skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I don't define myself as an Objectivists, but I tend to agree with a lot of Rand's philosophy (mostly about work ethics, individuality and productivity). Unfortunately, she has a rather lopsided view about emotions and human relationships. I'm sure if the following words were coming from someone who is not a bestselling author, that person could be loosely defined as "batshit insane":

> If they place such things as friendship and family ties above their own productive work, yes, then they are immoral. Friendship, family life and human relationships are not primary in a man's life.

In today's world, Rand would probably be suffering from burnout.
Yes. Two email addresses I invented for emusic are now receiving all sorts of spam. I own my own domain, so it's definitely the case that those addresses were leaked.
I agree. So essentially the "rust" in a codebase is the differential between what your developers know about the code and what knowledge is embedded in the code. Since it is much harder to read code than write it (at least, for "awful" codebases), once code has rusted enough it is best to just throw it away.

On the flip side, if you are able to keep your developers up to date on the codebase, you will save yourself a lot of trouble.
The economic and financial data alone will give Wolfram more paying customers than he can support. Just think about Bloomberg.
"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."

I used to do/think like that, too. But now that I've been touchtyping for a while I find the cost of hitting that shift key is really close to zero so I don't bother not capitalizing properly everywhere, IM included.

To everyone in this community who still isn't touchtyping: You're missing out. You're missing out!
"The dream" will end only if the oil runs out before the oil fund is large enough to offset the tax gap.

As it is, most oil revenue is set aside, and there wouldn't be a massive budget deficit if the oil revenue went away tomorrow. Doesn't mean there wouldn't need to be some adjustment if the oil revenue dried up, since it provides a lot of employment and the cost of dealing with increased unemployment could be significant, but Norway is surprisingly independent of the oil revenue, and becoming increasingly independent of it as the oil fund swells.
G^2 is just an attempt to steal WA's thunder.

Come on, Wolfram Alpha was only announced a few months ago. G^2 was not developed in a few months. It's not like G^2 is a "response" to WA.
"Remember, 80% of your surfers will be at 56k or even less."

Yeah.
Interview with Ian Hickson, editor of the HTML 5 specification
Our household shares one mobile phone between two adults. How does that fit into the 84% baseline?

As far as services, I checked GMail and other. I use VPS to host my web apps, so I pay for that. I pay for the ACM digital library, as I see a lot of value in that.

I would pay for online storage (eg Amazon S3). I use GMail. The spam filtering is great. I might use the paid Google Apps for domain email hosting, but would like a cost effective and time efficient (low administration effort) MTA which I can use for multiple domains.

My biggest concern with relying on some 3rd party for essential web apps/services is 1) what happens if they go belly-up? 2) what happens if there is an irreconcilable policy change?

For VPS, I back up to home and can always recover and host on a new VPS, just some time lost. If an essential service goes south, I've lost information and/or functionality.

So aside from fungible infrastructure, I've not yet seen anything compelling enough to make me pay up every month since I stopped playing everquest several years ago.

one of my primary questions for a service is "how much effort to sync with my home network or to mirror to another service?"
If you are a co-founder and stayed with a company for five years before exit, wouldn't you qualify for this no-tax clause?
In other words, Norway's lessons are very applicable to other energy exporting nations. But probably not many lessons that can be implemented by energy importing nations.
This is off-topic, but am I the only one to find all nytimes articles utterly useless? They're all very well written and interesting, but after reading them I never know more then I did before. I've made a habit of not clicking them, but then I find some interesting title and click... only to again waste 5 minutes.
Scrum Alone Does Not Good Software Make
I have an EEEPC 901 with Xandros. At first I was quite enamoured with it's distro but it's not that great. The updater fills it up with updates until it runs out of system disk space and I have to reset it, even though I have a 20Gb version (the sysem space is tiny [I don't have it with me so I can't look]). The scheduler isn't very good, scrolling on Firefox comes in bursts and often I think the thing has locked up. Firefox is probably not the best choice because of its bloat (ironic from the light-weight mozilla!). That said, when I ran Plan 9 in Qemu on it, I didn't find any such problems.

Web browsing on my G1 is a much nicer experience. I could seriously see Android being a good fit with my EeePc.
Have you used Office 2007 at all? They're hidden away by default. The whole purpose of the ribbon was to manage the complexity better. Plus, there's no paper clip. It's not the '90s anymore.
Steve Jobs allowed to tear down his home
It's not the content, it's the community.
What a stupid article. What's with the sudden rash of "Don't Go to College" articles?

It is a WELL proven fact that people with college degrees earn far more during their lifetimes than those without degrees. See the second page of this report for a great graph: http://www.census.gov/prod/2002pubs/p23-210.pdf
Why is this "hacker news"? I find the arguments and laws overall about what private citizens can and cannot do with "their" property to be very interesting in our society.
A bunch of disaffected college students just got out for the summer, and have more time to read and submit articles here.
"landing a job as an accountant"

"I wish I had gone to prison"

What's the difference?
Sorry, but you need to remember that some hackers (eg me) are pretty new to this stuff. I found it helpful to have all this information in one place. For me, the ranking is justified.
I'll second this. We've been experimenting with Zoho Office which has an API (at least for it's most important apps). I'm shocked that Google (a company with way more resources) hasn't at least matched what Zoho is doing in the space.
This article is, unfortunately, pretty pointless. Don't bother clicking.
I'd probably pay $5/mo for Pandora or Google Docs, GMail, etc., but most of the other services here either rely on network effects or are better advertising-supported. As they are, anyway: I can imagine premium features for almost all of these which I would be willing to pay for.
Most of the enhancements made in HTML over the last few decades would be impossible if browsers didn't render incorrect HTML. Even simple things, like having closed single tags (<br/> vs. <br>) is only possible because old browsers are really forgiving.
Going to prison can still be arranged if Mr Castillo really wants to give it a try. I can think of a few ways he could make his way there, and none of them require any qualifications.
Watch for the First Lady
Ruby IRB tips and tricks
I'm getting tired of people bitching about not coming out of school with a 6 figure job and a house.

You chose the wrong degree
You are too lazy to network and find another job
You'll be stuck in the warehouse forever

Stop bitching and change your own situation if you don't like it.

And he's 30, wtf? How long did he wait to go to college? or should I dare to inquire, how long did it take to finish?
I would pay for this software service, detailed in one of my earlier comments.

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=436214
I think it's a pretty pissy thing for al3x (http://twitter.com/al3x/status/1786897274) to publicly denounce a controversial feature change like that... at least wait until the backlash is over! He needs to support his company's decisions, instead of being so eager to divert blame from himself.

Although my comment could be completely void if Techcrunch is overplaying the entire situation, which is probably the case...
It's not an argument. It's a mention of something I saw in passing which might be of interest. Thanks for revealing your unspoken biases and proclivity to prejudge.

As it happens, I have 3 Macs and an iPhone.
It's not all that sudden... they keep surfacing every once in a while it seems.
But how safe is their investment? What can they own to keep themselves in a comfortable lifestyle (nearly) forever? Stocks and currency won't do it.

It's probably part of the reason for the push to renewable energy and energy efficiency. And also services/IP?
Yes, he's whining. But the undertone seems to be that he is crushed by debt to the point his life feels worthless. Therefore instead of spending those years only to accumulate debt, he is feeling he could have done just as well sitting in prison, for free.

I think the bigger issue is that people assume going to college leads to getting a job which leads to making more money. In this case, the whiner is stuck because the formula failed for him.

If we could somehow flip the conventional thinking into, going to college leads to building a solid foundation of perseverance and problem solving which can then be applied and traded for something you value, then things would be different. The whiner would then have a new formula which is observe the situation, solve the problem using a vast array of possible solutions and trade for something of value.

The problem in this case.. he can't seem to figure out how to get out of a warehousing job in a down market.

Sad.
That's it, really. The rest of this is good stuff. Especially considering it's 7 years old.
The part you're overlooking is that NeXT was as attractive to Apple as it was because they had a series of high-profile failures to develop a replacement OS in house.

In Apple's case the re-write idea turned out horribly and the only reason they made it thru is because a former founder had created a startup years earlier and had a working OS that Apple could buy and use.

Apple is hardly a poster child for re-writing software.
Tired of hearing so much about twitter. It's like a reality show with these clowns. It should be an open protocol.
Not to mention, you know, the bit about 'education' and 'refining your mind', which is supposed to be the purpose of the whole thing.
"if i can do it, so can everybody else."
No matter how many people try to become the president, there won't be enough time to let millions of people be the president during their life.

Of course the scale is wildly different with education and employment, but one should consider the environment and context of the other when making such a statement. No matter how hard you try, there will always be things you can't control; sometimes, they'll be massive blockers.

That "you just don't want enough -- that's why you fail" attitude can be insulting at best.

Edit: I'm not advocating dropping out of college. I'm currently working as a web dev during the day and studying on weeknights, specifically because I believe in education leading to better conditions (and I love learning as a whole). I just believe it's wrong to assume that if the formula works for me, it should work for everybody else.
What that reports shows is that historically college has paid off, but even with adjustment for inflation the cost of college has increased by 2.5 times over the past 70 years ( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/College_tuition has a great chart showing how that varies across institutions, in some schools the adjusted increase is much lower). Combined with the increased percentage of Americans attending college (from <%5 circa 1940 to nearly 30% now, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Educational_attainment.jpg), I think it's disingenuous to rely on data based on the relative success of those who attended college 40 or 50 year s ago to someone who is graduating from college today.

College is more expensive and having a degree is much more common. Because of these factors, although I do think lifetime wage for college graduates will continue to outpace non-graduates, I also think that the relative payoff will decrease.

Apologies for over-reliance on wikipedia, it is remarkably hard to find quality sources in a minute or two. ;)
If you compare Norway to the UAE (which includes Dubai, Abu Dhabi, etc) while Norway is investing its oil wealth in a sovereign fund, UAE is investing in real estate, tourism and other sectors. Both have rich social safety nets. In this way, both these energy exporting nations are smart in reinvesting/saving today's surplus. One interesting difference is that UAE is a federation of fairly autonomous states or emirates. So some states are already in the post-scarcity era (Dubai) while other states are still in the surplus era (Abu Dhabi, Ras Al Khiamah, etc). It makes for an interesting economic development scenario.
not for nothing, but if he's crushed by debt why is he only working a warehouse job.

Deliver pizza or work a second job, use that extra income to rapidly pay down the debt.
That isn't fair - there is selection bias. You have to compare people who were accepted to college and choose not to go to those who choose to go.

Then, subtract the opportunity cost of the money the college goers paid (i.e., cost * expected ROI in some other endeavor) before comparing lifetime earnings.

The studies I've seen to that for a lot of people (mediocre students, no-name school, etc) there is relatively little benefit to attending college.
I had a lot of friends from asian countries in my university (about 10% foreign students there) and they paid exactly the same as me. They even got the 40% aid from the government on apartment rent as students...

The only foreign students who paid a lot of money at my university were exchange students from the us who paid their normal tuition to the american university and studied in my university for a year... In exchange, some of the french students did the same, paid the almost free tuition in france and studied in the american university for a year...
When the author himself labels the assumptions pessimistic (more or less, I think it's a fair word), I think it's fair to say they are "pessimistic":

"I have short-sightedly ignored the possibility that we're going to come up with a true human-equivalent artificial intelligence, or some other enabling mechanism that constitutes a breakthrough on the software or content creation side and lets us offload all the hard work. No HAL-9000s here, in other words: no singularity (beyond which our current baseline for predictions breaks down). Which means, in the absence of such an AI, that the most interesting thing in the games of 2030 will be, as they are today, the other human players.

"I am assuming that nothing better comes along. This is the most questionable assumption of all. Here in the world of human beings — call it monkeyspace — we are all primates who respond well to certain types of psychological stimulus. We're always dreaming up new ways to push our in-built reward buttons, and new media to deliver the message. Television came along within fifty years of cinema and grabbed a large chunk of that particular field's lunch. Cinema had previously robbed theatre's pocket. And so on. Today, MMO gaming is the new kid on the block, growing ferociously and attracting media consumers from older fields. I can't speculate on what might eat the computer games field's lunch -- most likely it'll be some new kind of game that we don't have a name for yet. But one thing's for sure: by 2030, MMOs will be seen as being as cutting edge as 2D platform games are in 2009.

"In fact, I'm making a bunch of really conservative assumptions that are almost certainly laughable. For all I know, the kids of 2030 won't be playing with computers any more — as such — rather they'll be playing with their nanotechnology labs and biotech in a box startups, growing pocket-sized dragons and triffids and suchlike. Nothing is going to look quite the way we expect, and in a world where the computing and IT revolution has run its course, some new and revolutionary technology sector is probably going to replace it as the focus of public attention."
Pondering the Polymath Podcast and Pedanticism
1. That also includes older workers who got their degrees when a smaller percentage of the population went to college. Now that a much higher percentage of young people are getting degrees, will there still be enough demand to keep wages for degree holders high, relative to the increased supply of workers with those degrees?

2. If you include debt, cost of servicing that debt, opportunity cost of the years needed for the degree, increasing tuition and fees, and reliance on credit cards to make ends meet, with the finance charges and exploding interest rates credit cards entail, surely at some point all of the increased lifetime earnings are completely offset? Especially taking into account the increased number of degree holders in the marketplace.

It may very well still be worthwhile to get a degree. But the decision is not as clear as it once was.
i don't think that in this case, the language that the guy is using is saying "don't go to college", he's saying "don't go to a standard 4 year".

not everyone should go to a standard 4 year university. some people are better off in a trade school or a 2 year tech school. or, the military where they'll train you well to do some specific things. i also think that associates degrees vary in success and pull reasonably more weight than the linked report shows they do.

i think that this should be the takeaway.
Rww:Understanding the New Web Era: Web 3.0, Linked Data, Semantic Web
Ask HN: How does free compete with paid?
Our free website makes money off of CPC revenue, but our chief competitor charges a monthly membership fee. This means they can run promotions saying "Hey! Sign up now and get your first 2 months at 50% off", while we can only say "Uhh... we're still free."

So they get coupon site love, and we end up in the free-site bucket. (Though our site totally kicks their butt, not that I'm biased:-)

And this leads me to my question: WWHND?
There is now blogspam on the front page every day.
freemium.

say "hey, our free version is just as good as those guys' paid version. plus, if you want even better stuff, you can pay $X/mo and get some even more super awesome features that those guys don't even have at all! here's a coupon."
Is there a way I can exclude TechCrunch from my list? It's always puerile gossip or linkbait.
AT&T Knowledge Network Explorer
What a stupid comment. Where I come from, accounting is a fairly semi-successful occupation. Lots of people I know in my community are accountants, who love it, and are leading really happy lives. Just because there are people who don't aspire to be independent, let's run the show, I am my own boss, entrepreneurs, and would opt out for something a bit safer and more stable, doesn't mean they're accepting a prison-like lifestyle. Your childish, baseless, and condescending comment is actually quite offensive.

You'd think someone as old as yourself would know that there's more to life than a job.

And you'd think these types of garbage comments wouldn't get upvoted. To be honest, it's not even that witty.
If we're going to keep this around, the threshold ought to be set at a particular time instead of 1 year back from whenever the request is made. So I changed it to use a fixed threshold set just before the infamous TechCrunch mention in March 2008.
Guessing What Is Going To Kill Me, Pt. 2
It is curious that a proponent of individualism like Rand advocated that her point of view on relationships, family etc is the only one that's moral.

I really fell in love with objectivism as a teenager, and am a very strong supporter of free markets (yes, despite all the 'misery' they bring to workers in out-of-date industries). But examining her work and everything she said as a whole, it's clear to me that she took her opinions to the extreme. Who is she to say what should be primary in my life?
It amazes me how upset and involved people are in an obscure option of a microblogging service. People who are so upset really need to get some freakin' perspective.

But what amuses me most is when commentators on the subject say the new system is convoluted. Both systems were convoluted and weird. The new mechanism is just as weird as the old one was. Every website's features are just gentle wrappers around their underlying architecture. When you look at them carefully you can see the system underneath, and that system is complicated no matter what you do.
Which is one service I do pay for.
'At NFJS shows, a common question is "I only have time to learn one new language on the JVM: which should I pick?".

The easy answer is true: it doesn't matter. Just pick one already!'

So what is the 75% answer to "which other JVM language should I learn?"

I figure it's either Clojure or Scala, but not sure which one. I prefer Clojure and it seems to get a lot of buzz on HN and proggit, but Scala might be a more straightforward "upgrade" path from Java, and might have more users.
brown9
No Recession in WeeWorld As Social Teens Drive Virtual Goods Sales
I just wrote 20 pages of papers on Google Documents. It was nice to have them available everywhere.

Other than that, it was really awful. Open Office would have been better even. Microsoft Office blows away Google Documents in every way as far as usability is concerned.
My brother really loved accounting as a subject in college. He found something else he likes more now, but if he had become an accountant, I don't think he would have felt his job was like prison.

Just because something might feel like prison to you, does not mean it feels the same way to everyone.
I don't understand why it was deemed confusing. If I follow somebody, I want to read ALL their updates, no matter if they are replying to somebody or not. What is confusing about just seeing everything somebody tweets? I find it very confusing to suddenly not see everything anymore.

Also I don't understand how it could have been a scaling issue, since it was just showing all tweets, no fancy filtering or anything. Removing certain tweets from the timeline seems a lot more complicated ("if tweet is reply and !user follows person_replied_to, remove post").

It makes me upset because it was one of the major ways to discover new people to follow on twitter. A lot of viral marketing schemes are also based on this (and I mean not in a bad way). So it is not just a small thing to change.
I prefer the SomethingAwful forum model: start out free, start charging a one-time $10 fee for new memberships, and then be liberal about banning people (who can pay another $10 to become unbanned). There are other premium options available for other one-time charges.

Being able to moderate in a way that costs someone $10 can really help reign in the more destructive members of the community. There are people who keep resubscribing, but they subsidize the site for everyone else as they get banned over and over.