skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
> If everyone was driving light fuel-efficient cars, then engineering quality, not greater mass, would be the dominant safety factor for the buyer.

Light fuel-efficient cars don't meet everyone's needs. (Yup, mom-mobiles/mini-vans are needed.) And few people can afford to have both a commute car and an "everything else" car per daily-driver. (Besides, a commute-only vehicle means that you can't do as much in transit.)

Besides, the "if everyone drove small, everyone would be safe" assumption is wrong because many car accidents don't involve another car.

I'm unaware of significant efforts to make "not cars" (not just trucks, but immobile structures) more crash friendly. (Yes, I know about break-away traffic signs. Even if all signs were break-away, that wouldn't be enough.)
They worked quite well in Venice. The Republic lasted 1,000 years, which is pretty impressive. The half-life of the typical represenative democracy seems to be about twenty years, so that's a big difference. Since Venice, unpredictable elections have never been tried. Most governments have been clones of either the British or American systems.
comment = new Comment( parent );
comment.sarcasm = 0; //does this work? check later
Lessons learned from Spike Lee's profile of Kobe Bryant
I'm pretty sure relationships and start-ups don't mix even if you are older and wiser.

I know several counterexamples to this, and I believe I am one myself.
UIzard: a GUI database-backed web app IDE in Javascript
Thanks! More coming soon...
Brook's isn't always right. I think that quote is one example.
I may be overly conservative here, but IMHO a MTA should not touch the body of the message.

It should not even touch the headers besides adding a Received-header to the top.

Re-Encoding all Mails passed through is definitely not what I call "not touching".

I know that there are some exceptions (i.e. 8bitmime), but I still think that mail servers should keep their hands of what is passing through them.

Like mailmen who are not supposed to open the envelope, read the letters and reprint them using a nicer font on nicer paper :-)
I am on strike against the system
Dear State of California,
I quit my software engineering job last friday (a full time highly paid position), so sadly I won't be able to help you with your impending bankruptcy. I will, however, watch the trainwreck from afar.

Dear Bank of America,
I have closed all my long time accounts. Try charging me for checks now. Good luck making any mortgages/refinances with the increasing interest rates.

Dear Fidelity,
I have cashed out all my 401k/IRA. Good luck trying to push more suckers into bonds from stocks. I hope index funds wipe you off face of the earth.

Dear Chase,
Only integrity stands between me charging the max on all my credit cards, and declaring bankruptcy. That line's getting thin, too. The creditors can't call me if I'm not in United States.

Dear Fed Reserve,
I will be traveling in Asia, with my savings already in a foreign bank account, living comfortably with $7/day food and $400/month rent. Why work when the government steals your labor via the printing press, I ask myself. I'll just come back when hyperinflation prompts the american public to hang you from the statue of liberty.
I've been doing research on the nursing shortage in the US this past week.

There are currently 2.9 million licensed nurses nationwide, and we're currently 150k nurses short. By 2020, the government predicts a nursing shortage of 500k to 800k nurses due to retirements, aging baby boomers and a shortage of nursing instructors.
Indeed. This was a problem in 1990, but amazingly, it's not 1990 anymore.
A tale of two users - Twitter, early adopters, and lead users
Is it the hacker news effect at work? Or just a crappy host? ;)
If I hear about one more trivial issue that's called a something-pocalypse...
RIPE loses PGP key due to hardware failure. (What, no backups?)
It's very interesting read. Quite refreshing actually.
The Apple Newton
Personally, I couldn't disagree more. Specializing to early would narrow your window of opportunities.

A sixteen year old boy doesn't really know what's going to happen during his lifetime. Maybe, one day he would really love to program for a company that specializes in statistics - he would be hopefully lost if he didn’t even know what quadratic equation means.

Another example: in general, you don’t need geography and/or history for your daily job. But you would look pretty stupid if you asked your Swiss customer: “You still have that god save the queen sh*t”.
Chris Anderson’s Counterintuitive Rules For Charging For Media Online
I'm saying that arguing that he doesn't practise what he's preaching

Your interpretation requires distorting his statements to mean something that they are not meant to mean. You're inserting exclusivity where none exist and exaggerating the use of specific words to mean more general things.

instead of writing a text book, those professors should put their content online for free

You're conflating textbooks with all possible ways of selling or distributing knowledge, which Seth is not. He is talking about textbooks specifically, nothing else. There is no ambiguity there, the whole post is about textbooks. He does not say to publish textbooks for free, but to publish something other than textbooks. He does not say that all books are bad, but that textbooks are bad. He does not say that people should not be allowed to profit from their work, but that doing so by selling textbooks is bad.

Your accusation of hypocricy only flies if you draw general conclusions from his specific statements.

you also agree that he uses the blog only as a marketing channel

I did not say that and do not believe that. You're being dishonest and distorting my words by inserting exclusivity where none exists. Please stop.
Why Continuous Deployment?
Thanks for the suggestions.

Phone support so far has been rarely used so it's really more of a sales point at the moment. In terms of scaling, it may well turn out not to be a feasible option in the future but free customers can upgrade any time so it's worth keeping them happy :)
More than 50% of marriages end in divorce.

That is in the US, maybe.

http://www.nationmaster.com/graph/peo_div_rat-people-divorce...
> More than 50% of marriages end in divorce.

Some people marry and divorce several times though, so it does not follow that 50% of first marriages fail.
I noticed in the article that PokerStars ensured screenshots were being blocked? How is this possible?
Ask HN: When do postings get removed? 
(update: Apparently admin misunderstood that I created 12 new accounts to vote it up. What happened was that I tweeted about it, and folks registered to vote it up)

Hi folks, i posted about hiring a great hacker for Discoverio/MrTweet. It got onto the front page. But then it was curiously removed - and the page it was on is now empty. This is extremely curious. I do not think there was any violation - all I did was to tweet and ask my community to check it out. When do postings get removed?

Original: http://r4.sharedcopy.com/6j6mhd
Now (empty): http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=658481
Thoughts on Bing and Future of Search from Madrona Partner, UW Prof Dan Weld
Whats the best profession for me ? - 1. Web Developer 2. Computer Engineer 3.Engineer ... , phew, I am glad to know that hunch,com vindicates my decision to be a computer programmer. If the results were different...

http://www.hunch.com/professions/all/?h=3610.1482363.1482333....
way underspeced virtual server ;-) Should be working now.
http://www.serverdensity.com
I would have to agree with this comment, my significant other is a nurse and she routinely tells me all the stresses that come with her profession. Think of what a doctor or a pharmacist does, except on a more personal level with the patient. That's the nurse. The nurse is the last line of defense when it comes to misdiagnosis and prescriptions, and in some cases needs to know more than both the doctor and pharmacist. Shouldn't that afford more value than what they are currently paid?
I think picking statics work over structural engendering was the right choice :-)
I expected a site called "fuck" downmodded to -8 to be a lot worse.
He missed an obvious reason to make it easy to quit - I am more likely to try something if I can back out painlessly if it doesn't work out.
Fleet Foxes thank piracy for their success
Since they have a secure (HTTPS) way to deliver a new PGP key, I guess having no backup of the private key stops any leakage of backup.

Now we're trusting RIPE's website CMS instead. I'm not sure which trade-off is better.

(Well, I'm not. I have to trust my ISP and webhosts to deal with RIPE.)
Exactly. Barrier to exit is a barrier to entry.
I once signed up to XBox Live with my credit card. Soon afterwards, I realized that the online gaming "community" left much to be desired and that they didn't even provide dedicated servers for my games. So I decided to quit. But they purposefully do not provide an unsubscribe path through their user interface, you have to call them, wait on hold, and provide your whole credit card number + CCV to unsubscribe.

I have no doubt some MBA at Microsoft thought they could shave a couple percentage points off their attrition rates with this tactic. I sure as hell will think twice before I subscribe for any other Microsoft service again.
This isn't hugely relevant, but why did you go with "kitn" instead of "kitten"?
For heavy objects, it's probably not so relevant.

But in my experience, more friction would probably be useful when holding tools/weapons. Hammers have a rubber grip, for example. I've noticed I lose smooth eskrima sticks far more often than ones I've taped. In an natural selection event, that could be lethal [1].

[1] http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=c_qwaXb6kAE
Thought-provoking. Please share more of the tweaks as you discover them, both what works and what doesn't.
It's all about communication, expectations, priorities etc. Usual relationship stuff.

As long as you're on the same page, everything mixes fine.

There's nothing particularly unique about startups either. Lots of professions call for enormous dedication and periods of complete emersion in a project for some time.
GE's Healthymagination
My career has taken place entirely in startups, some of which I started, all of which were extremely demanding. I'm married and we have two kids.

I'm somewhere between this guy and 37signals on this issue. You can work 100 hour weeks. You can work 4-day weeks. You can travel all the time. You can not travel at all. I know people who've been successful on both paths.

I look back at what I've done so far, and the biggest success I was involved with (Secure Networks, probably) wasn't amazing because everyone killed themselves working for it. It was amazing because (1) everyone loved what they were working on, (2) there was an esprit de corps and extremely talented leadership, and (3) we managed to be aimed at the right market. I worked late nights --- but from home, and not all the time. 100 hour work weeks wouldn't have improved our outcome.

Another success I was involved with was an ISP (EnterAct) in Chicago (I was the first technical employee). Again, we worked hard, there were long nights, but it wasn't a 100-hour commitment. The big thing I remember about EnterAct was that the founders had families, and the families were regulars in the office. I knew their names. They had dinners and parties. You can address the absentee spouse problem by creating a culture that is inclusive of families. That's something we've lost in our transactional build-to-flip company culture, but it's not hard to recover.

Finally, in my current company, I've hit on my favorite answer to this question yet. Erin is a full-time employee of the company. We took the time to bring her up to speed with the actual hardcore technical work that we do. We've done billable projects together, she's worked on product dev, and she can switch hit for a lot of the work I'd do. Meanwhile, we share (mostly) the child care and household stuff. It's been a huge win for the company as well, for obvious reasons; it's like having another person who's as committed as a founder.

I think when you're 22, you can tell yourself a lot of horseshit about whether work or life is more important to you. I know I did. Thankfully, my wife forgave me (hey, I was young(er) and stupid(er)) and I came to my senses. I think this article's author thinks the same thing, and I'm betting he'll say something similar in his next argument.

Just some random thoughts.
Submissions that get flagged often enough are auto-killed. Have you looked on the site with your "showdead" flag (a user-configurable option in your user profile) turned on?
PS: Self-serving experiment. I wonder if this can make it to the front page of reddit without using a subreddit... if you'd like to help with this bit of shameless self-promotion, please vote it up at http://www.reddit.com/r/reddit.com/comments/8sopv/a_tale_of_... :-) (If you don't, please feel absolutely free to completely ignore this comment)
From the Model S to the Lawsuit: Recent Tesla Motors News
Maybe there's an easier trick that you can use to get started and bootstrap the process?
We wanted to emphasize the "press kit" part of the name. Press kits make information and media easily available to the press, just like our product.

I don't think "Presskitten" would have necessarily taken away from that, but in our minds "Presskit'n" just worked better.
What's different about startups is that the demands are unpredictable. A couple can steel itself for law school. And lots of marriages do break up over medical careers.
Thanks, I was quite confused. I don't think I'll make an account, but good to know there is some kind of functionality.
Marc Andreessen's blog post on "only thing that matters"
http://blog.pmarca.com/2007/06/the-pmarca-gu-2.html
Like most sites as they get larger, what gets trashed and removed becomes a lot more capricious as what offends some sub-group (or challenges them) tends to get removed, while others are complacent.
just because the job title is different, doesn't necessarily mean aspects of the jobs are any different.

Actually, I think you missed an essential point. In academia, publishing is usually a job requirement and key part of career advancement. This is what Seth means when he says it's part of their jobs. He is not saying it's part of their job just because they teach, there are plenty of people who teach things but are not required to publish.

distribute the same materials for free

Seth is not saying this. He is emphatically not suggesting that texbooks should be distributed for free. There is no "same materials" stated or implied.
There is a problem with the submitted essay that is a common problem with many essays on lesswrong: it writes about a matter that developed historically with insufficient examination of the history of the matter. Maybe the people submitting articles to lesswrong need to read more history more often.

The American two-party system is remarkable in how much the two parties do NOT insist on long-term ideological consistency. Each party shifts its positions and adds and subtracts party platform planks as new third parties introduce net points of view into political discourse. The parties are stable because their positions on issues are very unstable. If you compare the party platforms of the Republican Party and the Democratic Party to those of a century ago, you will see on many issues a complete role reversal of the parties. Similarly, which party is more favored by southern voters or which party is more favored by black voters is far less stable than the general tendency that black voters and southern voters only occasionally favor the same party.
incidentally, i'm still using memcachedb to store sessions and it seems to be working fine. i think the abstraction leaks under high loads which lock the underlying database.
Is it me, or is it funny that on the job postings are the bevvy of links (Reddit, Digg, Delicious, Twitter, etc) when this is supposed to be Reddit?

Also, 'reddit this' is nowhere near as catchy as 'Spreddit', which is a verb, and a clever word.
Isn't cruel to subject AIs to such environment?
This view of historiography goes back about two millenia years in China. A corrupt regime loses the "mandate of Heaven" and a new regime takes its place by conquest.
DDOS attacks on Iran's web-sites: what a stupid idea
Interesting take on things. One thing that gets me though is when people try way too hard to convince you to use something. That can sometimes backfire. You start wondering if there's a cult involved or if they're on commission.

Examples would be git,twitter,rails,etc - basically all the 'hip cool so hot right now!!!' stuff.

I think the other thing is that 'early adopter' can be confused with 'shameless fashion follower'. The difference there is easy to see in hindsight, but a little trickier when you don't yet know how big something is going to be.

There's no doubt though that this industry has tons of 'fashions', with people being in the 'in crowd', using the 'in tools', then a couple of years later ditching all that and moving onto the next hyped up thing and starting again from scratch.

Perhaps I'm just getting old ;)
Burke? Is that you?

"Aristocracy and monarchy are historically superior to universal suffrage representative democracy."

If this were true, then where are all of the great monarchies?

We're veering off into historicism versus reductionism here. I don't think there has to be as much of a conflict as some do, but it's best to leave that for another day.
Tire treads are mostly to prevent hydroplaning.

(Bicycle tires can't hydroplane, at least not at bicycle speed, and therefore road bike tires don't have treads. Treads reduce the contact area between the tire and the road, resulting in worse traction than a perfectly smooth tire.)
When you create 12 new accounts to upvote it.
Young, Urban, and Not so Tech Savvy
I'd think the name you'd decide to market under would be highly relevant to the whole rebranding exercise. There's usually some thought into spelling and slang use for many logos and brands. (The reversed "R" in Toys 'R Us, comes to mind.)
You posted a random job ad to Hacker News and it got flagged. Part of what makes Hacker News Hacker News is that established people in the community can snipe off-topic posts from the site, and that happened to you.
> Secret URL - how am I going to remember it?

Bookmark it.
Ask HN: please review my project - baseloop.com
Ok, but i see ycombinator related jobs all the time. So this is only for ycomb jobs?
You made an important point. I am interested in the enterprise space. The old way of making a sale is to send a salesman out and have him convince some executive committee to purchase your product. The sales cycle is 6 months or more and the price has to be somewhere north of $100K to pay for it all.

If you go with the easy in, easy out approach, the customer, most likely at the department or tech level, tries out your product as SaaS, with self-service If he likes it, he signs up with a subscription. The benefits are lower sales cost, a shorter sales cycle, and less time spent on tire kickers. You are probably getting revenue in 2 or 3 months.
in the end everyone needs to admit that email is still the way most people go

I think this is right. For us, it's collaboration tool and email, not collaboration tool or email.

We're using email + Google Docs -- pretty barebones, but the basic mechanisms work. This is for a loose, geographically distributed, sometimes amorphous group that is very resistant to adopting and converging on new technology tools -- not due to technophobia-- people are too busy doing experiments, writing grants, etc. Every new tool has high activation energy.

[Side comment: One reason I don't like non-email collaboration tools because they make it hard to own my history. With email, I have my own copy of what I was told and what I said. I'll have it after I leave the job; I have it when I'm offline. I can search it. I can do what I want with it. It won't disappear when the hosting company goes offline, or the hosting tool becomes obsolete. I don't think other people care about this as much as I do...]
I think that this couldn't and shouldn't happen.
It couldn't happen because of the services are provided by third parties.

First open apis vary greatly from one service provider to another - and this differs _vastly_ from the plan9 idea of unificating everything as a file. And do you really expect google apps to communicate with their microsoft counterparts ?

Second, I could hardly describe the web as having a unified user experience.

Third, and this is the most important thing, is that you're describing a closed system. What if I want to make something my service provider didn't think of ?
Hmmmm.... thanks! I saw that, and it was killed. I wonder why though, i certainly did not think it was spammy, and I took a lot of care to write it in a way that I thought the community will appreciate
What about sports though? For example football players transferring teams, suddenly being apart from their families, having to train in quick bursts, suddenly being in the playoffs/world cup/etc.

Seems very unpredictable to me. Plenty of other professions that are like that, I'd expect Musician, Actor, Artist to be pretty unpredictable/high stress.
From the blog post:
"Video aspect? Let YouTube handle that part. E-Commerce aspect? Use Amazon’s system. Payments? PayPal. Social networking? Facebook.

Don’t reinvent any of these wheels. Focus on what’s left – what hasn’t been done."

If you take what's been written literally, what did iPhone do in their first release that hasn't been done already?
IMO Apple's greatest addition is their app store. And it came later in the cycle.
while i don't necessarily agree with the drivers of why you're doing this, i have to admit that it is something i've considered doing myself in some form.

would love to hear more about what you're doing and/or how you're doing it.
Hi Paul, this is an misunderstanding - All I did was to tweet about it using an twitter account that was popular. @mrtweet had about 200,000 followers, so it is inevitable that some of them created accounts to vote it. I definitely did not create any new accounts.
That's a nice thought but in reality it's not the way scarcity works in an economy.

How much you pay an employee has only a tangential relation to the value that employee produces for its customers (both internal and external).

Only so far as it could contribute to a cost structure that could lead to a rev model that a consumer doesn't find value in. (COULD being operative because many businesses have a few of these top-heavy roles that are absorbed elsewhere).

If you can't innovate your way out of it, and you can't scale your way out of it, you have no choice but to raise prices. If that breaks the camels back, so to speak, we have a name for that: It's called a poor business model.

This applies to materials and services as well. Scarcity in Economics 101.
Your submission got killed. Not the end of the world. Find something relevant to post (maybe something not about you), and get on with your life and your startup. Best of luck.
Whatever.

Half of what he suggests is devoted to "Ideas to save Newspaper Websites". ...which is not quite the same thing.

The other half seem to say in various ways, "don't be so much like a newspaper."

Not bad ideas: just not powerful enough to revolutionize fundamental, entrenched, sickly aspects of their aged business plans.
Vooices controls web apps with voice - and could verify celebs on Twitter
not really sure how successful you're going to be with people giving you their email password.. isn't there a way to do that via the google api?