skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
>>In the current order most people either starve or live on a minimum

As a percentage, much fewer is poor for every generation that passes -- and a small percentage starve, today.

Go back a few hundred years and almost everyone lived hand-to-mouth. Check Hans Rosling's lectures on TED.com for how much better the present situation is.

From what I've read, when a country implements serious capitalism and good governance in the last century, there is no starvation after a generation or two.

Ah, never mind. Go to one of the places where they discuss things like this.

If you insist on quarreling with just me, post the link and I'll try to find the time to come along -- taking one for the team to help the average HN quality... :-)

Edit: I do understand where you're coming from. At day work, they are a bit frustrated at me telling them that Asian ginger candy is the answer to human happiness. (And let's not even think about getting started on editors!) I try to realize that I shouldn't proselytize on the web, people will realize the truth in the end... :-)

(By the way, I'm not talking about that garbage Indonesian ginger candy I used to love -- there is some Vietnamese variant that hurts, nam nam...)
I thought it was pretty clear in my first few sentences which points I was referring to.

Furthermore, your assumption about the screen and wifi is incorrect. Mobile Opera was available and was pretty decent. Yes, apps were a one click install. You get the app, either through url, or file transfer and press one button. A quick Google search would've cleared that up for you.
> There are a whole lot of people in this thread who don't seem to understand modern economics.

The thread is mainly about marketing, not about economics, marketing changes the dynamics of why people make choices.

> Economics is the study of why people make choices: why they forgo one opportunity in favor of a different one.

Economics involves much more than that:

- production of goods

- logistics

- consumption

And plenty of people would include

- the services branch of commerce

- utilities

- government

> In Russell's example, it would seem that there was something about the (contrived) piano purchase that made the buyer prefer buying that piano to using the money for some the other possible choices.

Indeed, he valued the absence of the salesman more than his money.

> But in a society that we like to claim is tolerant of all values, who are we to say that any of the buyer's values -- his motivations for making some choice -- are wrong in any objective way?

Such as: Buying drugs ? Spending a lot of money to keep up with the Joneses ? (arms race on a small town level)

Teenagers spending a fortune on ringtones, phone applications ? (and they're buying this stuff on credit)

Some choices are simply objectively wrong. There are even some laws to protect consumers against this kind of thing, for instance in some countries if you buy something on-line you have a right to a refund within a certain period.

> The farmer's got tons of wheat and all his capital is tied up in it; the family's cupboard is bare, and you can't eat dollars. Trading a pound of wheat for a couple of dollars is advantageous to both.

The farmer is not 'pushing' his wares though, he makes them available at a fair price on a market. The family is free to buy their wheat from another farmer based on the objective criteria of quality, price and convenience. He's not going to go out of his way to try to get people to buy his produce at the expense of his neighbour.

Farmers are a particular bad example by the way, most individual farmers (at least those that I'm familiar with, there are probably plenty of counterexamples) are held by the throat by 'buying consortia' that consist of large supermarket chains. They set the price, not the sellers.

Hardly any consumers go and buy their food from the farmers directly, unless you live near a 'farmers market' in a rural area.

This is one reason why plenty of farmers go out of business, only to have their bankrupt farms bought up by fronts operated by those consortia.

Transactions on the free market have a 'middle ground', unfortunately the free market is an illusion, no transaction is completely free.

A 'free market' for instance assumes that parties do not collude.
Tell HN: BFS is comming to Android. And it is fast.
"American politics has a large bearing on my life. America's decisions about finance, foreign policy, fuel, war etc. affect us all"

So does, say Chinese "decisions about finance, foreign policy, fuel, war etc".

Hardly a good reason to post propaganda/political speeches of the Chinese president to HN.

For that matter Al queda's policy decisions affect people all over the world. Not reason enough to post Osama Bin Laden's latest polemic on HN.

I can even make tenuous "similiarities/relevance to startups" arguments.

Taking on"established" foes check!, resource constrained, check! Tenacity and ingenuity key to victory? check! All this is not sufficient reason to discuss AQ (and its politics and speeches) here.

fwiw the HN guidelines do say "Most stories about politics, or crime, or sports, unless they're evidence of some interesting new phenomenon." and
"If they'd cover it on TV news, it's probably off-topic"

This is so a US local political issue and it is so on TV.

"Would I like to see random speeches from the Ukrainian President on here? If it's a good speech and I can take something from it then why not?"

Ukrainian (or Chinese) politics getting as much votes as the latest political kerfuffle on American TV ? That'll be the day! Please go through HN and show me one instance of a non American local political story that making the HN front page?

"speech of this quality". This speech is of a superior quality?

Compared to a speaking challenged Bush, sure. Compared to Clinton, not so much. Most politicians good enough to become US president are eloquent (or have good speechwriters).

But essentially this speech is just a bunch of heart warming empty phrases, a "motherhood and apple pie" speech which addresses a political need in the USA. It is hardly the declaration or detailing of a new policy that will affect the world.

Ahh, go ahead, turn HN into a forum to discuss American politics. The moderators don't seem to care. Why should I?
A crossbreed between MantisBT (search/filtering power, subtickets/ticket-trees, "direct feel"), redmine (Interface cleanlyness, Gantt-Charts, SCM integration) and perhaps PivotalTracker (Ease of use, the "velocity" idea).

I could write a book about what rocks and sucks for each, but the take-home is that neither does everything right.

My main suggestion would be: Make it as modular as you can. This is imho the holy grail of such a system.

Example: When I don't use time-tracking then I don't want to see these buttons in the UI. Make sure "time-tracking" is a self-contained module that can be unloaded and not a series of conditionals in your codebase.

The goal should be to have a a very slim core with a plugin-system so powerful and easy that people will start writing the interesting features for you. Everything should be a plugin.
A recent quote from a local VC: I've never known an entrepreneur to bootstrap a business to a big win who's marriage survived doing so.

Which is what made me leave Atlanta for Silicon Valley.
I leave my curtains open and wake up around 6:30 when the sun starts shining. No alarm clock. Then I work out for 30 minutes, eat a light breakfast, and walk downstairs to work.
then checkout http://www.commandlinefu.com/commands/browse/sort-by-votes
Ashish is a very casual guy. I've seen him at a lot of events (he a regular at most startup events). People say he's very approachable.

P.S: I haven't spoken to him myself.
Apple and Google are on a collision course
You have no idea how many times I've turned my blackberry alarm off and thought I had hit snooze. the iPhone alarm is a thousand time nicer with 2 different mechanisms, touch snooze and slide off.
A lot of what you are saying here resonates with me. I work part-time for a local charity in my town and have been involved in various others at times. There are a number of problems charities normally face which may explain your findings to some extent, including:

- well meaning but incompetent staff. People don't seem to understand that wanting to do good doesn't naturally translate into the ability to do it.

- no real management. I suppose this may be local phenomenon, but where I am (UK), there seems to be a tendency for small charities to be managed by wealthy housewives as a kind of hobby job. There is very definitely a social network of them that dominate the charities in my town. Often this means the management will be consistently absent from the organization. You can also see my previous point.

- no real check on the management. Charity trustees are often people who just want their name to be associated with a charitable organization. I can think of several trustees of the charity I work for who probably have only a vague idea of what we actually do.

- funding constraints. Charities in the UK who receive funding from government departments are usually monitored in terms of the volume of work they do rather than the outcomes they produce (which are much harder to quantify). Thus the incentive is often to not try to improve efficiency as reducing the work load may negatively impact funding.

Obviously my examples are to some extent just personal experiences that may not be universal. However I would guess that most non-profits face similar problems and that these problems may help explain why you got such a negative reception with your projects.

With regards to volunteers though, what did you to do assess their competency to perform the tasks they were willing to help out with? I ask because part of my job is to manage my organization's volunteers (which mostly come to us on work experience placements from the job centre). They frequently start working for us claiming to have various skills and then we discover that they often don't. For this reason I am usually quite unhappy about accepting new volunteers - when I have to get rid of them is is much harder (emotionally, for me) than sacking an incompetent employee. This might also help explain some of the resistance you encountered to what you were doing.
No, Economics is very much part of the picture. Economics is not philosophy or religion but optimization under conditions of scarcity. As long as we remain metrics driven there's nothing wrong with talking optimization.

My two cents.
And "open" works on bundles, allowing you to avoid descending into the /Contents/... part.

open /Applications/FooBar.app
Or maybe it's biased by the "prompt user to rate when deleting it"

I delete a lot of apps, simply because I find I no longer use them. I don't even bother to rate them. I'm certainly not motivated to vote 1-star on them.

Yes, I did read the article. I've also read a lot of the reviews on the App store. Often, the bad reviews just smell fishy to me. My assumption is that there aren't really so many more somewhat dim pig-headed users who like to vote 1-star on the App Store than there are on Amazon. Both of those "sites" are aimed at the general public. Maybe there are the same number, and Amazon has developed better moderation?
The problem is the customers of nonprofits often cannot measure the results themselves.

If McDonald's serves me a burger that is inedible, I know about it immediately and can stop patronizing McD's.

If Burgers4Africa distributes inedible burgers in Somalia, how do I know about it?
Yes, telemarketing. I didn't receive any particular training, but it was clear that the tactic was keep talking, so they'll agree to buy it to get rid of me. Yes, I was the piano salesman from the article. :)

Except -- I wasn't pushing a piano at the cost of a family vacation. I was selling a $5 for three issues ($25 off cover) re-subscription to a computer magazine. Experiencing how hard it actually was to push this offer gave me quite a bit of faith in humanity. 5 our of 6 said no and hung up before I got through my scripted pitch.

There's a certain sentiment against sales here. But where is that anger when someone is talking about their latest A/B test here? An A/B test is a test to find out which of two alternatives is better to make a visitor do what we want that visitor to do. Since the need for the A/B test, we can conclude that the visitor doesn't take that action be default. Thus, we're doing this design to manipulate the visitor to take an action that's not in his best interest? Because if it was in the his best interest, he should be doing it anyway, without the optimization, right?
Microsoft to add 'Ping' to Bing to share search results
keep hacking on what not work, and diving into detail. I began my Linux life exactly one year ago, when I bought myself the 1st laptop. It's rewarding and joyfull
nc lets you talk directly to a remote host, and strace allows you to eavesdrop on an arbitrary process' communication with a remote host (or with anything, really).

Actually, I rather hope there's something better than strace for the latter. But it works.
...except, that you should rarely use it. :)

It is much, much faster to pipe commands to "xargs". For instance:

find . -name core -print0 | xargs -0 rm -f

Since "find" doesn't know when your command is multi-file, it has to run the command once per file; whereas, "xargs" can run it as few times as necessary. It works well for any command that accepts "a list of files".

In the example above, the -print0/-0 are a safety net to null-delimit filenames so that it doesn't matter if any of the paths contains a space.
Then the thing would be shaped like:

*****************
*
*
*
*************

The distribution is what makes me think ratings are genuine for a genuinely good app.

*****************
**********
*****
**
**
> Building a scheduler that doesn't scale to an 8-CPU
> system seems like madness to me, given the very
> predictable trends in desktop hardware.

Even if that is true, it might make sense in other settings. On linux powered cell phones, for example.
But I seem to see the phenomenon much more with paid apps than with unpaid.

Maybe I need to figure out how to characterize these patterns statistically and do a survey.
Also look at "rsync".
But where will you find such a vast supply of discouragement? Pretty much everywhere. Closed-minded bosses, government bureaucrats, lazy college friends, disillusioned businesspeople, jaded teachers

Programmers
Map <up> and <down> to do the same in .zsh:

# search history on <up> key instead of paging previous commands:
bindkey "\e[A" history-search-backward
bindkey "\e[B" history-search-forward
The point isn't that you had an exception to the rule in your pocket. The point is that these things are now, thankfully, mainstream and popular. Oh, and comparing the stylus touchscreens and the iPhone's capacitive touchscreen is kind of like saying processed bologna and ever-delicious bacon are the same because people call them both meat.
From the article: The system in which most information transmission takes place today is not a pre-existing condition of the universe. It's not nature. It's a machine, with very particular rules, set in motion by real people with real purposes. That's why it's so amazing to me that scientists, and people calling themselves scientists, would propose to study the internet as if it were some natural system - like the weather, or a coral reef.

You can use science to study all sorts of systems, ranging from the oceans to the internet to economics. They don't have to be natural.

All that matters is whether you apply the scientific method to the phenomenon you are studying. Many economists do this, so (at least part of) the field of economics is scientific.

You might be able to imagine another world in which the laws of economics don't work. Ok, so what? You can imagine worlds in which the laws of physics don't work, it doesn't make physics unscientific.
Science is about predictability. If you can't predict behaviors with it so that you can falsify it, it is not science.
Dropping down to C is available in pretty much any other language too.
Based on the suggested assignments they sent out to schools, I can see how people might have been peeved about the original plans.

The Washington Times reported ( see http://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2009/sep/02/wh-withdraws... ):

"Among the activities the government initially suggested for prekindergarten to sixth-grade students: that they 'write letters to themselves about what they can do to help the president.' Another task recommended for students immediately after listening to the speech: to engage in a discussion about what 'the president wants us to do.'"

The speech as they released it Monday is a great one that I'd want my kids to hear. But because of the information about the assignments we had before hand, I wouldn't have thought it would be a good speech last week.
Most people think it won't happen to them, so they're not going to accurately price their gadgets.
will grab the pid of any process so that you can subsequently kill it

I like to use:

killall processname
We have two numbers: X, and Y, which is 20% larger than X. Where is the logarithm?
I would not want to go down a hill on that thing.
My most useful zsh functions:

# a visual recursive list of all files and directories
function tree()
{
find . | sed -e 's/[^\/]*\//|--/g' -e 's/-- |/ |/g' | $PAGER
}

# recursive text search (ack is also nifty)
function f()
{
find . -name '*' | xargs grep -l $1
}

# recursive search and replace (ignoring hidden files and dirs), example: replace foo bar
function replace()
{
find . \( ! -regex '.*/\..*' \) -type f | xargs perl -pi -e "s/$1/$2/g"
}
"But where is that anger when someone is talking about their latest A/B test here? An A/B test is a test to find out which of two alternatives is better to make a visitor do what we want that visitor to do. Since the need for the A/B test, we can conclude that the visitor doesn't take that action be default. "

If you do an A/B test you aren't actively disrupting me when I am doing things totally unrelated with what you are selling and impinging on my time. Telemarketing does.

With A/B testing at best you are trying to optimize your website (and indirectly and mostly unobtrusvely impinging the time and energy I choose to put into using your website). The difference is between trying to optimize layout in your store for when I do walk in vs calling me when I am playing with my children.

Telemarketers are active nuisances and in my (politically incorrect) opinion should be lined up against the nearest wall and shot out of hand.

What I'd pay money for is an Eliza like "voice bot", clever enough to waste telemarketers time to the point where the whole idea of telemarketing becomes economically infeasible.
"The question of whether a computer can think is no more interesting than the question of whether a submarine can swim": Edsger Dijkstra
Funny, we're pretty much opposite.

I see my 'window manager' as a neccesary evil to run browser and email clients, everything else runs in terminal windows.

Of course you could use 'pine' and 'lynx' but that gets old pretty quickly.
From Edge: Comment from George Dyson on “Economics Is Not a Natural Science” By Douglas Rushkoff

“How to best transcend the current economic mess? Put Jeff Bezos, Pierre Omidyar, Elon Musk, Tim O’Reilly, Larry Page, Sergey Brin, Nathan Myhrvold, and Danny Hillis in a room somewhere and don’t let them out until they have framed a new, massively-distributed financial system, founded on sound, open, peer-to-peer principles, from the start. And don’t call it a bank. Launch a new financial medium that is as open, scale-free, universally accessible, self-improving, and non-proprietary as the Internet, and leave the 13th century behind.

In essence, I agree with the piece and the comment.

I also believe that the Chagora model is very close to what they are talking about… (it can function with standard and/or newly created currencies whether localized or not. Especially when combined with methods of geographical localization and scaled anonymity. The practical microtransaction in all areas is essential for proper scaling of civilization and its the political microtransaction (networked citizen lobbying) that is the trigger.

P.S. PayPal is a bad model for civilization development.

(Chagora is essentially scalable speech and association)

If I’m an idiot I’d like to find out soon since things are very tight. I’d like at least a chance to present my case and don’t know where else to go.

http://www.Chagora.com

See blog for more...

http://culturalengineer.blogspot.com/2009/05/foundations-of-...
Sat that high up with not much in front of you... it looks like it might have some stability issues.
Total Recall: How the E-Memory Revolution Will Change Everything
Timeline from live chicken to Pret a Manger Chicken Wrap?
Live, dead, cooked, chopped, wrapped = 55 minutes
Cursive handwriting considered harmful; bring back italic
Yeh, I take I-can-do-everything-by-myself approach too. So might we collaborate on something?
Yes, it is. I recommend remapping the standard C-a to C-z, as C-a acts as "jump to the beginning of line" in couple of shells, Emacs and Emacs clones.
I take a bath ALWAYS around 11pm to 1 am on weekdays and wake up at 5:30am... Kiss my girlfriend goodbye, get dressed and head to the office. Her iphone and my blackberry both have alarms at 5:30ish. The reason I take a bath always before sleeping is because although I wake up at that time, I am really just asleep and on automatic. I wake up, get dressed, have coffee, drive to the office, have a morning cig, power up my hardware, and then like at 7:30 or so I start going out of automatic mode and wonder how the hell I keep getting to work and not noticing.
$ pwd
/home/jrockway
$ pushd foo
$ pwd
/home/jrockway/foo
$ popd
$ pwd
/home/jrockway
$ popd
error: directory stack empty
$ pushd
error: directory stack empty
$ pushd foo
$ pwd
/home/jrockway/foo
$ pushd
/home/jrockway
$ pushd
/home/jrockway/foo
$ pushd
/home/jrockway
...
Generally agree, but I don't think it's any harder to learn touch typing after two finger typing than starting touch typing from scratch.
My point is that the means produce the ends and the means of realpolitik produce crappy ends.

I'm still not sure you understand what I was trying to say; regardless of whether your take on realpolitik is correct or not (and I don't have a dog in that hunt) it's effectively a non-sequitur to the discussion.

EG: If I were saying that I can't make it downtown by 5 o'clock because:

- it's too far to bike in the available time

- my car is in the shop

- and I missed the last train

...your statement would be something like:

- trains have uncomfortable seats

...which may be true or false but doesn't really have much to do with the previous thrust of the conversation, does it?

The relationship between your point (which you've made twice now) on "realpolitik" and the posts of mine that mention "realpolitik" is well-nigh isomorphic to the example I just sketched. If you don't believe this I will be happy to make the analogy more explicit.

As this has now happened twice I can't tell which of the following holds:

(i) you understood the analysis I made of the politician's situation but don't care to comment on it; you'd rather discuss what you think of realpolitik. Given the tangential nature of realpolitik to the point I was making this leaves me confused.

(ii) you didn't really get what I was writing but saw a few words in there you have opinions on and so to continue the conversation offered your opinions on those words independent of any consideration as to the structural role those words played in the point I was making.
The segment about the bloop is worth the 'n things' pattern.
Incoming Announcements for iPod/iTunes
In zsh, you (1) don't need to write a function, and (2) you don't need to type "cd" to switch directories.

setopt auto_cd

alias -g ...='../..'
alias -g ....='../../..'
alias -g .....='../../../..'
alias -g ......='../../../../..'

Then you can just type "..." and go up two directory levels, and so on.