skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I agree essentially with you but I don't think that's really why Ron Paul did so poorly. Ron Paul did poorly because he was always going to do poorly. He was kind of an older looking guy who said a lot of funny things and was kind of a curmudgeon.

Most people don't even know what libertarianism is or that he was one. Then many people who know he was a member of the Libertarian party don't really know the difference between those people and your garden variety Republican.

But you are right in that the majority of Americans aren't libertarians anyway. Most people (Republican, Democrat, "Independent," haha, whatever) actually do want the government to tell us what we can and can't put in our own bodies. Even the "Legalize Marijuana" people are somewhat hypocritical. They say "legalize pot, it's not as bad or heroin."

Oddly enough, most Republicans (the old white guys) actually want social security, which you would think they would view as anathema communist propaganda.

American politics are very strange.
But since online poker winnings are technically illegal in the US, doesn't that invalidate any legal standing over them, similar to how gambling debts are unenforceable?
Oblivion used to be much deeper than -8. It must help.
To be fair, I didn't know that google would be offering portability until I read the story on TC. Sure I could follow Google's blog, but I don't. Maybe I'm just really good at ignoring Arrington's drama, but I really appreciate the information I get from TC.

And when a TC story ends up on the HN front page, I enjoy reading HN comments. Because there is no way in hell that I'm going to read the comments directly on the TC article.
I'd be interested in seeing estimates on how many such servers are still being used. I've never come across one.
Get A Job With Reddit Jobs. Or At Least Vote On One.
My point on why it was a poorly written story was that he implied it was some sort of "secret" which he was breaking. Sure, most people missed the google voice FAQ which talked about this, but don't call it something it was not. Even if it was good, useful information, calling it a "secret" is a bit self-important.

And completely agreed with your point on HN comments for TC stories. That is a nice side-effect.
Direct democracy does not solve the problem, see California. The Swiss cantons work well because they are small. Direct democracy does not scale.

One of the best ideas for reform I've heard is the idea of unpredictable elections, a la Venice. See: http://unenumerated.blogspot.com/2008/03/unpredictable-elect...
I don't think any serious research ever posited that nature can't survive the after-effects of human activity.

The issue is that if we allow motor oil, lead, mercury, etc to become part of the ecosystem, then nature will no longer be friendly to -us-.

Consider that we already live in a world where one must ration their fish intake for fear of mercury poisoning.
If you are a Small & medium business this is something exclusively for you
Theres a flipside to that envy though: The time needed to make sure the html+css+javascript renders the same on all the different browsers and their different versions.

... especially when they like to radically change everything all the time for no good reason. I'm looking at you IE.

Why couldn't they just use mozilla or webkit, and concentrate on adding innovative features like chrome did.
That doesn't really make sense though. Strictly speaking, evolutionary theory and natural selection, etc describe a theory about a process. I don't think the veracity of evolutionary theory or the explanatory power of it is contingent on how well proponents of it can evaluate the specific "uses" of adapatations.

ID is such a reactionary and contentless view that I find them actually far sillier than outright creationists like Kent Hovind; at least they are honest.
Ask HN: Is MemcacheDB a leaky abstraction?
I've been experimenting with memcachedb and I've run into some problems which I think are pretty fundamental to the project. I'm coming to the conclusion that it's an architecture issue - memcachedb is a persistent database abstracted behind an interface specifically designed for non-persistence.

Basically, I found that under high read/write loads I get occasional socket timeouts (tested on linux/osx). I think the underlying reason for the timeouts are Berkeley DB locks when data gets flushed to disk. Beyond the hassle of getting intermittent socket timeouts the real problem is that the memcache client API fails gracefully because it was specifically designed to be fault tolerant. You can check for socket errors and retry queries but you'll still get unpredictable query times.

I'm curious if other people have worked with memcachedb and have had similar experiences. Given the architecture, what types of applications it is useful for?
Why Do We Love Rounded Corners?
A Million Ways to Make a Million Dollars
If there was a designer of the human, "intelligent" isn't the adjective I'd use-- it seems more hacked together than engineered....
As far as the site, it looks great! I had a couple of quick thoughts as I looked through it but overall everything was really easy to understand.

Pricing - I was a little confused by the pricing (dollars vs. pounds) perhaps you could make the currency sign stand out a little more since I didn't notice it at first and was wondering what the difference was between the 10 and 15 plans were.

Support - I'm curious how offering phone support for the free product has worked so far. I'm not sure I've ever seen it before (not saying it's a bad thing, just something which I would imagine would be tough to scale).

Signup - Instead of directing everyone to the free signup page, you might want to think about directing them to the pricing page so that they have the opportunity to purchase the non-free plan right away.

Signup - Have you thought about listing out the metrics that are available in the free vs. non-free plans under the plans? It seems to me that those are a part of the core functionality which is important to users.
That could be a fun website for tech fans, where you have to fill in the blanks. Here are a few recent ones:

Palm Pre - Apple
iPhone 3GS - Palm
Twitter Mahmoud Ahmadinejad
>> "So, if you want to get an audience"

An audience of other people trying to get an audience, and some random odd techie types that read TC. What I'm saying is, the audience of TC is unlikely to be your target market.
De-Dollarization: Dismantling America’s Financial-Military Empire
Pretty much yeah. I am advocate of the so-called "Great Books" or canon curriculum. I think it is pedagogically sound and undoubtedly very cheap. The source material for many mathematics and physics work can be had for a few dollars a book. Although, I admit, it is still very debatable if Great Books is really pedagogically sound; I'm just a fan!
It misses tea/coffe for "What do you typically tend to drink when you eat dinner at home?"
Ehh.
The 2006 slides linked in the article (.ppt, not PDF) mentioned, in page 14, that the plate would be oscillating at 800 Hz (moving +/- 80 micron).

The current website page, http://www.dataslide.com/technology.html , appears to say 250 micron, no frequency given.

Anyway, it's a lot more than 64 read-write heads, but only 64 are used at a time. Still looking at millisecond latency, if the 800 Hz holds.
Thanks for the tip! Going in to change mine now....
Yeah, until their parents pawn it to put food on the table. What a horrible idea.
To say that people are not smart enough to run their own affairs is quite interesting. I'm not sure how to reply to that.

Say we converted social news sites into voting platforms. Would you rather be ruled be Hacker News or Digg?

Votes are power, not freedom. I believe the average person is smart enough to run his own affairs. I do not believe the average person is smart enough to run my affairs.
Seems like it lies and says 1/n people agreed with you when it doesn't have enough data. I've gotten 1/n so many times.
Here be dragons. Be afraid. Be very afraid.
It should be pointed out that Engineering education is broken. For some reason they take it as a point of pride that 50% of engineering students drop out (or fail) in the first year. To my opinion, eating your young is something to be ashamed of. No wonder there's a lack of work force if they're creating this huge obstacle to success.

As for salary, a good Engineer can be making over 100,000 five years out of school. It's not f&k you* money, but it's nothing to shrug off.
Professional journalist.

Any there any left?
Use reddit to get a job (or hire someone who can deftly pun)
Hunch is fun to play with. However, it really needs more data and more people to be truly helpful when it comes to decison-making. I say, give it some time. If it catches on, it could be really cool.
It seems to be nice and speedy now... much speedier than it was 15 minutes ago, at least!
“When you do things right, people won’t be sure you’ve done anything at all.”
What about it is awesome, exactly? I keep trying to give it a fair shake, but it's not got the critical mass of awesomeness to make me give up something familiar. In fact, I don't see a single thing about it better than what I'm used to.

I don't mind switching, but I honestly don't see any advantage to doing so. But I'm probably missing something, so am looking for knowledge from others. The only concrete thing I've gotten so far is from a buddy of mine who works for MS, so ... not quite unbiased, there.
That's like saying "We've all been to the doctor's office, therefore we are all qualified to discuss how diagnose and treat Guillain-Barré syndrome."
Thoughts as I browse your site:

What's with the logo? I see an "s" and a ???

Beautiful layout. Simple, elegant, informative: makes me really trust your service.

Oo, phone numbers! Very, very, very nice touch.

I wish there was US billing. I'm a little wary that my card will be charged in Sterling. Is "converted upon payment" a way of saying that my card will convert or that you'll convert and charge my card in USD? Also, I find it's good practice to just settle on an international price even if that means that sometimes different currencies see a discount/overcharge.

A volume discount would be nice. Monitoring 10 servers right now would run £100. Maybe do something like, £10/server for the first 5, £6/server for 6-20, and £3 for 21+. I'm guessing that the service doesn't put a lot of load on your box and a big client with an IT department who won't be wasting a lot of your time, but has a lot of boxes to monitor would be a catch. Small customers are sometimes the most hassle so offer volume discounts.

Nice to see an alive blog with actual interesting things on it rather than a simple "we have a blog" PR-type thing.

I gotta say, it looks mighty impressive. Clean, good looking, you seem to know your stuff, I don't have many questions. Really, the big issue I see is that there is no volume discount. I'd guess that the cost of dealing with two customers each monitoring one server is higher than one customer monitoring two servers. Especially as that number goes up - if I'm a network admin monitoring 50 boxes for a company, I know what I'm doing and will figure out things to a greater extent than some random one server person.

Very nice! Good luck!
no one up or down mod me anymore please. Leave it at 8

8-D
"I believe the average person is smart enough to run his own affairs. I do not believe the average person is smart enough to run my affairs."

Neither do I. And I don't believe it is a matter of smarts. I don't believe anybody should run my affairs, smart or not.

But that's a structural question: the limits of voting power. Can the majority force the minority into slavery? Can the majority overtax the minority? Etc. All great structural questions.

Or to put it in a non-political venue: should database designers have final say over persistence mechanisms on a team? Should teams vote to decide what they can accomplish by a milestone or should a few decide?
just thought i'd add (as i try and think about this) maybe it could work more like twitturly, but provide a simple upload and hosting mechanism for bands wanting to get their tunes out there..
As someone who uses TextMate every day, I still don't really understand the TextMate hype. It's a decent editor, but I still prefer UltraEdit (from back when I was using Windows, obviously). There's just too many little things TextMate doesn't get right.

Two examples that come to mind right away is the fact that TextMate cannot handle large files (tsk, tsk... ) and the inability to edit in hex mode.
The manufacturer who adds extra "beef" to its structure ends up with a heavier
airplane that carries fewer passengers or uses more fuel, and loses sales to the
lighter and more efficient, though "weaker," competitor. The same is true of
cars. We willingly sacrifice greater safety to get cheaper, more
fuel-efficient vehicles.

If this wasn't published by a U.S. based paper, I'd think this writer was European or something. The historical trend (prior to the recent price hikes with gas of the last couple of years) has been the direct opposite. Americans were buying bigger and beefier cars (read: SUVs and minivans) to protect themselves and any children. (The whole "soccer mom" phenomenon, remember?) This was a contributing factor to the implosion of the U.S. car industry, since they faced selective pressures at home that caused them to develop vehicles that didn't sell as well to the world at large. And now that fuel prices are starting to invert the equation, foreign auto makers are eating our lunch,
Review HN: 1clickwebpage - the easiest way to build a webpage
Tire treads?
Digging Deeper into Sufficiently Smartness
LOGO Design, Vol. 2 Book Review
The latest logo design book from TASCHEN, entitled LOGO Design, Vol. 2, just arrived at my office on Tuesday. It is a follow-up to the popular first volume entitled LOGO Design, Vol. 1.
"Ok, well seeing as you're trying to be a smartass..."

I think you misspelled "Socratic".
Nokia N97 Latest Firmware Update
Greetings! If you're hiring, here's 50% off a 30day job posting: coupon code "HackerNews" (no quotes).

Granted, it's the same deal as the TechCrunch coupon, but it says HackerNews in the coupon!

And if you'd like to learn more about redditjobs (and the meaning of life) read this entry: http://blog.reddit.com/2009/06/reddit-already-helps-you-wast...
ID is a "contentless view" as evolutionary theory is since some of the views of ID are negations of views of evolutionary theory.
This is not bad, but I can't see how it can be good or useful, which people are you targeting with your service?
Ideas That Might Save Local Newspapers
Tell HN: Mr. Tweet / Discoverio looking for a great hacker to join our SF team
We are building a brand new type of recommendation system focused on leveraging on all the open attention data being produced, and we are looking for a super smart hacker to work together with us.

We are seed funded by a top angel investor, based in SF, and made up of 4 full time, 3 part time folks. We are built on Rails/EC2. We have over 200K users right now, and we have some very concrete plans on expanding MrTweet into a seriously cool business

Besides being hardcore data folks, we also think a lot about how to build discovery systems and incentive design in order to best leverage the data - our presentation on "Discovery is the new cocaine" recently hit the front page of HN. =) http://is.gd/op2

Ideally, we are looking for a smart hacker who preferably has experience working with very large datasets, understands the basics of recommendation engines, and loves the idea of working in a startup which iterates rapidly based on user feedback. If you do not have much experience, but learns extremely fast, please get in touch too!

Any questions - comment away, or contact us at mingyeow@mrtweet.com / 650 283 6558. Referrals are very much appreciated too. Thank you all, we love HN! =)
Small UI Changes = Big Results
Server: Microsoft-IIS/7.0
X-AspNet-Version: 2.0.50727
X-Powered-By: ASP.NET

Lisp!!!->python->asp??? I'm just damn confused now ;) What's next? Frontpage? ActiveX?

Cool idea though :)
A couple of things:

a) The site should say a ton more on the front page. Frankly I don't really understand what it does. Is it a standalone job board, or do the listings automatically appear on the the actual reddit site?

b) Starting price is fairly high. If the thing will automatically appear on reddit, then it might be justified somewhat, but even then, its pretty easy to get frontpage on programming reddit. If the thing doesn't appear on reddit, then the prices are just plain insane, why would I pay $300 or even $175 for something that gets no traffic.

c) If I like the job, why would I upvote it so that I get more competition?
Within a territory, you'll always have one actor who is the ultimate arbiter - ie, the government. Ideally, that government would be a neutral judge who simply enforces common law, and not a meddlesome theocrat who tells me how to live. But what selection process is most likely to result in arbiter that pleases you? Selection by Hacker News, or selection by Digg?
(EDITOR'S NOTE: Oops. This turned into more of a treatise than I'd realized. I hope this is useful stuff, and not too nit-picky. I also see I'm the only one so far mentioning these things, and I'm interested anyway, so maybe I'm just being cranky. :-)

Your video is great, and the site design itself is quite nice, but the content itself may need to be fleshed out and reworked a bit - I'm generally not a huge screencast watcher, and if I didn't have an interest in the product I might've clicked past almost immediately.

For an example, I didn't realize that the screenshots were clickable at first glance. When I clicked on them I get a screenshot that's too large and zoomed out. Add some indicator that they're clickable, crop it down to what's really important (no window dressing) and make sure it'll fit on a window that's reasonably sized.

I'd also consider some sort of in-line image display technique or gallery, so you can illustrate exactly what you want the potential customer to see and take away from the screen - when I click on the screenshot, the text explaining what I'm looking at goes away.

Even the details themselves don't seem quite fleshed out enough. What data is being reported? In order to find that out, I have to go to the pricing page, then look at a footnote in difficult-to-read text at the bottom of the page. (In fact, get rid of the footnotes entirely. They make you look like you have something to hide - but nothing in the footnotes looks particularly bad.) Don't make me think - I might only give your page a few seconds to convince me, so tell me why your process snapshots are cool and useful if I'm trying to diagnose a problem (you do a better job of that in the video). Graphs, while handy, are boring on their own - tell me what data is being graphed, why your graphs are better, and why they'll help me keep my servers online.

To borrow from Kathy Sierra, your goal is to make me understand how and why your product is going to help me kick ass - in your case, why your product will help me keep my servers running smoothly and my clients happy. A few bullet points (while really good to have! seriously, after I decide your product is intriguing, the next thing I'll want to know is what it does) isn't quite enough on its own to make me understand why I want your product.

This all might be a moot point, however, since I already like the idea of the product itself, and that was after the lack of details basically forced me to watch your well-put-together video... so maybe it's working better than I thought. :-)
Not for me.. I did 440 questions, and I'm really impressed by the stats after each.

I'm getting realistic numbers.
Startup 127: Term Sheet – Voting Rights and Protective Provisions
Homeless in The Sims 3
The two meanings of mathematical terms
This post explains how in a venture backed startup, preferred shareholders get special voting rights and protective provisions over some pretty important decisions.
Wouldn't it have been better to just send the packet to the network if said software was detected? After all, it was supposed to be a network test - hopefully at least you replaced it with another network test?
Ruby on Rails with Flex
yeah, I was a little worried that it's too early to be useful, but like I said on the about page, it's for throwing up a quick piece of info on the web, like directions to a party, or a user group meeting. Or, placeholder pages for any sort of organization.

eventually, it'll grow into a full site builder and a mailing list and a way to charge people for events/merchandise. more here: http://blog.groupped.com/

I'm just going really slow trying to balance the consulting gig and this and a few other ideas at the same time. Hence the launch to atleast get SOMETHING out there. Thanks for the feedback.
hurriedly shuts down Frontpage

Oh, uh, what do you mean?

Actually, these gents are responsible for everything you see on redditjobs.com except for the alien in a suit: http://www.jobalchemist.com/
The actual blog is here: http://aliceandkev.wordpress.com/
It's how god brands his flock
Not too bad, you definitely make it easy, but not having the ability to float/justify anything other than left is a big problem, and the output just looks really plain.

Some options to customize the colors of the page background and putting a little padding between the footer and the end of 'my' page would also be nice.
So what's wrong with jEdit? I've used it on Windows, OSX, and Linux and found it identical in each. It has highly customizable syntax highlighting, and is easy to learn. (Some seem to find the UI ugly, but I don't.)
I originally thought TC was like a tabloid. Now, after thinking about it, I've come to a conclusion that there's a better analogy: it's like cable news.

The things you see on cable news (e.g., CNN, MSNBC, Fox News, etc.) are, most of the time, not really "news". They're trumped-up soundbyte stories which are "broken" at times calculated to keep eyeballs on the screen. The information reported is often wrong and corrections are rarely made. Sensationalism and reporting any controversy one can find, no matter how minor, is the order of the day. Popular stories/subjects, when discovered, are turned into repeating segments to milk them for all they're worth.

And, of course, people who rely on cable news outlets for actual news will come away fairly poorly informed on the state of the world.

But all of the above apply equally well to TC. It's just another big American infotainment outlet, working to make money off something-that-maybe-kinda-looks-like-news.

Which is why I don't read TC, and feel frustration with people who (as on this site) obsess about it and constantly link to it. Mentally, I class such people with folks in real life who want to tell me all about the latest thing they heard on Fox News.
Read the comments on the blog, actually a lot more insightful then his post
Man, I hope you never wind up in a hospital with your nurse reading that comment.
Two examples of failure of the market. If everyone was driving light fuel-efficient cars, then engineering quality, not greater mass, would be the dominant safety factor for the buyer. Also, the market seems to drive the lightness of the tail on an airliner right down to the limits set by the regulations. If the market was doing what it should, then engineers would stop short.
The default page name "MyFirstWebPage" was already taken when I tried to create it. I'd just make the user enter something in here since I'd imagine it's pretty unlikely that you'll be able to default it to something the user is going to end up using.
10 iPhone Accessories We'd Love To Have