skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I'm not sure that the entire premise of "representative democracy" is that you can have highly emotional factions and yet still ahve a productive conversation ... I'm not sure where that language derives.I think it's not that complicated: a representative democracy is simply democracy less a people's majority rule.

Part of the problem is the most people aren't very smart, certainly not smart enough to run a government or think about issues in sane or at least non-simplistic terms.

As far as teams that have divergent personalities but still manage to perform, it depends on what you mean. There's a lot of factors there.

My point was that there is probaby not some technology (at least non-invase/non-mind-altering) that can solve problems of "group-think" or "us vs them" or whatever kinds of problems. Even if you just look at how religion affects politics, with the fairly reasonable assumption that you aren't going to get rid of it, it seems hard to see how you would construct a technology to solve such problems. I don't know what that would mean, really.
I'm rather sick of the internet's armchair critics and non-contributing zeros. Anyone can have any opinion (and unfortunately the internet makes that too easy), few people can actually make a difference.

You'd think all the TC haters could build a thriving blog and community with their vast knowledge and experience of 'failure', but since they can't scale a simple WordPress blog with modest traffic — I'm not hopeful. It's taken over 10 minutes to load the page. Even more ironic, it's a linkbait headline with less than stellar content.
I admit I kind of new to the startup scene, but why is it I hear that getting mentioned on TC is worth it's weight in gold? It looks like a less frequently updated, bad copy of Engadget or Gizmodo than anything else. Not sure if the linked article is accurate or not, but I'm not sure why there is all this love/hate towards TC?

I find WAY more interesting articles and discussions here on HN. Plus the discussions and comments here are hands down better than the 4chan crap on those other sites (TC, Engadget, Gizmodo, etc).
I don't think things win market share by how cool or powerful they are - e.g. Betamax vs. VHS OR SPARC vs. x86 OR Haskell vs. C. Why something becomes popular has to do a lot with timing, price and creating something that's "good enough".

Other than this, plan9 is/was really cool and has a lot of interesting concepts (like a distributed architecture).
Looks cool, but get "Hunch encountered an error.
Please Refresh the page to retry." each time.

Probably under high load at the moment.
Or you can put it otherwise: If Google can't afford to ask artists to do something for free, then who can? (Meaning that there will always be enough 'good enough' fan bois that they don't need the high profile artists.)
What makes it right for you to take down an Iranian government website, but wrong for someone in Iran to take down a US government website, or for someone in China to take down the Dalai Lama's website?
Imagine Breaking Up The United States
I'm afraid I'm not motivated enough to use your motivational tricks. Circular dependency!
I thought Reuters already solved the "Suck More Than TechCrunch Problem?"
PageRank. That's about it as far as I can see.
I guess the blind spot on our retinas also must show the super intelligent attention to detail.
It's sooo slow. Best to wait a few days I think.
Boston Celtics tap the cloud
That is how he presents it.

There doesn't have to be a conscious, collaborative effort by Your Politicians and Their Politicians to keep the Voters screaming at each other, so that they don't notice the increasing gap between the Voters and the Politicians. There doesn't have to be a conspiracy. It emerges from the interests of the individual politicians in getting you to identify with them instead of judging them.

He calls it a "swindle" because whatever reservations politicians have with their party, they all try to get you to identify with themselves.
Fascinating comment.

Part of the problem is the most people aren't very smart, certainly not smart enough to run a government or think about issues in sane or at least non-simplistic terms.

Then why do people have the ability to vote? That's my point: from simple people complex systems form and operate. 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.

But switching to the technology side, with the internet we already have some examples of voting and filtering in action. For instance, there are probably a thousand bad, emotional blog entries for each one that gets upvoted on HN. It's just a matter of appropriate filtering and selection criteria.

Let's suppose instead of voting items up or down we categorize them by how they emotionally affect the reader. Over time, the system could provide an appropriate mix of interesting, insightful, and sometimes maddening material for me to consume. My "tolerance level" would be determined by how emotionally I responded to certain stimulus. The system would keep things emotional, but not so much as to not have a cohesive discussion.

That's a broad outline of one solution. There are others.
My immediate gut feeling to an ad is - to refuse.
Great teachers are often willing to sacrifice pay for the ability to teach at a great school, to be allowed to teach to the best of their abilities, to be able to hold their students to a higher standard.
I completely agree. This seems like a faux fight for the sake of keeping the hum about their tablet going.
Sales Rep? Are they kidding? Are monkeys at the Zoo not reproducing during the "recession?"
"Winning" by Jack Welch http://budurl.com/vsz3 One of the best books I've ever read about business. The ideas presented work well in startups or larger corporations. The section about "candor" fantastic.
Given how utterly cool plan9 is, I have some difficulty understanding how they so completely failed to find a userbase.

I think the reason it never became popular is that the existing popular operating systems have been (to this point) good enough. There just hasn't been a compelling enough reason to invest the time and energy in switching. I think the only way you'll see a large switch is if a "killer app" comes out which takes advantage of Plan 9's features which wouldn't be possible on other OSs.
I agree, and I also think that for something to be legitimate civil disobedience, you have to at least be a member of the civil society that you're disobeying. While there might be some westerners of Iranian descent involved in the denial of service attacks, most of the people involved probably are not directly connected to Iranian society.
Thanks!

"Photo-slide shows" on the web need to die, anytime I see one, I never click on it. These ad-spam on these things is nearing the annoyance levels of most porn sites..
I've been teaching myself how to program, and I've found this link on SO to have all the links hackers send when people ask them "how do I learn to program?":

http://stackoverflow.com/questions/3088/best-ways-to-teach-a...
Email clients are known for handling HTML in a variety of broken ways, one worse than the other. From what I remember Notes is the worst one to handle, followed by Outlook. Since a few people use those clients, writing stuff they can display is required.

A funny thing I've read is that Outlook 2007 is apparently worse than the 2003 version. See e.g. http://www.google.se/search?q=outlook+html+rendering
Actually, one of the major problems in filling teaching jobs in the USA is the hiring process itself. If schools organized their hiring processes better, they could create a pool of qualified teachers looking for a job. As it happens, it's very difficult to navigate the job search and hiring processes at individual schools. The result: a lot of out of work teachers, and a lot of open positions for teachers.
Yeah..the TechCrunch and Coding Horror hating is getting a little tired...I'm not sure what the agenda is...are they spurned startups?
This sounds cool, but I think I will just make a jumble if I try to actually use it. What I like most about closures in most languages is how quickly it lets you work. In C, I don't want to work quickly. I need to be methodical and pay close attention to detail -- this usually means I'm going to keep track of what I'm doing both in my head, in notes I'm taking, and in the actual C code. Passing pointers along with the callbacks (for example) isn't such a big deal when I'm already doing all of this extra work.

I mean, I'm writing C in the first place since I'm doing something low-level, something that needs careful optimization, implementing some kind of base system for something else, etc. Otherwise I'd just use a higher level language.

In the context of Obj-C it makes more sense, though, since you're already writing C while working with a higher-level language, too. You use obj-c objects if you need refcounting or GC at the moment; I can definitely see the usefulness of having closures in C. I know lots of people will probably use it just fine, but for me, I think I would just make a hash of my own code.

Or maybe when I give it a shot it'll work out fine. Ok done with rant :)
The job titles leave a lot to be desired.

There are many types of engineers, many subjects to teach, countless things to sell, etc etc.

Not to mention packaged in a needlessly complex UI of distracting photos. The Driver page says "specifically truck drivers" and then shows a photo of a limo.
Yes, I apologize for my sloppy statement.

I realize Emacs does a lot of the work for you. It's just that I've worked with some of these mode packages over the years and have been impressed with the complexity they embody and the size of the code involved.

Textmate seems to avoid most of that complexity with its declarative system, and still give you syntax highlighting and auto-indenting, etc.
The guy sitting next to me has a Masters in structural engendering from MIT. Yet, he is currently doing statics work, because it's better pay for less effort.

He has friends who went into investment banking and are making 7 figures yet the idea of 100k right out of school is supposed to be a great job. The real choice in his mind was extreme pay for 90 hour work weeks or reasonable pay for a 9-5. And Engineering is neither of those.
Because when you attack something, you are attacking the people that hold it?

In the United States, every citizen owns part of every government website, so to attack one is to attack us all.

In a sham government, it's just some assholes who pretend to represent the people that own the buildings and websites, and they do so by use of force. To attack those websites is to attack those people, and some people deserved to be attacked.

I have no obligation to view the legitimate property of a democracy in the same way as a bunch of thugs ruling a country by force of arms. They are not equivalent.

I'm not advocating one way or another -- in fact, I'm opposed in this instance. But your question deserved an answer. And it didn't look like you were able to come up with one.
The Incredible Importance of Being a Founder
I was hoping for something a little more self-aware, like: "Spend eighteen hours a day breaking stories that are important to the tech community, and zero hours per day talking back to critics. Admit that your goal is to be the first to report, not the last word," etc.
You're confused. Microsoft isn't innovating here either. They're paying someone to innovate. That's why it's called "commission".

If Apple employed great type designers and was giving them nothing to do, that'd be a problem. But there's been no shortage of great font releases without Apple's patronage -- and all these releases can be installed on a Mac. So what's your real problem here?
Did they FTFF too, or did they just rewrite it? I have not tried Snow Leopard.
employers refuse to raise wages because consumers do not derive enough value from the work to pay higher prices
to be not prepared to traffic on launch is not a great idea... if you are well known in the field and visits will start to be high at day 0
Legend has it that after AT&T stomped all over their fun little research OS by turning it into a popular product and all the tedious concerns like "backward compatibility" that entails, the creators of Unix got together and said, 'right, we'll make a new OS and give it the least marketable name we can imagine so that it will never be taken away from us and ossified'.

Although I've never used Plan 9 myself (I don't think I've ever owned hardware it would boot on), I am impressed by the features I've read about, and I wish it had become more popular... but on the other hand, I'm quite happy with the chording-free and keyboard-friendly UIs I have available.
Successtrophe!
I think this will be a neat feature for Obj-C, but it'd be a neat concept (not in this implementation) for C/C++. Closures/lambdas aren't greatly leaving the strict language world, but they ease development vastly. I'd like to see closures being added/removed as if they were an array/vector/something in C/C++.
Samsung SGH-X510 – A Securer
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Textbook publishing is a juggernaut, and California is one of its big movers. Here's a great article that appeared on HN a month ago explaining the industry's inner workings:

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=598523
1. I see your point about it coming down to his job definition - the question then is, is there a difference between consulting and being tenured?

2. I think it's not about books being out of date, it's about the ideas not originating from the authors. After giving that one some more thought, I think I disagree (if this is what Godin meant at all) that that makes a difference.
Also grip tends to have little to do with friction. When moving heavy objects you curl your fingers around it vs. laying your hand flat and trusting in friction. If anything reducing friction might be a good idea because you can better position your hands for optimum grip.

Edit: When you move a couch you curl you fingers under an edge, hold onto a tree branch you curl your fingers around it etc. Climbing a tree can involve friction but usually it’s griping the texture of the bark.

PS: Consider how you would hold a wet wine glass.
It's a small and cheap laptop that runs everything people need. There is nothing strange about people wanting it. If I sold a small and cheap car that got me where I wanted, people would buy it too.
A 140 character message is not always enough to give a complete thought. Complete thought-based communication is more important than bursts of small messages that give rise to the digg bar and cause the craving for more and more communication because you are not really getting true interaction with the other person.

On the other hand I love how someone posted on facebook that they are going on vacation and had their house broken into since people knew no one was there.

O well Twitter and Facebook still baffle me, no idea why people use them.
Is this guy MIME encoding everything in base64 or quoted-printable?

Last time I checked email could only be 7bit ascii because of many legacy servers.
The only thing that Google Voice seems to do that Vonage doesn't is filter your incoming calls based on rules. That would be handy, but not the "killer app".

Hmm, I think this may indeed turn out to be a killer app. Guess we'll find out soon enough.
Interview: Caterina Fake of Hunch.com
A tool to do what? Get some hype from bored-at-work followers?
Ask HN: Review my product - Server Density
"Monitor CPU load, memory usage, processes, disk usage and Apache status. Keep an eye on your servers and get e-mail/SMS alerts when things go wrong."

http://www.serverdensity.com

There are a lot of monitoring services available for up/down monitoring (e.g. Pingdom) or very detailed, complex monitoring (e.g. Hyperic/Nagios). The aim of Server Density is make internal (CPU load, disk space etc) monitoring as easy as possible as a hosted service.
A Few Things You Didn’t Know about Signals in Linux Part 1
Love your games man. Keep up the good work.
Because a large number of investors and potential clients read Techcrunch, so having your startup mentioned on the site does a lot for your notoriety amongst the business crowd. While Hacker News, Engadget and Gizmodo might be more interesting to us hackers, their audiences expose your company to fewer business prospects.
DataSlide's Hard Rectangular Drive - 64 parallel read-write heads
Drama leads to audience. TC is a master at drama (with product, people, and organization). So, if you want to get an audience, get into Techcrunch. However, I would agree the product has to be good, otherwise, it is just a big spike for nothing.
LoseThos V5.07 Released: 64-bit Open Source Operating System
The site seems to store your password in plain text or 2 way hash. I'd recomend against creating an account there with a password you use anywhere else.
Actually this is a python project using CSSUtils and lXML
Fear Grips Google: Sergey Orders Bing Study
I think the modern idea of a "cloud" is the Plan 9 philosophy coming full circle. Many breakthroughs in Plan 9 (distributed architecture, everything as a file, unified user experience) are being recreated on the web (cloud storage/photos/music/email, open APIs so all your webapps can intercommunicate--when I squint really hard while looking at screenshots of Plan 9, it almost reminds me of google's suite).

The OS will become extinct once everything happens in the web browser, and the OS becomes not much more than a web browser itself. And then they'll have pretty much reimplemented Plan 9.
People have the ability to vote because other people who formed the governments those people live under thought it would it be a good thing to let them vote. I'm not sure what you mean exactly.

I don't think you can go from "many people aren't smart but can vote therefore the complexity of government arises from simple constituents (pun intended)." Those people can vote other people into a well established government with machinery of bureacracy dating back hundreds of years.

I think that is overstating and reading too much into what is happening. It does sound nice, I agree. However, giving people choices in terms of people who are collectively able to join and continue the machinery, say, the bureacracy of the U.S. government and maintain a semblance of the status quo is not really akin to some phenomena in which simple components combine to form complex systems.

In the case of the U.S. government, there is such a long standing set of machinery that is never really seen by the voter in the capacity of voting that the government is really sort of a machine that runs regardless of the officials in office and so forth. Note, this is not the same thing as saying "there is no difference between the two parties." It's just that, for the most part, over the course of time certain things have been established thus the wheels of government continue to run without regard to voters. If the entire state of Maine decided not to go out and vote on Presidential Election day, the mail would still run.

Anyway, to you're other point. It seems like you're trying to argue that humans are so malleable that you can change courses of history or foundationally change the way humans deal with eachother by changing how they consume news or other information, presentationally (i.e. not thought-control devices in their brains).

I don't think people are necessarily that malleable or that one-side they would, on the whole, choose to be mindless consumers getting information only from your Suggest-a-tron machine. What happens if they decide to actually talk to each other directly without intervention? Wouldn't that interfere with the mind training program? Also, I'm not sure about all this emotional stuff you're talking about.
Ask YC: A twitpic for unsigned musicians
Hey.

I was wondering what the people of YC news thought of a site that let unsigned artists upload and submit songs to twitter - like twitpic, but for unsigned material.

Songs getting tweeted the most could then be displayed on the site.

Maybe it could be run as a co-operative or non profit?
I agree with you on the fireman, but you are the first person in the UK that says they more than enough nurses. I do know there are different type of nurses though. My grandmother is a semi-retired CPN (think private nurse). She prefers it this way because she chooses when to work and gets paid good money for the few hours she does do. Washing the backside of old people can be pretty damn numbing after a while. But she did put 4 daughters through college this way.

My aunt was an ER nurse who moved into private practice (plastic surgery scrub nurse). Her former hospital calls her on occassion and ups the compensation. I figure if you have to call old employees and promise more money than that is a sign someone is underpaid.

Note, a scrub nurse requires a MS.N. and certs out the wazoo. Those are hard to come by because there aren't enough teachers.
looks really cool. I was able to answer a bunch of questions, half way through got an error The questions (at least the ones I answered) were quite relevant.
They also have a API. Would be interesting to see what mashups can be done with the API.

edit:
One of the decision topics I tried:

Should I buy an Apple iPhone or a Palm Pre?

The questions were relevant, and I found this quite interesting:
Do you have long nails that would impair your being able to use the touchscreen effectively?
Success mantra by startup founder in India
Yeah its the only bad thing I see about HN; it seems like everything t/c says makes it to the front page for some reason. You click on the headline, read the sometimes inflammatory/trollish story, scroll down and see that the author and commenters are usually fighting about something silly. t/c is by no means a site for "hackers" to read..

A good example -- google voice announced months ago (when the site launched) that portability would be coming soon. Somehow Arrington figured it out yesterday and posted a really poor story implying it was some sort of "secret" weapon for Google (and got into the requisite argument with a commenter). That story somehow ends up on the HN front page.

I don't get the HN obsession with TC -- slashdot / reddit / digg and the other nerdy sites seem to ignore it and I wish this site would treat it like what it is as well.
My brother is a mechanical engineer and certified Professional Engineer with 17 years of solid experience. He is concerned about losing his job because of the poor economy. The article leads me to wonder why.
In terms of the site, you've done everything right in my opinion. Easy video, lots of screenshots and benefits I can understand in a glance. A FAQ for more detailed information. Very nice.
This was nothing like I thought it would be.
Every question I have answered so far it says I am with 50/33/25 % of people depending if there were 2 3 or 4 answers. I really doubt that.
congratulations! what a pointless article? it manages to cover nigh on EVERY type of job there is....
Behind The App: Curdbee - sweet and simple billing