skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
In 2006, Craigslist's CEO Jim said that if enough users told them to "raise revenue and plow it into charity" that they would consider doing it. (source: http://blogs.zdnet.com/BTL/?p=4082 )Craigslist could raise a billion dollars for charity over several years, with a simple text or banner ad. They could put a large "X" next to the ad, allowing you to permanently close it. There seems to be little objection to this idea. The optional banner is harmless, and a billion dollars could be enough to dramatically improve the lives of millions. As a moral calculus, the decision seems a no brainer.

As a first step for us, the Craigslist users, in telling Craig and Jim what we think, I started a Facebook group. http://www.facebook.com/group.php?gid=114346357248 It only takes 12 seconds to show your support. Once we get to 1000 members or so we can take it to Twitter en masse.

See Mark Bao's blog post, also. http://markjournal.com/2009/07/craigslist-advertising-for-ch...
An informative interview providing better understanding of the amazing work this team has done. A well balanced team with great creativity, energy, dedication, perseverance not to mention their awesome talent. Great team work resulting in a quality product. You guys rock!
Everything in the article is spot-on, however the title is wrong--there are totally trends in startups. URL shorteners, social networks, twitter clones and iPhone app companies are all observable trends. And the lesson for companies following those trends is that they better have damn good ideas and execution, because they're chasing the hardest markets.
I think this is a very powerful post. Something I regularly thinking about. Especially the powerful self centered posted ideas. I like PG's idea that we should embrace randomness and avoid our self centered ness. Its something I do struggle with evry day. this article unfortunately at times reads like a suicide note.
I'm confused. How is the existence of Google news?
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I think this is a breach of trust with wikipedia users (in a way).
Does google think of their users as their customers, or just as products they sell to their advertisers?
As usual, the only relevant information is totally glossed over. What is this alleged evidence that such a seemingly insane test actually has meaning?
Nokia to enter netbook market
If your theory were correct, there should be a correlation between placebo effectiveness and exposure to the "perils" of modern western thinking.

There isn't.
It's probably directly related to the number of people regularly taking medication for other conditions. More people have more faith in magic pills to solve all their problems. We have become a heavily medicated society.
I'm curious what makes your experience so painful. I've found using Craigslist to be quite painless while selling or buying (Chicago, Paris, and SF) - usability is ridiculously simple and straight forward.

IMHO, KISS is part of why Craigslist has been so successful.
I used VS+VIemu at my last job (.net shop), and it started to feel kinda homey after a while.
Well, they already do (and have to) maintain separate indexes for each and every gmail account (or else how would you search on the metadata fields like To: and From: in your inbox at all?).

Supposedly the issue is that they don't perform more computationally-expensive linguistic analysis during the indexing phase. If they tokenize each word but don't perform any stemming or lemmatization, for example, the result would be similar: only full-word non-substring matching.

As others have pointed out, its probably a cost-benefit decision by Google to not spare grid cycles on full-fledged linguistic analysis for individual's email accounts. Google CAN do better at it, as is evidenced by their web search index.
>were about the same as the violent death rate in modern Houston, Texas.

You realize most of the world would think this is abnormally high?
Yes, there is plenty of evidence that education has a positive effect on wealth creation. Here's one example:

http://www.sciencedirect.com/science?_ob=ArticleURL&_udi...

Early childhood education is found to produce persistent effects on achievement and academic success, but not on IQ . . . Cost-benefit analysis based on one randomized trial finds that the economic return from providing early education to children in poverty far exceeds the costs.
Your Blog is Your Mothership
Book recommendation: "The Fates of Nations" by Paul Colinvaux (I created notes on wikipedia: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fates_of_Nations) It changed how I look at the world. Population control really is the #1 problem.
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Hotel Survival - with George Egg [video]
Visual Studio.

It auto-indents your code making it readable. Excellent Intellisense. Find/Replace within project and solution. Integrated debugger is full-featured.
http://www.socialmobilitycommission.org/ippr-social-mobility... - starting on page 13 is a good survey of studies
A black man in Harlem is 4.11 times as likely to die in a given year as the average American male.

This fact brings to mind an anecdote illustrating the fact that people have no clue about relative risks.

While jogging, I passed by a protest near Harlem Hospital. Signs mentioned this death rate disparity. I asked someone what the protest was about, and was told that they wanted more funding for the hospital.

Most of the protesters were sitting on lawn chairs, smoking, and eating fast food. Many were obese, few were of healthy weight. They didn't seem to realize that running in circles around the hospital would do far more to reduce the disparity in death rates than any amount of funding.
Not always:

http://trends.google.com/websites?q=ebay.com&geo=US&...
To build communities. Creating or contributing to something to be shared with others.

I've noticed that I am happiest when I can do something for the common good (=give). More than I could ever be by just concentrating on myself. Giving away some of the excess of anything creates more value than keeping it all to myself. Less having, more being.
Yet, when countries like Brazil copied the European-style welfare state they failed to get the same result.

And neither Britain, the U.S. nor China had a welfare state during their industrial revolution.

Correlation != causation
See also: socialization, nature vs. nurture, anecdotes != data.
I noticed this when I was in SF recently. In Australia we have next to no pill commercials (just the ocassional government awareness of a new vaccine or vitamin ads).
Microsoft launches OneApp app framework for smartphones
In this particular case, the appeal to emotion leads to incorrect conclusions.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brett%27s_law
And what makes you think such motivation isn't environmental? With the right opportunities earlier in life, they may have developed that internal drive.
It also - wrong as it may be - causes your audience to make a judgement call. When you use it as a first word in your title, many people will conclude that your vocabulary is rather limited or you're going for some kind of shock value. In either case, this usually means your main thesis is weak.

Making judgement calls is something we all do, but if you are trying to convey a point you need to properly ensure focus is maintained on the topic itself and that your audience must confront the merits of the argument. Giving them an excuse to dismiss your argument will not help convey your point to as large a segment as possible, especially when all you are doing is re-hashing something straight out of 37Signals' book.

This sub-thread shows that in some degree, the author fails in this regard. It's something worth keeping in mind when it is your turn to convey a message, or sell a product.
(oh man, too late for me to edit, pretend this line, "spots are a bit booked right now, but count me in as an enthusiastic follower if you open source it." and this line, "A related idea is being done" are erased. Sloppy me!
No man, you got it all wrong. It's called "mind-hacking" now.
"your input" => "general customer complaint", I mean.
Facebook May Expand Staff by 50%, Zuckerberg Says
Life is an investment for the purpose of life after death.
Newton2?
Understanding Google Wave
Well, I certainly agree with your point that economic opportunity alone is insufficient for wealth creation. If element you're pointing out is missing from low-SES communities is that unquantifiable culture, and I agree.

Since this puts us way off the track of political correctness, I'll bring up what I consider the shining example of social mobility in the US: American Jews. I would argue that the Jewish community maximizes both economic opportunity and a variety of social pressures - on education, family, and community.
This article is behind a $31.50 paywall. Did you actually read this article? Or are you just assuming that just because some academic wrote it an abstract that its true? I used to browse my college's social science library for fun. The number of methodological flaws in the typical journal article is enough to make a person cry. If you have a copy of the article, maybe you could send it to me. If you haven't read it - well - citing a gated journal article that you haven't even read is not evidence and does not contribute to the discussion.
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Ask HN: your thoughts - .net domains o.k. or unprofessional?
I don't see too many YC companies with a .net domain. Although when asked, most say that it doesn't matter. Is a .net domain a 2nd rate mark?
How do you know? What if, according to Google, the problem was the customer? How do you tell a publisher that their website is not appealing to advertisers such that the publisher will satisfied? Isn't that implicit in the account cancellation? So why say it again explicitly?

I don't understand what Google could do differently to handle these incidents other than staff handlers to parrot empty reassurances to angry customers.
Looks like you started writing before I deleted - sorry about that. I had claimed that oil wealth aside, countries with high per-capita GDP all had those socialized services. Yet most examples I could find had populations smaller than NYC, and obviously didn't serve as adequate comparisons.

It seems there are way too many variables to look for clear examples. We certainly can't look at the industrial revolution for examples of what will make a prosperous society - wealth creation then relied mostly on optimizing physical manufacturing, not intellectual products, as it does now.
What makes it so great is that it lets you focus on code instead of using the program.

VS Studio, eclipse etc.. feels like I am using an application as much if not more than I am coding.
Here in Canada, pharma advertising is very heavily regulated by the Federal government.

While I think these regulations are very useful in general, they sometimes break horribly. I've found that sometimes the only way to get information about medicine I am currently taking is to click "I am a medical professional" on the manufacturer's website -- because drug companies have been told that web sites count as "advertising", and that they are consequently not allowed to put information online for public consumption.
I know just a little about Neighborgoods. @mickipedia (twitter id) is the founder, she's based in Los Angeles, and even before starting this site, she's been interested in the environment for a bit. I don't know her personally, but she seems constructive and smart and funny.

As for monetizing it, since their system will/does support renting/loaning between people, I imagine they can take a cut of that? Maybe membership? (Now i'm just guessing)

I in no way mentioned Neighborgoods as a reason you should stop working on your project, but rather something to validate it! (Yep, I'm one of those polyanna's... :D)

I really do think you should open source it though, or at least big chunks of it, even if you do a hosted service. (I can save the reasons for this for another time.)

As for eBay rep, I don't think it should replace an internal reputation system, but especially in the early goings, what could it hurt? And not just eBay, selective data from as many 3rd party places as possible. Even a Twitter account that's more than 6 months old could make some people (like me) more comfortable loaning certain kinds of things.

And man... I think there's so much wasted cycles on sites like Freecycle and Craigslist free section... basically there is no item "management." Even when stuff is free, so many inquiries on stuff that's gone, or redundant follow-up letters to tell people it's taken, etc. I know your system is a different use-case than give-aways, but I see an overlap in need and purpose, and stuff + relationship management is applicable to multiple situations (and similar demographics of people who like to be resourceful).

As for beta of NeighborGoods, I have an invite for you. I will hit you up on the email I found in your profile.
Well, my understanding of all this is that:

1) You were actually eavesdropping on e-mail conversations.
2) The people being eavesdropped on used their company-provided e-mail accounts.
3) You found out lots of really personal stuff about the people.
4) Your "defense" here is that they shouldn't have been talking about personal stuff on their company-provided e-mail accounts.

Correct?

Now, assuming that I've got it right, let's go through these again:

1) This is bad, mmkay?
2) This is likely to happen at, you know, workplaces.
3) Again, people's personal matters are personal.
4) This is a bit more complicated:

I'm sure you agree that by default, whenever you send an e-mail, you don't expect it to be read by anyone else besides the intended recipient(s). That's just the way people perceive e-mail - that they're sending "letters" to others.

But basically now you're saying that because these people were sending e-mails from a company account, they should expect them to be read by people other than the recipients, and therefore should avoid talking about anything personal?

It's true that some shitty companies do read their employees' e-mails, so this argument has some merit, but not all of them do. I wouldn't want to work at a company that I'd expect to be reading my e-mail all the time.

At the workplace in question, do you think people had any reason to suspect their mails were being read by others? Were they the kind of people who would even be aware of the possibility?

You said you were just trying to find out how fucked the company was, but did you really think there was nothing wrong with your approach?

Besides, knowing someone screwed on the conference table after work hours is useful knowledge when you sometimes eat lunch in the conference room.

Cute, but I'm sure the table is cleaned daily.
I think it is rational in the sense that it is counting something. That always leads somewhere.
Did you read any of the actual studies cited? The modus operandi in social science is to throw in enough variables into your regression (or leave out a few key ones) until you get the result you want. Just throwing a lot of "[Nunn et al 2007] say x " on a page is not evidence. If there is a particular one of those papers that you thought was the most convincing, I can take a look at it and evaluate the actual evidence/data presented.
Yeah I recently dumped my .net job and ran for the hills.
Now I've got my slices /etc/host'd, and I can just sshfs in and gvim around to my hearts delight.

(I actually got reprimanded for using gvim at the last job, luckily we struck a compromise with vs+viemu.)
Wired's cover on Craigslist was plain wrong.

Their UI is brilliant, iconic, and works great. Why fix something that's not broke. And while Wired mag is shrinking and their tech culture authority has waned, CL is making $100M+ plus and growing with virtually no overhead. Yet they focus on Newmark's social shortcomings? How about a focus on his P&L, his dedication, and how he saved consumers billions on classifieds.
Yes, the scroll wheel itself moves in a horizontal plane, but it triggers a vertical action on the computer screen. Nobody with any experience handling a mouse is thinking about the mouse itself, but only about the effect it will produce on the screen.

The "move towards" / "move away" analogy falls apart because the screen is a vertical plane. "Up" is more intuitive than "away", and "down" is more intuitive than "towards". You may even see an example of this intuition in how people talk about using the scroll wheel: nobody says "scroll towards" or "scroll away". The FF people who came up with the backwards convention must have been looking at a mouse without thinking about its common use cases.
Much appreciated! Thanks for the kind words. We're really excited to push out a lot more stuff in the next few months...

~Jason (@FlightCaster)
Caffeine is a diuretic, tho'.
Two convicted in U.K. for refusal to decrypt data
I find this strange. I'm not going to completely discount the study, but I would like to counter - with capitalism itself.

Capitalism enforces the reward concept so effectively, that every now and then we almost collectively implode exchanging rewards. The system works too well, if anything.

Aside from that, the only thing this shows is that people who enjoy the task in question will do a better job than those who do not. Well, duh. A talent is a combination of skill and enjoyment - of course they will outperform someone who is simply assigned a task.

That doesn't mean rewards don't encourage behaviour, it just means that you can't pay for passion.
I have a theory as to why Placebos are getting _more_ effective; which is the real curiosity of this article.

Television. If as a child, you watch 10,000 hours of commercials telling you how effective drugs are. Is it any wonder that you are convinced enough that your body actually makes it true, even if you got the Obecal P instead of the real deal.
Love^. Adventure. Creation~. Childish silliness.

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in my opinion yes - solely for the fact that people will almost always try .com first.

however, devver.net (from the techstars incubator) has a .net, so thats not to say it isnt done.
Occam's razor suggests that Wired's explanation is complete bullshit. Let me give a far simpler explanation that would explain all the phenomena mentioned in the article:

We are seeing a rise in physical health problems due to increasing social isolation and other mental health risk factors.

As we replace the community barbeques with family grills we're losing more than a fun weekend activity, we're losing something that's evolved over hundreds of thousands of years to keep us mentally healthy. And more and more, scientists are learning that mental health is one of the greatest predictors (if not the greatest) of physical well being.

Why do you think ~50% of college students experience clinical depression? I'm sure that stress, poor diet, lack of sleep, and excessive alcohol consumption are all contributing factors, but at the end of the day these poor lifestyle "choices" aren't really choices at all; rather, they're triggered by specific design decisions made at the institutional and societal level.

Placebos aren't working better because people have more faith in medicine, they're working better because of the Hawthorne effect; people feel like they have someone who cares about them. That's why the effectiveness is radically different across populations, depending on the social environment, even though we're all exposed to the same media.
I'd be willing to bet it is, given 10 years or so.
I wasn't assuming that it was true or wouldn't have methodologial flaws. It's basically impossible to find a study of any real-world sociological study whose methodology is beyond dispute.

If it helps, here's one with more details:
http://www.waisman.wisc.edu/cls/cbaexecsum4.html

Site with more details, including sample surveys etc:
http://www.waisman.wisc.edu/cls/REPORTS.HTM

Conclusion:
As the first cost-benefit analysis of a federally-financed, comprehensive early childhood intervention, findings indicate that participation in each component of the program was associated with economic benefits that exceeded costs. This was accomplished by increasing economic well being and reducing educational and social expenditures for remediation and treatment. Similar to Head Start, the CPC preschool program is the most intensive and comprehensive component and yielded the greatest benefits by age 21. Findings for school-age and extended intervention demonstrate the benefits of reduced class sizes and enriched school environments in the early grades. Thus, contemporary, large-scale child-development programs can provide substantial long-term benefits to society.

Google has many many studies that you can look at:
http://scholar.google.com/scholar?q=effect+of+early+childhoo...

The effect of education on income is a subject that has been studied heavily. I'm sure that you can find studies that support many conclusions. But I think you will have trouble proposing that someone is making an unsupported claim when they say that education increases wealth and social mobility.

Edit: This doesn't mean you can't claim "I think that system X would achieve better results." It's not necessary to tear down the economic results that the American system has achieved in order to propose something that would work better in the future.
well if the world is ever threatened by randomly hued geometric shapes that demand organisation and ordering in accordance with arbitrary rules, we'll know who to call.
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> Flagged revisions falls somewhere between semi- and full-, and will likely be used accordingly.

Used 'accordingly', sensibly - like de did by flagging every article?
Recently I overheard some "non-techie" people discussing a university website, I looked over one of their shoulders, and they had written down ".edu.com". Point is, people are very familiar with the .com tld.

That said, it probably depends on your audience - if you have a great site or cater to a more tech-minded audience, it'll probably make less of a difference.
Its not second class but it's likely bad from a marketing perspective.

When you tell someone the name of your company they're going to go to .com first - and if you don't own that its going to look strange.

The real exception are sites which make creative use of country code domains like bit.ly or del.icio.us
.net is 2nd rate unless you are a 'network' or ISP .. other than that - go for a .com