percent accuracy. I never bothered asking how but most names are gender-specific. As mentioned on other comments on this page there are significant difference between the written expression of men and women although that gap may be narrowed when you are limited to 140 characters.
The author seems to be completely ignoring the fact that sometimes navigation SHOULD be one-way only.

If the link or button you've clicked on makes a change on the server that affects that page, it might not make sense to display the old page when you hit Back.

For example, you were on the edit page of a list of messages you want to send to another user on the site. You finished making changes and clicked "Send". Now you’re on a page with a message saying, "Messages Sent!". What do you expect when you click the Back button?

1. The edit page with the list of “pending” messages that have actually already been sent?
2. The edit page with an empty list of messages or the original messages but now with a “sent” status?

I’d argue that the second option is far less confusing for a user, but that’s not what you’ve suggested should happen.

And what happens if you click Send again? In the first case, you could send the same messages again, or maybe the server will reply with, "I don’t know what you’re talking about - those messages are already sent". There’s no way for a user to know!

Caching is all good and well, but sometimes you really don't want a page to be cached. That's why there are headers for caching...
See Which Friends Dont Follow You Back and Vice-versa In Less Than 15 Lines of..Perl
The idea was recently demonstrated in Ruby and was neatly done in 15 lines or less(Anything familiar about the title?). It used a Ruby gem that I couldn't afford, so I had to roll out some Perls of my own.
they took our jobs!!!

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GFG2P-toC6k
But does this work this same way with a 140 character limit since people are often forced to express themselves in a different way?
It's good that you have a video showing the features, but it could use some more audio. The silent parts need a voiceover. It looks like there is enough stuff to talk about to fill up the whole time.
Thanks! Yeah, it's a pretty poorly made video. There're also too many times where I'm confused what feature I want to show next and I just waste time in the video. I didn't edit the video because that would make our webcam streams look jarring.

Definitely intend to make a better one for the outside-HN launch. Will also need decent copy at that time.
To stop their slide, and grow their market share again (which is, I presume, the goal of the IE team at Microsoft), Microsoft basically needs to get Firefox users to switch back to IE. Everything becomes a lot simpler when you think about it like that.

Firefox made it dead-simple for people to switch from IE to FF. The whole install process for Firefox takes maybe 120 to 180 seconds, from the time you click "Download" to the time you are up & running. And Firefox imports all your IE data in one click, and also recognizes common IE shortcuts. Ctrl-E is IE's shortcut for the top-right corner search box -- it also works in FF, try it!

The reverse is not true. It's hard to switch from FF to IE. IE takes 10-15 mins, plus a restart to install (at least it did when I installed IE8 it a couple months back). It doesn't let me import FF data, and it doesn't recognize FF shortcuts. By making it so hard to switch to IE, they have basically made it impossible to grow IE's market share. Is it any surprise then that IE is dying?
I'm surprised that the other email providers have allowed the switch to be technically possible. Oversight by them, or intentional?
I don't think you can use a word like "obsolete" in this context. There hasn't been any dramatic upset or change in usage - capitalisation is as useful, or not, as it ever was.

It may indeed be useless, but that's another question. Many (most?) other languages have no concept of capital letters; personally, I like it in English - it does convey meaning and enhances readability, IMO.

I like capitals. But I think like many, I don't use them in certain contexts - IM, for example, which is highly informal and, more importantly, every sentence is on a new line. This is why full stops can be dropped there too, and it doesn't look weird or hard to read. But in continuous prose, like here - I would argue they are useful. The post, for example, is just that little bit harder to read for his lack of capitalisation.

The cost is not too high. Compared to glyph-based languages, English is remarkably efficient in terms of character space, so it's not like we'd benefit all that much from a reduced character set. It might indeed help in typing emails but .. I've never really considered that so much of a burden? The proper solution isn't to ditch the capitals, it's to finally perfect continuous speech dictation...

update: isn't the author really proposing that formal speech itself is obsolete?
"Also, don't you think it's bad form to self submit your own short blog rants here?"

It's explicitly not bad form as per the site guidelines.
but there's already white space after the period...
Identity Theft: Do Not Become A Victim 
Moments after stepping out of the taxi, Rachel plunged through the entranceway of the hotel lobby eager to put behind what had been a terribly exhausting day. Flight delays due to weather had caused her LAX-MDW-BWI trip to take nearly eleven hours to complete.
conclusion: Even though people hate patents, they still love the technology eclipsed by.
Don't forget acronyms, of which we have many. And capitals are an important visual cue to indicate the start of a new sentence.

On the self-submission question - I have no problem with it, if it's interesting, and this one is, if flawed. What I don't like is when people repeatedly submit their own blog posts here, every single one it seems like sometimes - I wish that could be programmatically blocked somehow.
Serious research papers still get typeset. If you're writing a few paragraphs, sure, HTML works fine; but if you're writing a 16-page paper which includes detailed mathematics, having real typesetting isn't optional.
As an interesting data point, many Asian languages don't have a concept of capitalization in the language at all.
So that is why Mom switched to Gmail today. Thanks, I had been wondering!
HN is not the place to regurgitate stupid old slashdot memes that add little or nothing to the conversation.

There are a number of ways that you could have phrased your response that would have stimulated real discussion instead of "har har lolz anti-spam newbz"
A Beginning Guide To Evolutionary Algorithms in Perl (2003)
Hence his years long struggle to tear it down and build his dream house.
How is this different from dimdim?
Hackers loving patents & all those restrictions?. The world has changed hell a lot from the days I read real hackers notes on text files. I was a kid then & loved all that.

Update: added real
but when you have very large paragraphs. this is very difficult to read.
I would definitely lose Hacker News.
This is a very bad attempt at humor and is not in the spirit of HN. From what I have seen, we are all about encouraging innovation, new ideas, and discussion. The GP simply discourages them.

I make a point not to spend time around the pessimistic downer crowd, and it ticks me off when someone shoots down an idea offhandedly. I sincerely hope HN does not move in this direction.
What Does Your Facebook Profile Say About You?
Look at digg. It's is a pain on pages with long comment threads.

Other than that, I have no idea what this topic is about. Going back works fine for me in all the ways he mentioned.
When I first saw the title of the post, I thought it was going to be about financial capitalization, but alas, some capital is still a requirement for business.

Incidentally, I think most people wouldn't take you seriously without the might of the shift key after every sentence ending period.
besides this, does anyone else find the "Tick,Tick" sounds in IE as annoying as I do?
Google is much more valuable especially if you take services into account, such as google code, gmail, google maps, etc etc

Hackernews you can get away with using rss to a good extent and the blog/articles official comments.
Wow! How long did it take you to type up all that?
I think screen (using ssh and scp) is your best solution to only using one terminal and lets face it ctrl+key n is very easy to do.
Twitter is like the HN story titles, not the comments. It'll never be better than true communication.

But as a quick exercise, I tried to get your message down to 140 characters:

I have an account that I set up to use the API, but I refuse to use it out of wrk. Its just full of low-quality msgs that r discouraged @ HN

Generally I think people spend more time trying to fit what they want to say in those 140 characters, that it defeats the point of the length anyway (well the real reason is due to the SMS length, but the main idea of twitter was short messages, regardless of the limitations)
Evolution of a PHP programmer scribble
Dimdim, like WebEx, seems to be optimized for presentations. For instance, they only allow 1 or 2 people to share their webcams (I think they even pitch the 2 webcams as "2 people can present together...").

AlmostMeet is more for those intense collaborative discussions within a small group. So everyone's an equal participant, even with the webcam and desktop sharing. And then there's a whiteboard that's actually usable.

Because we use P2P, the voice chat should also be better. The caveat with P2P is that it can't scale to a large number of participants, which is okay, coz neither does our interface :).
Open-Mindedness [video]
(a) I think you mean "fewer and fewer examples"; saying "less and less" makes you sound like an idiot.

(b) The latter part of (a) may only apply when read by educated people, but since they're the people that make all the decisions, you should probably keep following proper grammatical syntax for now.

(c) This is basically like telling, say, Arabic linguists that reading right to left is "obsolete"; it's a language construct, it can't just magically become obsolete.

I suppose you could argue that capitalization is a formality, but then you'd have to make an argument against all formal speech. The biggest hurdle you'd have is convincing everyone that talking and writing in "txt speak" is acceptable. There are a lot of people, myself included, who would sooner die than see that day.
Thanks for the links!

I find it pretty cool that the first site only does the guessing based on a pretty small list of words - you can see it by viewing the source.

Some words are more commonly male and others are more commonly female - looks as if that's all it is doing.
I agree they need to work on the installation/transfer process, but to their credit, they have made some big changes and even innovations in IE8. The kind of thing that will probably slow the trend but not reverse it.
The War on Sharing: Why the FSF Cares About RIAA Lawsuits
As a matter of information theory, whatever feature a writing system has tends to disambiguate sentences that would be ambiguous without that feature being marked. The late John DeFrancis had an excellent article in the first issue of the Journal of the Chinese Language Teachers Association called "Why Johnny Can't Read Chinese," in which he mentioned many issues of readability that differ between Chinese and English because of the different orthographies of the standard written forms of the two languages. Capitalization is useful in English, and it is habitual to me as a former editor of trade magazines and a law review. Other languages have no such thing as capitalization in the writing system, but they have some arbitrary feature or another that also conveys information to experienced readers of the language. Capitalization is NOT obsolete in English.
While it has remained linear up until now, I doubt it will continue, regardless of which way you think it will diverge.

If Microsoft gets its act together and makes a browser that people don't mind using (and I believe IE8 is significant progress), I could see that level off around the 50% mark.

Similarly, if Webkit or FF makes some tremendous progress or has some killer feature, I could see IE's share drop very abruptly. So far however, the competition has mostly gone for feature parity.

One of the things that bugs me about the IE6 browser wars is that the majority of outspoken people think supporting standards would help. In nearly all fields (with healthy competition) supporting standards is something you need to do before anyone will adopt your product, and then you get to worry about new features.

I think this mindset of standards compliance has caused FF and Webkit to not push more interesting ideas. Want to support a video tag? Do it. Just make sure you follow the HTML 5 spec first. That's where real innovation comes from -- for instance, the creation of AJAX wasn't a standard, but Microsoft adopted it, and the other browsers thought it was a good idea.
Aren't forgetting the page view element of contenture? I think payment is driven by page views not sharing.
Looks nice, but then a screen-cast should - when do we get to play with it?

What technology are you using in the front end? I'm guessing Flash/Flex. Are you using FP10's P2P technology (Stratus?). What are you using for desktop sharing?
Don't forget that the whole purpose of writing is having it read. Anything that makes the reading easier without sacrificing accuracy is good. Capitalization, correct spelling, and to a lesser extent punctuation are foundations of good writing, because they improve readability and comprehension.
You can use it now! Click the "Meet" link on the top. Signup isn't even needed, but helps if you want to build a library of files and drawings.

Yes, using FP10's P2P tech with Stratus, with a Java applet helping for desktop sharing.
Use the email in my profile, Luke! :-)

(I had to choose between keeping a "corporate" image while shilling my company left and right, and being honest and true to myself among my hacker peers. I am doing traditional advertising with nothing "startupy" about it; and if we're doing anything new/different I don't intend to "share" it, so you guys are stuck with my closet Real-Self ;-)
I could lose either one. There are HN alternatives too.
Btw, the service IS live. Click "Meet" to give it a spin. The logs seem to show everyone's just checking out the video, which is unusual for HNers. No wonder there aren't any "<feature> is broken" comments.
I hate to say this because it already gets plugged enough here, but YC is an example of it. One of its goals is to make switching from working for a big company to working for your own company easier.

Edit: My first negative-voted post! I'm puzzled (was it perceived as being anti-YC?), but don't worry, I'm not complaining.
Post mortem of a bad HN submission
Doing Good in Unexpected Ways
The Economy Brings Generations Together, With All Their Baggage
Hotmail now has free POP3 so you can let Gmail download new email from your wife's Hotmail account. Shh, don't tell anyone!
Obama proposes no capital gains tax on qualified small business stock
I think this mindset of standards compliance has caused FF and Webkit to not push more interesting ideas. Want to support a video tag?

But...Firefox 3.5 beta does support the video and audio tags, and tons of others.
UC Berkeley’s CITRIS lab: a haven for startups
A few times I've found the account is over a year old, but comments only started recently. If the front page of their comments was filled (i.e. 10 comments), I probably wouldn't have noticed this. BTW they didn't seem especially bad, just the typical newbie comments before someone replied "Please elaborate".
Google, way old school?
Maybe it's just me, but it took me a good while to figure out what you guys do when looking at your homepage. I'd make sure to emphasize that you are a group remote conferencing application, even if you are still in private beta.

Your slogan "fully save time, money, and the earth" is great, but make sure that people know what you're doing! Based on that slogan, you could be almost any company doing almost anything.

So I'd simply work on the marketability of it. Otherwise, the application looks great!
Ahhh - I see. I Had a play - looks nice. I'll test it for real next time a need a meeting. Few things I spotted:

1. The vertical height is a little over 100% (so I have a vertical scroll bar, but only for about 20px missing off the bottom)

2. The desktop sharing plug-in crashed my Flash Player. Chrome recovered, and the second time it seemed to work, but I didn't get any notification that it had worked.

3. I really like the freehand->geometric functionality.

4. I think the dialog box at the beginning Re. UDP is not a good user experience.

If you know anything about Adobe's plan for a commercial product to replace Stratus then I'd love to talk (or even if you just have some guesses, I'd love to hear them). Email: tango charlie sierra two two zero one at gmail
That was great. Gender Studies class, huh?

By the way, Gender Guesser gave me a good laugh when I ran it on a comment from HN. It said, "Verdict: Weak MALE
Weak emphasis could indicate European."

A scientific basis for the effeminate European stereotype??

Edit: I was joking about the stereotype.
In Canada, capital gains are 50% taxable and the first $750k of capital gains on small business stock (subject to fairly reasonable definitions) is exempt.

I'm curious to know how this compares to other countries; could HNers from elsewhere please reply to this with the details from where they are?
Swedish Bank to Freeze Accounts of The Pirate Bay Admins
A few times I've compared the same programming article here and on proggit - and the later always had deeper comments. Maybe it's not surprising, since that's the focus of proggit, but only one of several here.

I've also twice noticed the same usernames on reddit and HN - and their comments on reddit are more helpful and intelligent than here... Though not a conclusive sample size, it does make me think that reddit's concentration of communities (with subreddits), and the ability to easily skip bad comments (with collapsing [-]) seems to be working.

But I find the stories submitted here are better than on reddit.
You can scp from a remote host to the host you're currently logged into (assuming no firewall restrictions). You could even simulate the put command with a sufficiently clever shell script by using the value of SSH_CLIENT or _CONNECTION. To sweeten the deal, some shells (zsh at least) will even do tab-completion for remote scp paths.

Aside from that, I don't think I could function without multiple terminals. I usually have 6-7 open, minimum.
Creepiest real-life robots
What are the least deserving successful sites/apps?
Some might have succeeded simply by being an early adopter of some technology. Others might have succeeded because their users didn't know any better.

An example of what I mean:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Million_Dollar_Homepage

Clever perhaps, but worthy of such success?
very interesting {:}
I find that there's usually 1-2 stories per day that are significant for what I am seeking on that day. So, for me, it's not surprising if that doesn't always happen, since there are so many factors involved.
Ditto - anyone that calls "Commando" the worst vehicle for Arnold clearly didn't see the subtle mockery of the "Guy with a gun" genre.

(Oddly enough, it also set a record on 2chan here in Japan; apparently they never had a situation with more messages in a shorter time than when Commando was on the tele)
Of course the million dollar homepage is worthy of its success. Quite frankly, it's a brilliant idea.

There are very, very few things that are truly "unworthy" of success; your view of this strikes me as far too general. Just because something doesn't awe you in technical marvel doesn't mean it's not an excellent product.
Thanks. Regarding:

1. That's intentional, so the user would scroll down past the the logo and "Signed as ..." portion at the top. But I guess that's not a good design decision.

2. Sorry! Need to test more browsers. Opera has issues too btw, but Safari+Firefox+IE seem to be happy.

4. Agreed. It turns out it's hard to check when the firewall is really blocking UDP, so we're having the user check for it. We think we have a solution for that though, and will release that soon.

No word from Adobe about a commercial version of Stratus or release date for FMS4 (which is supposed to support the functionality too). Btw, Adobe's Flash Collaboration Service (formerly "Cocomo") is also a contender for commercial release.
What about mediocre early apps in Facebook/iTunes that succeeded simply because they were early adopters with little competition?
Lifehacker Laptop Bags
Thanks. You're right about the lack of marketing; definitely need to write a lot more copy.

I'm glad you liked the "fully save time, money & the earth" slogan. I'm still waiting for commenters here to say how much they hate the name of the service though; that's been all my friends' first reaction :).
Yepyep, you did it. This is excellent.

I can't find anything that I wouldn't pay for-- this would help out our team if it turns out we can avoid firewall problems with the video streaming.

Seems like that part would be the most likely to cause issues, right?

I'll try it again when others on my team are awake to give it a shot.

Edit:

Ok, tried the voice and video-- a bit worse than other services. Kept cutting out the audio and video. Had to keep re-enabling it myself to get it to work again.

File uploads worked well there, as did images and drawings. Good stuff, but the video and audio aren't stable enough to use for a real conference. Usually it behaves fine with most services I use, but the others kept losing my video and audio in mid-sentence.

Desktop sharing seemed to work (or so it said) but it's really hard to tell what part of the screen it is showing as opposed to things like GoToMeeting.
The idea is that if you own 5% of a company worth 200M and you quit, the remaining 95% ownership of the company cares enough about it that they will replace you and move on. In this scenario there is no acquisition, and you walk away without making the company lose any significant value.

I've seen that happen: one of the fully vested founders of the company I worked for left on a sabbatical. After six months he decided he didn't want to come back. By then all his functions had been taken over by other people. He sold some of his stock, kept the rest and went back to grad school.

The point is not so much the size as the fact that you can walk away more easily if you own a small fraction of a company without causing a significant drop in value.
Pogue: Tech Marketing - What’s Important and What’s Not
Venture Capital Update - better times are coming
I write a whole paragraph without capitalization, then invoke my emacs script to automatically capitalize the paragraph. Problem solved.
This is cool, but we incorporated in January. If this passes, do we redo it now?