skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
The underlying theory of Web 2.0 is that the whole is greater than the sum of its parts. Your video of your college roommate lighting his farts on fire would have basically zero value if you put it on your own personal web page (unless you happen to be Perez Hilton). Post it to Facebook, and suddenly you're an Internet celebrity, because millions of users are already coming to Facebook every day to see content just like yours, and because Facebook's architects made it perfect for viral distribution of information.

If you're interested in making money off of your content, there are sites out there that will help you try, from Shutterstock to Google Knol. I've tried many of them, and the pennies that I earn don't come close to covering the cost of my network connection, much less my computer. If you're going to call Facebook contributors sharecroppers, that's fine, but they are sharecroppers who spend all of their time arranging the seeds into a posterized mural of their pet cat, not planting them in the field and toiling to harvest the crops.
I guess I'm one of the few dupes here :). I recently switched to using Fusion blades (not the power ones where you also have to worry about the battery) because I forgot to bring my shaving kit when traveling.

I have to say I was pretty pleased by how quickly and consistent the shave was relative to Mach 3. Being accident prone and generally impatient in the morning, it's resulted in no blood loss so far (it's been about 2 months since I started using them). I've used 2 blades in this time which to me is worth the cost relative to the time I save and the quality of the shave I get.
Cabinet Solutions - Fine Custom Cabinets and Furniture
Cabinet-solutions.com provides exceptional customer service. Kitchens in Sarasota Cabinets offers dedicated service, top-quality products and creative design, all at a reasonable price.
Ask PG: Downvotes on articles ?
The 'flag' option on articles is used as a downvote more and more frequently. This causes discussions in progress (sometimes with lots of comments) to suddenly be killed.

If the intended use of the 'flag' option is to flag undesirable content (for instance spam) then a downvote could simply be used to control what makes it to the front page and as a signal what kind of content is desirable.

Not everybody on HN has the same focus and if a subject is controversial that is no reason to shut it down categorically, especially not if the conversation is actually respectful. (the comment moderation system will keep that in check quite nicely it seems).

So, my request is simple, enable downvoting on articles and reserve the use of 'flag' for spam.
The only thing that prevents from thinking about this idea in the same way as flying cars is our water delivery network. if we could build that 100+ years ago (albeit at gigantic expense), perhaps we have finally reached the technology level where we can expand to an extremely high-speed automated 24-hour postal service.

When you think about it, society is already curving back towards more delivery services and less 'go and fetch' services - I know I now do more shopping online than I do in an actual shop, and those thousands of dedicated supermarket delivery trucks (and attendant drivers_ are a huge saving waiting to made, alongside the postmen.

What we need is for the government to step in and finance a really large scale trial in co-operation with the postal service and the various home delivery services. Mail, pizza and groceries would be enough of a tipping point I think.
Don't Bootstrap Your Company To Death
I second the softer feel, the Feathers seem a lot less stiff than the common merkur blades I was using. They also feel sharper, I think the blade conforms better against my boney face and less irritation.

I've been meaning to order this actually, maybe I'll do it today.

http://westcoastshaving.com/index.php?main_page=product_info...
Razor and Blade?!? They're freaks!
Danger in your pill bottle
And before that it was Amazon. I still remember the "find it on Amazon" link on every page of AOL NetFind search results :) Apparently it was some special deal they made with AOL, from back when search engines did things like that: http://www.timewarner.com/corp/newsroom/pr/0,20812,666067,00...
I suppose I did. Thank you for the clarification. Perhaps I missed the boat by not watching the video.

As for the digital amp comment, is that in regards to the Line 6? The Variax is a guitar, with on-board CPU and synth modelling. It isn't a Pod crammed into a guitar, from my understanding (though I could again be wrong, and will voluntarily revoke my posting privileges for the day.)
I think it's intentionally inflammatory, for teh clicks.
Please don't. Karma is not intended for burning.
>> It is a proven fact that handwriting and signatures are the best tools to understand a personality.

> You don't think they are the tools to understand personality?

In a word "no".

The site in question provides a new signature for a fee. Do you believe that people can change their personality by paying a fee to a web site and writing their name differently?

I'm pretty sure that almost anyone can produce 20-50 different signatures. If someone does so, have they developed new personalities? (Claiming that they had those personalities before doesn't help your position.)

Signature/handwriting analysis is as useful as analyzing the bumps on one's head. It help with identification, but tells you nothing about the person.
Yes. Online grocery shopping with dedicated delivery services is huge here (in the UK). Imagine how much bigger it would be when you could order stuff in much smaller batches at more regular intervals? Loaf of bread and a pint of milk to home at 7am, and a sandwich to your office at 1pm?

If you include the postal system and all those little trips people make, we are moving stuff between various hubs and houses several times a day anyway, often with dedicated trips using our hugely inefficient, slow and polluting vehicles. We could really get the eco crowd onside with this one.
Many people never want to move up. They just want a good job, period. 50-60 year old people are like that.
Taming the Web for Local Advertisers - GrowthSpur
Still sounds suspiciously like a "nickels in front of a steamroller" issue.
Exactly. It is wonderful that a reflected, empathic introvert has finally been able to figure out something like this. I am in the same spot as the author right now, and the thing that really gets to me is that I have to fake being an extrovert in order to connect with other people. It isn't really that hard (it's just acting), but it is really draining when it shouldn't be.

The ideal way to interact would be to be able to be myself while still managing to spark some openness and life in my conversational counterpart. After all, most deep wants are somehow achievable, and there isn't any obvious reason why it should be impossible to connect with other people if you happen to hate smalltalk and often enjoy being alone.

The definition of introvert is not requiring that much external social stimulation, not hating to interact with other people.
That's good advice, Jacques! Most of these requests are about our time tracker (Tempo), not any secret project. We're a pretty small shop, so everyone's wise to it at this point.
that kerning makes me think that when I get home I'll run the text through a font checker. I don't think anyone who writes English normally would write calligraphy like that.

Presumably for a low number of users you could return simply one of 3 or 4 different styles of signature, taken simply from good handwriting fonts and facsimiled on video for the lessons? Not necessarily a bad idea.
Ah!!

Well my dear friend this was not in India. But America. I remember watching about this hysteria on Carl Sagan's Cosmos. They had organized parties all over California as they thought they were going to die in some days as the Earth would be finished. And so it was better to have fun, make confessions etc. So there.

Coming back.
Well don't you think there's a difference between 1910 and now?
If you move the clock back a little. I think witches were pretty common in America and Europe (and related hysteria in towns and cities where they were "located") too don't you think? Or take the hysteria after the launch of the Sputnik. People thought they were just going to be bombed every second day.

And suicides weren't because it was said Halleys' tail had cyanide.
It was because of this: Comets have had a history IN ALL cultures to invoke some sort of fear. The only difference is that there are still a lot of people in Eastern countries who are backward. That's the only difference. In Europe not very long ago, comets could lead to executions. In places like India and China there are still a lot of people who hold on to such beliefs that the gods are angry.

And when I said about culture I meant that there are hundreds of cultures and such rituals are more prevalent in some of them than the others. So generalizing would be a sin.

About flu. I have not been to America since the outbreak of the flu so I can't say. I think in India and China some of it is necessary. A lot of people live in slums, and these are more likely to catch the virus once it has spread. Right now it is confined to people who came in touch with people coming from abroad.
If there isn't a certain degree of hysteria, there could be catastrophe when these poor people start getting it.

And I agree with your point about the media created frenzy, but I again believe that it's the same in all countries if you normalize.
The first software patent ever granted
Does MS have a history of patent abuse? AFAIK they don't. They talk about it a lot, but I don't think they actually engage much. I hate MS as much as the next Linux loving commie, but this is stupid.
I think it would be a good idea to put one sample report up on the site.
Which places are those? What kind of family sizes are we talking about?
Facebook messages, notifications, and friend lists on the desktop
The feature request thread can be found here:

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=363

I'm sure the curators of the site read the feature request thread regularly.
Big "if" though. This is a $2,000 training course we are talking about. I'm very skeptical about the value of training courses and rarely send any staff on them. Smart people can learn a lot from books.

If this guy doesn't have the cash for the course, I suggest he buy the author's book and read it. Chances are the content is the same.
You should replace the colored water images on the left of each page with actual signatures. The colored water images are overly generic, and that's really disappointing coming from a business that claims to do visual design.

Having signatures may also help people understand the difference between your 2 products... right now, it seems like your premium product (the graphological signature) is just the "extended bs edition" of your entry-level product.
re your edit: There are several interpretation to the 'down' button, one of them is 'I disagree with you', others are 'I don't like your facts', 'I don't like you' or 'you are wrong, but I can't be bothered to write it up'

Which it is is always a guess.
Can Topps Save Baseball Cards?
It's okay if you find it offensive. I found your original unedited comment equally offensive.

While I respect your interest in people and I don't mean it to be personal at all.
Oddly enough this doesn't seem to be hurting the stock price. Usually news like this will tank a stock. I suppose it's because the current price isn't over extended.
Who Won the Recession?
Avoid editing the same comment please and write a new one instead.

The context of my replies gets lost.
Seriously ? Dementia takes over after only 18 months ? She works in freaking avionics. Ruby on Rails, .NET and Java developers should not comment on this issue.
Is there some advantage for suing in Texas? Twitter was sued there by a Texas company which makes sense, but a Toronto company doing so as well.
Have none of you people heard of capturing groups with parens and references? I assume you meant to write:

s/(Google's) (search engine suggestions)/\1 automated \2 based on users' queries/
Poll: Do you prefer to "flag" or "star" items for action later?
Had an interesting debate on if users "get" the concept of starring/flagging items for later.<p>In my new app you can "star" news articles and they appear in a separate "starred" view. She thinks it should be flag/flagged instead.<p>Thoughts? Does it matter? Do only GMail users get starring?
Star / Starred
Flag / Flagged
TCHunt is a free program that finds (for the most part) TrueCrypt volumes. (Modulo 512, chi-square stream analysis, etc). The scary thing is that it's not 100% positive as it cannot differentiate between random data and AES data, but in general testing, it finds 100% of TrueCrypt files. I wonder if something such as TCHunt could be used to accuse someone of having an encrypted TrueCrypt file or not? I doubt it, but some folks argue otherwise.
The Rise of Conversation Media
The way I understood this article is that women are more interested in guys who are not single whether they know him or not. This experiment will prove just that.
Seriously? Are tuh-mey-tohs and tuh-mah-tohs completely different fruits?
can someone explain the difference between

"hand over your business, your domain and your software within 12 days" or we'll see you in court

and

"Being Sued" ?

I know the letter is a cease and desist letter but the we'll take leagal action hardly makes it a 'thanks for adding value to the twitter ecosystem love letter'

Cheers,
Dean
I am in Bombay and there is indeed a scare of some kind going around. N95 masks are selling at 5 times the normal price. The media echo chamber is in scare mode. All my newspaper front page headlines have been about swine flu since quite a few days.

All the same, TFA sort of misses the point. While 325k people here might die of malaria every year, nobody in my friend of friends and in their extended family has died of malaria in recent times. All of them know exactly what to do if they caught malaria and how to avoid getting it in the first place. Right now, none of them would know what to do if they caught swine flu. Also, in this sample, statistically speaking, everyone probably has more of a chance of dying of swine flu rather than malaria (even though both the chances are pretty much negligible).

All I am saying is that that comparison to malaria was a bit misleading.
You should make it clearer in the title and the form that you're not associated with YC or any other seed funding group.
That really depends what the objective of going to a university is:

Mine was actually to understand. This is largely incompatible with the notion of covering a large amount of material which you need to regurgitate near-verbatim in an exam. That kind of environment essentially reduces any subject to a memory recall game. I decided I wanted to come away with a very rich understanding of fewer things, and my exam grades mattered less to me.

So, it's not like I didn't go to any classes. I just didn't go to any which didn't really increase my understanding. If it was the sort of thing I could just read out of the text book and memorise, then I would do that instead of wasting my time sitting in a lecture. Instead, I worked on projects (both credit and non-credit varieties). I went and sat in the computer science tea room with a stack of papers and I just read them. I asked academics about things that I read and didn't understand. The most common answer was usually "Hrm. That is interesting. I don't know the answer to that, but there's a paper by so-and-so that might explain it!" - result! Print another paper and head back to the tea room.

After two or so years of this, I had a pretty darned good foundation in my sub-field of computer science. Enough that I managed to work on some novel projects, which I wrote up and published in my fourth year. By my third year I had managed to convince the department to drop a bunch of course requirements in favour of letting me do a project worth an equivalent number of credits. I actually did all of this in the lecture time slots.

The alternative would have been sitting through introduction to {programming, algorithms, self-harm} for years, getting bored, and probably just dropping out to go earn real money cutting code.

So really, who got the better deal? My classmates who digested the material at exactly the rate it was delivered? I think I got the better deal, because I actually made full use of being in a university environment.

And as I said, I believe that was what got me into a very good PhD programme. I got my money's worth.

So, skipping classes is fine as long as you are willing to take responsibility for your own education.
Amazon were selling books online in 1995. Not sure how they were advertising, I'm guessing it was mainly offline, though I imagine possibly signature ads on newsgroups may have been part of it.
Any promise about massive new infrastructure are dubious, especially one that is met by pre-existing services.
To me a 'flag' is a sign that something is wrong, a 'star' is a good thing (think 3 star restaurant, 5 star hotel).

A flag is 'attention required' but the subtext is 'somebody is going to get hurt (real bad)'.
His wife's in a coma.
Slow Reading (61k PDF)
Maybe they don't have a story of patent abuse through the courts, probably because they don't want to risk invalidating their patents.

And why bother suing Linux corporate users, most of them also Microsoft users?

Sowing FUD is just as good
> Big Pharma uses their 'research costs money' argument to counter this, but they forget - conveniently - to mention that they spend a very large multiple of their expenses on research for the marketing department.

You say that like it's a bad thing. That's dodgy at best - telling doctors what a drug does seems like a very good thing. Telling consumers that there's a drug that might help with a problem that they have seems like a good thing. (They may not be talking to a doctor about it.)

However, let's go with "it just increases the numbers of people using it". If you're someone who needs that drug, increasing the number of people means that other people are helping to pay for the fixed costs. Since the "good" fixed costs are rather high, that's a good thing for you.

> They abuse the patent system left, right and center in order to extend the income from so called 'blockbuster' drugs at the expense of doing something innovative for a smaller group of people.

(1) There's no such connection.
(2) What's stopping you from producing said "innovation"?

A lot of people are quite fond of criticising other people for not doing some "easy" good, yet the critics don't bother to provide said good.

This is interesting, because the domain is almost always one where "good" comes with fairly large financial rewards. If the critics are correct, they're not doing an easy good that would both provide them with considerable money (which they could use to do more good) and drive bad people out of biz.
Wait, what does that even mean? Corporations can use Stack Overflow, for free, just like anyone else. Why hire a consultant or invest in training when you can just drop a question out into SO? I didn't realize SO's karma was that magic bill-paying kind. Attribution is a positive thing, okay, but let's not pretend that it somehow erases the 'sharecropping' aspect of the site.

Also, just for the record: comparing web 2.0 participation to sharecropping, complete with picture of black farmers, is completely idiotic and more than a bit offensive.
Atwood linkbaiting? That would never happen.
I did start my story with that same caveat. And I think the moral was that relying on adults to guide you through this process is not always preferable.
There's one county in Texas (I forget which - Tarrant maybe?) which is EXTREMELY friendly toward patent trolls. It's SOP to bring a suit there if they possibly can.
Computer scientists take over electronic voting machine
"Does MS have a history of patent abuse?"

One well known case:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stac_Electronics

"Stac, in an effort led by attorney Morgan Chu, sued Microsoft for infringement of two of its data compression patents, and won"

EDIT: So they have a history of sometimes infringing patents, but by abuse perhaps you meant using patents as a weapon?
that's why we get high / cause you never know when you're gonna go
P2 is the answer. I know beauty when I see it.
There's also already a WP PubSubHubBub plugin http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/wp-pubsubhubbub/
"you are using an incompatible browser"
The market has gone down pretty consistently the last 3 days, and it is pretty consistently going up today. Its hard to bet against the market :)
South Asian undersea cable disruption slows Internet access
I think its to mean that flag means revisit this later, and star means "I like this". That being said, they both suck as ways to revisit things later.

I feel like we need something completely different. Generally when I star something, it means that its something I like and may want to look at again(like in google reader). Its not like I must action this later.

A better mechanism that that is neither flag nor star, but a mechanism that would allow things that were marked for action to rise to your attention after a certain amount of time if you haven't already acted upon it.
The tight restriction on down-voting is a key feature of HN and reflects the mores of the community overall. Down-voting is disrespectful and destructive - do you really want another Reddit?

The "flag" option brings a particular thread to the review of the moderators and (if it fails the HN relevance test) ultimately to it's removal. That's what keeps HN focused - no pictures of kittens here no matter how many people vote them up.
I think Coding Horror has already given whatever value it could. It's time to move along, perhaps.
"We teach you how to learn" was repeated over and over again in my engineering department at my university. I always thought it was an excuse and justification that allowed them to save face and make it ok that what was being taught was going to be useless in the "real world"

So sure, content-wise it was useless, but now I see that I can pick up any project or subject learn it and apply it really quickly. But I am still not ok that they were not capable of providing valuable content and practical knowledge in class.

Neither in college nor in high school did I learn anything from class or teachers (except for a handful), my education was mostly Google, Wikipedia, and blogs, not textbooks or teachers. (I stopped buying books my last semesters in College after I realized I never opened them when I did)
Three blind men were put next to an elephant and asked what it was.

One touched its leg and said that it was a tree.

One touched its side and said that it was a wall.

One touched its trunk and said that is was a snake.

We need journalists with "vision" now more than ever.
I think Atwood's point that many people are putting unpaid effort into sites that may benefit others is sound. I just don't think it's a calamity, since the time being put in is mostly spare time that the donors aren't expecting payment for.
Now, implement collapse/expand comments and new comment notifiers (red bubble/white number) and you have a twitter, friendfeed and facebook killer.
Yes, there's a very good reason. The courts in the small town of Marshall, TX are extremely friendly to plaintiffs in patent suits. And plaintiffs basically get to pick their venue, so of course they all go there.

So Small a Town, So Many Patent Suits
http://www.nytimes.com/2006/09/24/business/24ward.html
Maybe it's a consequence of lacking educational standards during the formative years of local judges...
Reminds me of the mail delivery system in the 5th element... So many creative innovations in that movie.
It was about time they felt the pain it is to support IE6...
Not on your iPhone you don't. Unless you've found something really cool:)