skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
There's a huge gap between trying to do translation as a non-professional and the amount of effort required for a professional. I dated a German / English -> Hebrew translator for a while and despite me being better in both German and English, she could translate much more effortlessly from German to English than I could. It's a skill that's separate from raw language ability. She'd just read a line and then immediately start pounding out the translation.
I'm surprised/impressed at how quickly they're moving on this whole Stack Overflow concept. There are YC startups that don't seem to be as nimble as Atwood's team. What's the long-term relationship between Atwood and Fog Creek?
Nice work! It's great to see a fellow go-playing hacker on HN. I'm the author of EidoGo (http://eidogo.com/, http://github.com/jkk/eidogo/tree/master), which is JavaScript-based, open source, and has features like branching and labels. Feel free to steal any of my JavaScript; I'll certainly be taking a peek at yours :-)
I'm glad I'm not the only person who has #3. For some reason, I seem to get miraculous insights into problems when I'm exercising, so I've taken to keeping a tiny pen and a couple index cards within reach at all times. While running, this has sometimes resulted in me crouching on the side of a street, scribbling madly while constantly looking for oncoming cars, but when I get back home and finally finish that tricky proof or implement that evasive idea into code, I find it is well worth the trouble.
Anyone know of plans for non-profit or educational use? I imagine the folks trying to cure diseases or solve environmental problems could use a tool like this.
Not sure I agree. The iPhone has great visual effects, but the Android phones I've played with seem a lot more usable. Google services integrate wonderfully, and the third-party apps tend to do cooler things. (Hello tethering, location awareness, etc.)
Speaking as a professional translator, I have to agree. But I'm also speaking as an open-source developer, so I'm used to that model, and the translation industry isn't. It sounds to me as though LinkedIn could have approached the matter with some tact, but it should be said that translators as a whole are pretty prickly. We have to be. The better we are, the less visible we become.

And it's a common scam in the industry (less so now that we congregate online) to take a document, break it up into chunks, then send each chunk to a freelancer as a "translation test" to be done free of charge. I think this LinkedIn thing hit some people that way.

But yeah; mostly, this is one of those sound and fury things.
Outlawed as in banned by the school? I know the technical policy for my high school was that we had to leave them in our lockers. Of course, nobody actually did that. It was entertaining to see teachers catch students though.
Agreed. I translate one and a quarter million words a year. After a while it truly becomes second nature.
Until I clicked on the link, I was excited, as the comments on monetization lead me think they might be providing a marketplace for me to provide for-fee answers to users.

Unfortunately, this is not the case.

As it is, I don't bother to use StackOverflow. My questions would be too esoteric for the audience/format, and nearly all of the questions I see are boring, easily answerable with a search of the documentation. The questions would be less boring if I were paid to answer them, and then I'd be more likely to find a few gems to answer, too.
I once took a class with Gell-Mann with only a handful of other students. He did a lot of impressions of people's accents, so I asked him if he would imitate Feynman's, but he claimed he couldn't do it.

The funny thing about him complaining about Feynman's anecdotes is that Gell-Mann seemed to have just as many about himself.

A very interesting guy to talk to, as you might expect, though at times a little overwhelming.
Readable Feeds
The only thing I know is that just today my 8 year old son and I were watching cable TV and saw an ad for Vonage ($24.95/month). My son asked me who would get Vonage because you can get MagicJack for $19.95/year.

I guess, personally, I'll stick with Skype.
A few people have emailed me about parameterizing the hack for the HN RSS feed that I created ( http://nirmalpatel.com/hacks/hnrss.html ).

Unfortunately, I have been a little too busy with full-time work.

Fortunately, Andrew Trusty decided to do just that. Thanks Andrew.
Payments is a regulatory problem first, and a distribution problem second. Somewhere around issue 9 or maybe 11 is "we shouldn't have to rely on banks"
Understanding Open Source: Have Open Source Models Reached Traditional Business?
Same here. As far as I can tell most of the hype about Twitter is driven by the fact that the people most in control of the popular tech media (slowly expanding to media generally) are also the ones who benefit most from Twitter's success. So every single publicity whore tech blogger is out there evangelizing twitter precisely because they see it as a way to drive people to their blogs where they can make money through ads.

We still have almost no evidence as far as I can tell that Twitter is being adopted as a widespread general communication tool. That's not to say that it won't, just that what we see now is still 90% hype driven and it's anybody's guess whether the thing will collapse or not when the hype dies down. For communication among my friends I still vastly prefer instant messaging which has so many features that twitter and SMS don't that using twitter feels like returning to the stone age.
I think the strategy is hope that girls are accomplished enough logical thinkers to be successful programmers, who can nonetheless be bamboozled into believing that a career in computer science will involve a lot of telling fantastic stories about golfing dragons without ever having to write code.

You are never going to address a gap in the number of female programmers by playing around with dragon-and-drop programming. Industry does not need dragon-and-drop. They need people who will take an intensely boring specification document about business rules for an insurance company, and translate that specification document into functional Java code and XML files. Your XML editor will not have a dragon-and-drop interface.

A large part of me thinks that people who are not programmers are not programmers precisely because they have some notion of what programmers actually do for a living and would hate it.
How much money would make it worth your time? If your expertise is too high / too esoteric for the StackOverflow community, then you should command high prices in the marketplace.

It's doubtful to me that you could appeal to expert users to exchange time for money when it is better leveraged by consulting and entrepreneurship.

This topic comes up quite often on the StackOverflow podcast.
1. Why wouldn't your "network" (or as I like to call them in the real world, "friends") help out? If you think no one in your "network" can help, you didn't think hard enough.

2. Don't send 10 resumes. Narrow it down better, concentrate, and work hard and fast to get some offers on the table.

3. Accept an offer, starting date +1 month, buy a ticket to Europe and load whatever is left on your visa. Perfect opportunity for a holiday.
Because that business model worked so well for Google Answers?
I've noticed a few of those articles myself.
"...more expensive Kindle... test-market to college students."

Good luck with that.
Serious question: Does anyone have a good link to a more technical comparison of the iPhone OS, Android, and WebOS? Not necessarily the phones themselves, but of the current and future potential of those platforms? I've done a little searching, and there's a lot of information out there; maybe one of you has seen something more technical that explores each platform in more depth.

I'd love to support WebOS, but it's still incredibly young, and I'd hate to switch to a platform that ends up dead-ended.
Both points made above are valid. While not a great PR move, LinkedIn is entitled to make that kind of decision and honestly I hope they get what they paid for (nothing).

Something that the free market does not take into account though is fairness or ethics. I'm not an economist, but I have enough sense to know when people are being taken advantage of and that I think is wrong.
I remain stunned that our political system has produced literally trillions of dollars in bailouts for idiot bankers and failed automakers while we appear to be so close to a cure for a range of cancers-- a disease which strikes down people in their prime.

Seriously, the Bear Stearns bailout alone was SIX times bigger than our entire federal commitment to cancer research.

Hopefully our Aussie friends will find the cure.
is it me or is it a little bit pricey in the mid range? 1 million page views is nothing, and then you are stuck in a $999 plan without actual traction to monetize.

And there is no reason to be stuck on a $999 plan on a shared server, if for $300 bucks more you can get unlimited + dedicated server.

Seems like the $999 plan should be $499 instead, and the $1299 plan should be $999.

And come to think of it, the pricing seems pretty high. Let's face it, the software is very simple and could be duplicated very quickly. Why pay $999/mo, when you can have a few hackers code it up in a couple of weeks for a few grand.

Hell, someone should do it here, would be a decent startup idea, copy them, but charge $29.99/$59.99/$99.99 for your plans.
Then I have to ask: what do you mean by "advanced math students"?
I think that the Internet sheds an interesting light on the practice of censorship, since for the first time in many people's lifetimes, a new and completely uncensored medium is going through the process of being methodically censored.

People can watch as censorship is put into place; they can see what is being censored and by whom, and they have the benefit of being able to directly compare the censored world to how the world was before/without censorship.
> How does that compare with the interest of others in keeping the reporter alive?

Does it matter that the person is a reporter?

> What's the user's interest in posting the information?

US journalists are on record saying that they wouldn't help US troops avoid an ambush. CNN admitted censor its Hussein-era coverage to maintain a presence. I can go on and on about how journalists pick stories in ways that don't paint them in a very good light.

I've nothing against questioning the interest that someone has in saying something true, as long as we're going to question everyone in that situation. Deal?
"Bezos claimed that Kindle e-books add 35% to a physical book's sales on Amazon whenever Kindle editions are available"

Wow, that's impressive.
If you treat your phone like a feature list then the iPhone has competition. Its best apps are vastly cooler than anything else on a mobile platform, but the iPhone itself is simply a very good phone feature-wise, nothing incredibly standout.

If any part of you cares about usability, or about gorgeous interfaces, or about incredible design, then you can't go with any phone other than the iPhone. There's no competition. The Pre is the closest thing there is, but even it's not at all close.

Apple as a company has thoroughly nitpicked its designs. Some people don't notice - you seem like you're the type not to be anal about design. For the people that live for design, the iPhone is something of a miracle. I can't think of many things that are as beautiful as the iPhone.

Most people are somewhere between me and you. Some people don't want many features, but they want the things they've got to be gorgeous; other people don't notice the little blips in design and stick to phones that are better at other things.

The iPhone and Android aren't competing with one another. They're mobile OSes that focus on doing very different things, aimed at different markets. Google gets that. I don't know if the phone manufacturers licensing Android get it, because they keep trying to compare themselves to the iPhone. They shouldn't; they have a solid product that happens to target a different market. So what's neat is that you can get the phone you want and I can get the phone I want, and we can both go away thinking we've got the better phone, and both of us are right.
Investigating sine waves in Google Trends
The Falkirk wheel is a lock. It "merely" has moveable chambers.

The only "demonstration of Archimedes principle" involved is that boats that float in water float in water.

It is seriously cool though.
Microsoft puts Razorfish up for sale
Is it just me or does the Lamson logo look kind of phallic?
This is great. I was hoping this would happen since so much microdocumentation is only ever shared between team members on large projects and is not easily available to new members.

On the other hand, I guess the idea they mooted early on of going open source is dead now.
At first glance, this is an autoresponder that doesn't require a confirmed subscription. If that's correct, when some idiot spammer sends it a message with a spoofed envelope address (because they don't realize or care that 88fortunes is an autoresponder, not a person), it will send an unsolicited message to whatever address the spammer used. Anyone know how many "this is spam" clicks it takes for them to ban a sender having no history with them?
This is why we don't snip quotes to make them sound better for our own snark. FTA:

Amazon has announced a larger, more expensive Kindle DX for textbooks and periodicals, which it will test-market to college students.

Last year I paid $500 - the price of a Kindle - for my textbooks. I didn't open most of them. Returning them was a pain in the ass. I hate going out and buying them, period. If there's a device that lets me buy books each semester for only $50 total, or - not to suggest illegal activities - that lets me download them via my college's student hub, then I'm going to take the DX and never let go of it.

College students know a good deal when they see it.
the censorship in Great Britain of the Wikipedia page for Virgin Killer, an album by the German hard rock group, Scorpions.

Some of you might be too young to remember Scorpion. They had a worldwide hit in the late '80s, with a song that went, "I strolled along the Thames, passing by Big Ben, listening to the winds of change." Or something like that.
Spolsky and Atwood got talking after Atwood posted a criticism of Joel. I think they pretty quickly started working on this idea after that (I think Joel brought it up with Jeff).
>Because Microsoft's monopolies are hurting competition and the evolution of our practices.

What monopolies? Plenty of people use Firefox these days, some even use Chrome and Safari. Personally, I use Opera. Or perhaps you are talking about OS - well, OS X is nearing 10% market share, and (AFAIK) showing no signs of slowing down. The only real monopoly MSFT has is Office, and honestly, that's because it's far and away the best office suite. OOo is pretty good, but definitely inferior to Office.

If anyone has a monopoly on search, it's Google, to the point that "Google" has become a synonym for search. If you're really anti-monopoly rather than just anti-Microsoft, you should be rooting for Bing.
Listen to the StackOverflow podcasts and you'll read why money based answer systems don't work. In fact, this is why they are beating Experts Exchange.
DARPA Hires Company to Build a Machine Reader That Scours the Web
Thanks for the tale; I recall reading from other sources (perhaps in the book "Genius"...?) that both Feynman and Gell-Mann had enormous egos that would butt against each other from time to time. It doesn't strike me that there's really a "bad guy" in this story.
>Something that the free market does not take into account though is fairness or ethics.

Actually, the free market is the most fair of all systems, at least for some reasonable definitions of "fair".

>I have enough sense to know when people are being taken advantage of

No one is being forced to do anything. This is a consensual arrangement. So how is anyone being taken advantage of?
1. While it is easy to find egregious examples of unsubstantiated claims on the New York Time's Op-Ed page, this is not one of them. I don't read about the economy obsessively, but I am perfectly aware that most pundits, forecasters, and in general the whole national peanut gallery expect unemployment to continue to rise, save for the usual suspects on the stock-pumping circuit. Herbert's remaining assertions were attributed and partly in quotes, indicating he talked to the person in question and they said that.

2. A recommendation is not necessary. In the real world, away from the relentlessly optimistic and "going forward" business-speak, every observation of bad news does not have to be followed by a powerpoint slide titled "Lessons Learned" with a bullet point list of glib generalities only unknnown to retarded people even before the shit hit the fan. It is even possible that there is nothing we can do to change the economic course of the next few years, although that is a topic separate from guessing at what that economic course is most likely to be.

It is perfectly ok to simply observe where we are gonig withou having a suggestion on how to turn. For example, let's say a couple of guys were working on a startup; one of them figures out that something has fallen though, and there is no way to win. You have to tell the other guy, and argue with him if he doesn't believe it, even if you don't know how to avoid whatever impending disaster is on the horizon.

Personally, I don't see a way around a prolonged period of reduced consumer spending and employment. Furthermore, those that do have jobs will save much of what they earn but it will be inflated away or used to cover the recent loses of financial institutions, so they won't even get full benefit of it. The government policies that will be best in the long term will likely make this period even worse -- balancing the Federal budget to reduce inflation will put more federal workers in the job market and cut benefits right when they are needed, for example.

I think the best thing for me to do is to focus on building a better business, and be fairly conservative in saving and spending now, os that if thing sget worse I am not forced to make really stupid choices by lack of resources. I think planning on the future having a lot of unemployed young males, and thus an oversupply of freelancers, is smart.

One trend that I think is worrisome, and I don't know of anything to do to prepare for it, is the combination of large numbers of unemployed, under employed, or generally economically insecure young males, and the fact that it seems to me (most obviously on reddit, but also from other places) that this same demographic has a fascination with police brutality, tasering, outrage at idiotic TSA goons, etc. (All of which is probably justified.) It seems to me that there is higher than usual likelihood that some large gathering, such as a concert or political event, will result in a riot with lots of pissed guys who want to fight the cops and have been thinking about how to do it for a while. That won't be good.
> In my opinion what the newspaper websites really don't like is not linking, but quoting.

They may not like quoting more than they don't like linking, but they are campaigning against linking (and quoting).

They're also arguing that they should be given an exclusive on information. In a recent example, they think that folks shouldn't be allowed to post that MJ died after reading about it from a "legit" on-line source.
now you do
Ah, I misunderstood your point in that case, apologies. As to what you where intending to communicate, I definitely see where you are coming from on that one. It's easy to make claims, but execution of an idea is always the rub. This particular project does seem a bit more down-to-earth than a lot of the other projects that seem to be getting defense funding these days.
only 300 people were enraged enough to join the group. That's pretty much the equivalent of a movie premiere being boycotted by a few dozen religious nutjobs.

You can't please everyone, and for every "enraged" person, who did the equivalent of signing an online petition, you have others who are glad to help and make your product better.

So you as a product manager, would choose to add $200-300K in expenses(for those professional translation services), just to appease a tiny percentage of users?

Out of those 300 people, how many do you think LinkedIn will lose as users? I'm thinking none. So in the end, they lost nothing, and saved a ton of money.

I didn't hear anyone bitching when facebook pretty much did the same thing...at least LinkedIn is offering some compensation.
Chart 1 interests me. It suggests that, if the US could slash the non-out-of-pocket expenses, there would be very little difference between US and Swiss health-care spending. This suggests that removing the US tax deduction for corporate health care plans would be a good hack.

Removing that tax deduction should cause corporations to reduce their contributions to employee health care plans, increasing the proportion of out-of-pocket expenses. We tend to be more careful with our own money, so I would expect this to reduce waste and increase competition in health care.

The downside is that the increased out-of-pocket costs would be painful for many employees. That seems unavoidable - someone does have to pay for the health care. But the pain might be eased by a tax break that initially offset most of the cost. That break would be phased out over a few years.
On Twitter, a Furniture Promotion Tries to Ride Iran Traffic
Why pay $999/mo, when you can have a few hackers code it up in a couple of weeks for a few grand.

The long road of our industry is littered with the corpses of projects which would only take a few programmers a couple of weeks to program. But technical risk isn't the big worry here for a startup.

Hell, someone should do it here, would be a decent startup idea, copy them, but charge $29.99/$59.99/$99.99 for your plans.

That hypothetical startup would be:

a) Trying to market the product without having a successful reference implementation available and without having Joel & Jeff to bootstrap the reference implementation.

b) Be aimed squarely at the low end of the market. (i.e. penny-pinching pathological customers rather than enterprises for whom $1,000 is inconsequentially cheap if it brings projects in on time) This buys you some very fun customer support duties.

c) Need to sell minimally several dozen companies on a quirky knowledge-base type product per FTE they wanted to support.

d) Get to compete on search advertising with someone who can afford to outspend them ten-to-one for customer acquisition.
$129 PER 1,000,000 page views.
Atlas Obscura: Wondrous, curious, and bizarre locations around the world
> "Do you think it's wrong for a web site to link to another web site?"

> "Yes. Unless they've paid the site they're linking to for the right to do so."

Did you ask her if she thinks that you should pay her before telling a friend how to get to the great article that she wrote, a way that lets her monetize said article as she sees fit? If she says yes, as her if she understands the question and whether she wants readers. If she says no, you ask her if she minds if you tell 10 strangers.

A link isn't content. It's a way to get content. It doesn't affect her ability to monetize her content in any way that she feels appropriate. Newspaper folk either don't understand that or ....
Isn't this ironic? Hasn't the Times printed stories despite being told that doing so endangers "national security" (i.e. could result in the deaths of citizens)?