skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Somebody has been plagiarizing pg: http://www.paulgraham.com/ideas.html

OP: "Fix something that’s broken. In business, it seems to me that the traditional banking business models are broken or at least no longer fit the purpose. On the other end of the spectrum, Internet dating sites don’t seem to work. They have millions of users, so they must be promising something people want. And yet they work horribly. Just ask anyone who uses them."

to pg: "One way to make something people want is to look at stuff people use now that's broken. Dating sites are a prime example. They have millions of users, so they must be promising something people want. And yet they work horribly. Just ask anyone who uses them. "

Or "Take a luxury and make it a commodity. People must want something if they pay a lot for it. It is a very rare product that can't be made dramatically cheaper if you try. When you make something dramatically cheaper, you sell more, and people start to use it in different ways. For example, once cell phones were so cheap that most people had one, people started using them as cameras and Internet devices."

to pg's : "Another classic way to make something people want is to take a luxury and make it into a commmodity. People must want something if they pay a lot for it. And it is a very rare product that can't be made dramatically cheaper if you try.

This was Henry Ford's plan. He made cars, which had been a luxury item, into a commodity. But the idea is much older than Henry Ford."
(Don't believe me? Let your customers find out about you lieing, cheating, or stealing. Then see what happens to your revenue stream.)

That really just convinces me of the equation

Success = (Factor1 + Factor2 + Factor3 + ...) * Appearance of Ethics

Which still doesn't explain Microsoft, oil companies, tobacco companies, etc.
I agree that we are entering into a highly competitive landscape for mobile, device and gadget operating systems. In fact, there are more choices than ever and that is a good thing. With a long history (~13 years) Microsoft is going to continue to push forward with new versions of windows mobile, windows phone, windows ce, windows embedded, etc. They have a huge footprint in this space and from what I can tell are really taking the mobile OS space very seriously. They are aggressively marketing to OEM's an attractive licensing plan and so this will be very interesting to see how Google Android does in this new space for them. In the end, it is all good for the consumers as we get some really cool toys and gadgets.
I have the same problem, although (as I've mentioned before) I'm a writer, which I believe requires the same kind of creativity and ability to pull out unique ideas for solving problems.

Once I've announced a project, it seems to lose some of its energy and when people don't ask to see more, it makes me question my work. I stalled on one project after showing it to my wife, she didn't ask about it for a long time (which due to college, work, friends and immigration papers, she hasn't had the time to read anything). However, the self-doubt creeps in and now I'm stuck deciding between an entire rewrite of the old project to correct the problem, or to switch completely to my 'on the side' project that has occupied me for a week (compared to a few months) and has produced about half as much in much less time.

I also realised that the people I've listened to have been the wrong people, despite them being well intentioned. When I used to work as a reviewer, my editor praised my personal voice as akin to Terry Pratchett, but when I used it in actual stories I was told it had too much personal voice in it. Stupidly I listened to the other people and not my instincts.

So now I'm back to pointing my own compass, which is where I enjoy being and where my motivation stays up. Ironically it involves hiding the work from my wife, although I usually don't write when she's home anyway, which is definitely going to get me kicked (the question is where) if I end up with a finished 80,000 word novel I neglected to tell her about.
I have a question to someone with a physics/electronic background:

If you implement this idea in a large number of devices, wouldnt a concentration of these devices block/suck the RF signal, impeding any transmision?
does anyone here use feedly? i'm curious to see what a fever user thinks of it.
Differences in fertility by class, world wide
This is an awesome thing. I can't see tech-savvy people switching to IE and keeping it unless they prefer it. All of the less-tech-savvy people out there that catch wind of this will upgrade to IE8 Goodbye IE6!!!

I hope this does catch on :)
> Unless the contest grabs the attention of CNN, we're talking about a contest in a relatively small market

I disagree - it's stuff like this that goes viral. There'll be the people like me who think it's a farce, and then there'll be those who want to try it out, all talking about it.

I'd be willing to bet that it'll be a trending topic on twitter within a couple of days.
I wonder if you can stick this phone in the microwave and charge it with a quick 30s?
I can't believe so many people are missing the moral of the story and focusing on the ethics part of it. Its not like he was harming anyone by making the copy and I'll bet he thought ethics was the last thing people on the blog would be talking about.

Now for the meat and potatos of the story: I think that you can apply this lesson (making it on your own before you ask for help) to many other areas other than the music business. Lets say you were looking for VC funding, don't you think the people funding it would be more impressed if you got your idea up and running without any help? When you do things with little or no help it shows determination and a will to succeed no matter what the odds are.
I'm confused, doesn't "collision attack" mean being able to create two (or more) documents with an identical hash? (As opposed to preimage attacks which involve creating documents that have a given hash).

So why would that prevent the attack billpg described?
You can also buy a water filter, and get better tasting water extremely cheaply when compared to bottles.
Mr. Antigravite really needs to get that PhD.
I found the fable interesting, liked it even. Well written, it gave me some goosebumps at points. However where are the anti-dragonists. Surely the men on the street might not have the patience to read about an anti-dragon, they might however be willing to hear the process and how aging may be brought to an end. If our kings of our world are ignoring the petitions of our world's anti-dragonists, it seems that they have ye to take to the second stage, to raise the profile of their cause and attract donations and momentum.

In the fable, after the anti-dragonists went to the people, it seems they gathered a wide following. This might be because people really wanted to kill the dragon and also because they were told of how such a goal may realisticly be archived. We aren't told much on the other hand, only that some scientist in Oxford is working on aging. What the process is in simple layman language is not explained to combat the strong belief of many people that such people are well in a neverneverland.

I liked the fable, however I would like to see those who wrote it to practice what the anti-dragonists practised in the fable. Perhaps right now it is more important to gather momentum.
One of the scientists is named Antigravite. Does that strike anyone else as a hilarious coincidence?
The reason stated was pests.

Most likely both crop production and pesticide use will increase in the north, mostly due to increased temperature allowing for both longer growing seasons and better conditions for pests. The CO2 effect will be dwarfed by the temperature effect in the north. The effect in the south will mostly be determined be access to water, either as rain or irrigation, and have huge local variations. Where there is good access to water, production will rise (due to increased CO2), where there isn't, it will drop.

Overall, I'd expect a significant increase in crop production, but we may have to get used to new crops and varieties to get the full effect.
Using college loans at low interest rates to help start a business is a good idea but how often does a student actaully have any money left at the end of the schooling to launch such an endeavor? I am currently a student in college and I don't have any student loans out as of right now. Maybe my last semester I might sign up for one to start a business after I graduate.
Perhaps you can limit algorithmic banning to users under a certain karma or account age?
Personally I'm an introvert and while possibly not as bad a case as others, I'm restricted to a handful of friends who being with doesn't seem to drain me. Again, personally, I seem to lose motivation when I tell other people about a project, because I expect other people to ask about the project. However, that isn't realistic, I'm sure a hardened extrovert would tell their friends about every single part of the project as it progresses.

From what I can tell, an extrovert is going to be motivated because they get to tell everyone new stuff because they keep working. Where as an introvert is going to lose motivation, because they don't have the tendency to be out there talking to everyone, they expect an unrealistic and disproportionate amount of questions.

I guess a good analogy is that an introvert is the actor on the stage who always wants to be in the spotlight, but doesn't do enough to attract the spotlight. Where as the extrovert is the spotlight, who wants to tell everyone where and what to pay attention to.
> Yes, but everyone was happy with the status quo of MP3 players at the time

No they weren't, most people couldn't figure them out.

> To say the iPod solved a problem is pure hindsight.

No it isn't, the iPod brought it to the masses by making it simple enough for everyone to use.
No, not joking. I understand that you can fix a website instantly and as often as you like, but these are not websites we're talking about, they are applications that users have to download and install. If any desktop application I ran had multiple bug fix updates per week every week I would be pretty worried about the overall quality of the application and of their development process.
Not always true, for example twitter didn't solve a new problem. People could communicate before just fine; it just provided another method to stay connected.
A lot of people weren't happy with MP3 players at the time. It's not like they were extremely popular before the iPod. Specifically, before the iPod there was no MP3 player that could both fit in your pocket and hold your whole music collection.
Atari 2600 iPod Dock
Close, but Moor is Moro (one r).
My English friend claims he was able to hard-boil an egg in three days with his GSM phone. I've tried in the States and I think he's full of it. But this gives me pause - there is a level of ambient energy from RF devices that is considerable.
Just in time for one of the coldest summers on record.

It's hard for people to fathom the thought of global warming while their local weather is in fact colder.

Jared Diamond's Collapse is a good reference. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Collapse_(book)

What did the Easter Islander who cut down the last tree and doom the island think as he used his stone axe?

While I remain skeptical about global climate change, I can also appreciate the fact that polluting less and taking care of the environment is a good thing.

The problem is that even as America becomes cleaner, China, India and the rest of the third world are burning trees and coal like crazy.
Wikipedia turned into a book
It could be that people are focusing on the ethics because the "meat and potatoes" of the story are stupid.

The author's main point is: if you're rich and famous, people are more likely to treat you as if you're rich and famous.

The author says you have to "make your own success," and as an example, he points to a "really bad metal" songwriter who was "in a band with a major rock star" and who helped to sell 20M records.

But surely not even the author believes for a second that this songwriter managed to sell 20M records "on his own." Surely there were publishers, promoters, record companies etc. involved, yes? If the songwriter in question was a surprise indie hit, surely the author would have said so?

I think the very idea that a business deal involving an advance payment is somehow a charitable cause ("asking for help") dramatically illustrates the the arrogance, the star-struck cult of fame and money that's brought the music business so low.
"Not sure why it would lower crop production."

The conditions that crops need aren't based on average temperature, but rather they're based on the minimum temperature, the maximum temperature, and how long it takes to go from very cold to very warm and vice versa. With global warming the climate zones don't just shift north, but rather you get these situations where certain crops just won't grow at all. For example, grape vines have certain mechanisms to protect the buds during winter, but these mechanisms get disabled as soon as you get the first warm snap. The problem is that if it then gets cold again you lose all the buds, so no grapes.

With global warming what happens is you still have very low minimum temperatures in winter, but the average temperature is warmer and so you have these temporary warm snaps disable all the natural protection mechanisms that have evolved over thousands of years. So if you just move the vines north then they all die because their cold protection mechanisms get disabled and the buds freeze, and you can't keep them where they are because it's too hot in the summer so they die also. So what happens is that you just can't successfully grow good wine grapes anymore. Now obviously this is a pretty trivial example, but there are similar things going on for a lot of our major food crops. You can't just move them north, so we're just going to have major food shortages.

Another good example is wheat rusts. Every winter our top scientists go down to Mexico and create new types of wheat based on whatever rust is currently spreading. The only reason they have time to do this is because the wheat sprouts later in the US than it does in Mexico. But with global warming all the wheat will come up much closer together, so what may happen is that we just don't have wheat anymore.

(And believe me, wheat rust is pretty much the scariest shit you can imagine. There's a reason it was one of the biblical plagues.)
You’re Not Going to be a Professional Blogger
I have to disagree with you here. I had a couple MP3 players before the iPod and it was obvious that they were pieces of crap. Very obvious. I didn't know how to make them better. I knew that they had unnecessary pain in syncing, control, and storage space.

I don't own any mobile Apple products now but the iPod really did make portable digital music players mainstream through its cachet AND the problems it fixed.
Emacs with Wanderlust and GMail
Wow, yeah, they just invented a whole new class of phishing scams.
In the music industry, don't you have to pay an advance back?

Wouldn't that mean an already rich songwriter can pay it back, even if he bombs?
User-Agent: "10; DELETE * FROM users --
Intel, Oracle, AOL, PayPal back ID interopability group
This sounds like a challenge for 4chan crowd. I'm sure they will be ecstatic if an FF user wins the contest :)
Suitcase With $134 Billion Puts Dollar on Edge
ALL startup companies and entrepreneurs have dealt with this at some time.

From what you describe, it does not sound like it's worth pursuing or getting worked up over.
The touchstone is awesome though. While I still can't get over the fact that I paid 1400% markup for it, that thing does bring a smile to my face every time I use it.
Wanting to avoid death, disease, and destruction is not the same as a general fear of change.
As an Aussie I really appreciate your usage of HTFU there!

Anyone not aware of the meaning: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=unkIVvjZc9Y (Possibly NSFW, swearing)
URL shortening service hacked, clicks redirected
Is Your Idea Worth Something?
I think as far as we are controlling the client, we can make it look like any browser. As far as I know (my knowledge is very limited in this area, please correct me if wrong) there is no way to be 100% sure that the user is using a particular browser.
Personally I'd even be willing to help it go viral by forwarding the link to my non-techie friends. At least that way we'll be helping erode the IE6 user-base...
It is based on architectural cornerstones such as column-store, bitmap indexing, hash join/aggregation, and page-level multiversioning

Meanwhile... no DBA required. Riiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiight.
You would be surprised by the wonders you can do with a text editor and SVG
Twitter Litter: The Benefits and Risks of Contemporary Citizen Journalism
so we're just going to have major food shortages

That's a non sequitur. If certain things don't grow as well, it doesn't follow that nothing will.
You are correct that the end user controls what is ultimately sent to MS (or whomever is probing). However, if they are doing something like plugin enumeration or using a java applet to go a little deeper, you then have to know what the request looks like and what info they are expecting. You then have to intercept that request and send back the expected data It's possible, but a little harder and more time consuming than flipping the user agent.
Upvoted grandparent, downvoted parent. I'll leave it to you to figure out why.
Nokia to Announce E72 and 5530 XpressMusic
Almost all journalism is this bad.The only reason you happened to notice it here is that it's a subject you know and care about. The pieces on Obama's strategy towards Iran aren't any better - you just don't notice it because it doesn't stand out to you. .
Harvard Study Finds Weaker Copyright Protection Has Benefited Society
Good point.

Are they Australian though? I can't seem to find an equivalent contest in the UK or US.

Edit: scratch that, just saw your comment above saying you're Aussie. :)
Firehost is a new company but their advantage is they built their infrastructure starting with Security and that's their core focus
If true, this has a devastating effect on elections. The more a political party talks about its agenda, the less it will do?

It totally contradicts the notion that the voters like a candidate that can clearly explain what his goals are.
i'd change this to "always be trying to grow". growth isn't infinite and isn't necessarily linear. sometimes you might plateau or contract. but once you're complacent with your levels and stop trying to grow, you have a problem.
I don't about where you live, but along the Gulf Coast region, it is hotter and drier than normal.
It's not getting "inspired", its finding all the problems they have and are incapable of fixing due to bureaucracy, then stepping out of the place and coming back with a product that solves the problem. It is often easier to get money out of big companies than change.
Is Twitter The CNN Of The New Media Generation?
"That's a non sequitur."

In my explanation, but not in reality.
And you could make a similar point about almost any other time someone is said to be afraid of change... that's why I'm making fun of it.
When the IT budget is tight, good enough has to be enough
I think providing useful stack traces is one of the most important features of a language - since it makes debugging so much easier. Those languages that have great stack traces are Java, Python, Ruby etc. Some languages that have pretty cryptic stack traces are for example ML and Haskell (and C++ if one uses lots of templates). Lacking useful stack traces is a big problem for Clojure, at least if one is new to the language.

"As soon as we started programming, we found out to our surprise that it wasn't as easy to get programs right as we had thought. Debugging had to be discovered. I can remember the exact instant when I realized that a large part of my life from then on was going to be spent in finding mistakes in my own programs." - Maurice Wilkes
I do not believe that human contribution to global warming is significant.

Water vapor is responsible for 95% of the greenhouse effect, yet somehow it is never brought up in global warming discussions. Why is this?

We've raised CO2 concentrations 100 ppm to 370 ppm... a concentration that's tiny in comparison to the amount of water vapor in the atmosphere... after all, we're on a giant ball of water.

I subscribe to the theory of giant ball of nuclear fire leads to warmer temperatures -> increase in ocean temperatures -> release of dissolved CO2 & increase in water vapor -> greater greenhouse effect

I don't hate the environment and obviously we should be reducing our impact, but cleaner air and water should be cause enough.

If anyone can explain to me why my reasoning is flawed I'll be happy to champion the idea that global warming is primarily driven by man... it would actually make my life easier to embrace it as fact. However, as it stands now, it seems to me a rather arrogant proposition.
Solar-powered manned flight
Please fix the URL to the NYTimes URL, since this is a NYTimes article...
While I appreciate the (universally true) idea, the post (and the site in general) is a bit too fluffy for me to learn anything tangible.

It's kind of like when you are training for the Olympic games, people shout at you "If you don't run the fastest in the world, you won't win the gold medal!" Yeh, great advice.
It is a little bit disconcerting to think that there's enough power just floating around to... "do something real".
Not sure how you came to that conclusion. Flash-bashing by HTML5 fans is a staple on HN. FWIW, at no point does he say open web sucks.

I only posted this article because it clarifies common misconceptions and assumptions made open web fanatics in hopes that another view might be respected.
This is true. But would you trust the average retiree to shrewdly manage their money over the average highly regulated AAA rated insurance company?
Mozilla Firefox 3.5RC1 is out
That is a frightening prospect.
I've been using Clojure for about a week and out of the issues mentioned in the article, I find the stack trace and import issues the most annoying. Also, since it's built on the Java ecosystem, clojure seems to have inherited all the config bullshit which is a big reason I left that world years ago. I guess I thought those issues would have improved over the past 7 years, but it appears not.
Wow, that's a load of crap.

You can link a traders pay to what they are managing not just what the firm's overall position. The obvious solution would link 90% of their pay to the preformance of what they manage such that losing money results in a reductin in pay beyound what breaking even does. AKA lose all of our money and you make nothing over the last 6 months.

There are reasons why nobobdy does this that have little to do with protecting investors assets.
Oh, the reason's fairly obvious; upmodded for leaving a comment. :)
EFF Busts Bogus Internet Subdomain Patent
changing jobs or moving to a new city is not remotely the same as the consequences of global warming. Sorry, it just isn't.
For example, grape vines have certain mechanisms to protect the buds during winter, but these mechanisms get disabled as soon as you get the first warm snap. The problem is that if it then gets cold again you lose all the buds, so no grapes.

But in fact, we know that grapes were grown at more northerly areas in the British Isles in warmer historical times. If it has been done, it's too late to suggest it's impossible.
Everything I've read indicates that the bonds are almost certainly fakes, and that there's rarely any legitimate reason to physically move even 1% that much cash. The linked article doesn't really dispute that, with it's talk of spy novelists.
Torture introduces possible error into data. So it's an extremely bad analogy.

Picking up a sheet of paper doesn't call the validity of the data into question. It's still the same data.