skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
You beat me to it, only I feel somewhat compelled to add a big "What?! What?!"

In light of multiple increases in the speed of memetic evolution as mechanical_fish outlines, where on Earth do you get the idea that idea formation has slowed down? I can't even fathom such a thing.

Your (general sense of "you", i.e., this is true for me too) view of the past is skewed by the fact that we see it all at once, and we are not living it. However, try this: Take your favorite "fast moving" time, perhaps the Enlightenment era. Plot the popular ideas on a timeline. Do the same thing with the last century, on the same scale. Now, put those two timelines next to each other, and you will achieve enlightenment.

By the way, no fair letting ignorance drive the timeline. No fair putting down all sorts of 18th century advances in, say, philosophy, then claiming the entire 20th century was a yawning, gaping void... because while your (again, general "you") knowledge of 20th century philosophy may be a gaping void, actual 20th century philosophy was not. In fact, the reason why we all know much more about the 18th century than the 20th century is that so damn much happened in the 20th century that you can only absorb small parts of it. And while the economy in the 21st has slowed down, idea formation sure hasn't.
I am so sick to death about these constant "privacy concerns".

If you have some deep dark secret that you don't want the world to know, then don't go around posting it on a system that bills itself as a way of providing ubiquitous access to everything posted to it!

These people who get concerned about privacy are the digital equivalent of somebody posting a billboard with their contact information, then claiming a violation of their privacy when people use that to contact them!

You posted it online. On a public forum. You cannot expect even a modicum of privacy when you do that. If you have a problem with people reading what you write, don't write it!
I'm not sure why someone downvoted this -- I think it's a good suggestion. I ended up using 99designs as a gallery of portfolios, found a guy whose work I consistently liked, and contacted him through the site.

Someone that's trying to get started like this could wander through some of the cheaper jobs on there (where the payment has been "guaranteed"), do those, make a little money, keep going.

If you're actually any good, it would be a viable option.
You're smart enough to understand the concept of a statistical relationship, and also smart enough to know that single anecdotes ("my uncle smoked all his life and didn't get lung cancer") don't really prove anything about a statistical relationship.

But look again at what you're claiming here: "price doesn't depend on quality of content".

Here's the evidence you start from:

- Time: lower quality content, ~$5 / issue

- Economist: higher quality content, ~$7 / issue

Which to an outside observer certainly doesn't look like a case of price not depending on quality of content.

To turn the above facts into evidence for your claim you introduce a "price per page" metric, which lets you salvage your point at the expense of introducing a dubious metric.

Leaving aside the dubiousness of the metric, your chosen datapoints don't hold up once you leave the newsstand:

- 1 year of time: ~$20. http://www.amazon.com/TIME-1-year/dp/B00007BK3L/ref=sr_1_1?i...

- 1 year of the economist: ~$127. http://www.amazon.com/The-Economist/dp/B00077B7M6/ref=sr_1_1...

Difference in quality of content may not be a complete explanation for the above differential, but I'd wager a guess it has something to do with it.

And even at the newsstand you can find a wide range of price-per-sheet values (eg: 4c to 20c by my estimates), enough so that you could just as easily, say, have picked "Foreign Affairs" and "Time" and have it come out that higher quality content yields higher per-page prices.

Which is why this looks like a sloppy generalization: you're trying to argue against a statistical relationship (generally "higher-quality content => generally higher prices") by means of anecdote, and not really a carefully-vetted anecdote at that (as evidenced in the subscription pricing).
I know we typically strip out things like "77 Tips for X" in favor of X, but if we kept them in, it could signal to me that this is a useless filler list post of things we already know and mostly agree on.

Sample:

Partnerships are based on trust. No trust, no partnership. Quite difficult to assess, because what you may perceive as lack of honesty or deception is most of the time the result of incidental misunderstandings. Real trust must overcome these. A real partnership works not without misunderstandings, but despite of them.

Now imagine that level of vapidity, times 77.

Gaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaah I hate list posts.
Umm -
http://www.elance.com
http://www.odesk.com

Post your portfolio to both those sites. Begin bidding on projects. Bid low first just to get some reviews / get your foot in the door. If you are good you will have people chasing you down soon.
I'm all for making technology easier for people who aren't savvy (which is most), but this crosses the line and takes MAJOR advantage of people. You could also argue, if you're dumb enough to pay for it, you deserve it. I don't believe that though.
Installing Cherokee With PHP5 And MySQL Support On Fedora 11
The two students had no way of checking all of their predictions, but based on their own knowledge outside the Facebook world, their computer program appeared quite accurate for men, they said.

So basically they didn't prove anything, they have anecdotal evidence.
If they become or are very successful, at least I don't have to tell myself "damn, why did I not act on that idea". Definitely a market I don't understand and to be honest, don't really care for. However, if they can make it big, more power to them!
Well as it stands you can get a visa based on simply having a sponsoring employer. This just moves from sponsoring employer to sponsoring VC.
Depends. If e.g. we have different appetites for risk, than trading can generate value (though not dollars).
Love your banner/logo
But if they can provide more value by trading than by making, why should you value making above trading?
By that modern definition of PC, the Apple II was not a PC and my point still stands.
Why you should NEVER ask for metrics ?
It's a bit naive to suggest that corruption is only ever caused by governments, and that black markets don't ever involve corruption.
Maybe, he did fit a lot of information into a more compact space by using Flash.
Next: An Internet Revolution in Higher Education
Interestingly, the guy who wrote O'Reilly's book "Best iPhone Apps" also picked Instapaper as the absolute best iPhone app (http://endlessyears.com/?p=1373), after reviewing (or, at least, considering) 65,000 apps, and selecting his top 200.
Hang in there - I'm working on the replacement for the neufbox right this minute, and it is a very cool piece of kit.
This is a good article that describes the company (SAS) and their culture:

http://www.fastcompany.com/magazine/21/sanity.html
Honestly, this isn't that bad. IMHO this isn't different than an car dealer charging $100+ for an oil change. There are people who can't/don't want to do it themselves, so it makes sense to pay someone else to do it. (Don't even talk about Jiffy Lube. I wouldn't take my enemy's rental to them.)

The folks here are mostly computer people, so we look at that and say "I could do that myself in 15 minutes!", but most people can't. Struggling with the potential wireless and firewall issues, TV format, resolution, audio formats, etc... can be frustrating and time consuming for lots of people.

Have you ever paid a plumber to replace a hot water heater or fix a burst pipe? The plumber goes home and thinks to himself "Man, I can't believe these people pay me $300 to replace a hot water heater! That's easy work!" when most people here don't have the tools or know-how to do it.
I don't know if technology diminishes human creativity, but it certainly increases our love for big, intelligent-sounding words. :)
Excessively powerful, or excessively intrusive? A government can be very powerful, but choose not to use that power in wealth destroying ways (example: post-Deng China).
http://xpud.org/download.en.html is also very good and only 50 MB in size.
Paul -- I don't mean to be trollish at all. I think of what I did as more a "debugging" exercise :)

* Yes, Time and The Economist have varied and sometimes opposite volumes. Your point just isn't meaningful.

* This re-rebuttal doesn't address your original point, which wasn't so much about patterns vs books as it was your contention that content is all treated the same. Laura Bush hasn't sold any books yet, but she has the money.

* I'm glad you didn't mean what you said. But you did say it.

* I really ought to avoid uppercase, you're right. But it's not the same point. The first is about inputs, the last about marketing and selling strategies. Quite different.

best,

Howard Weaver
editor.blogspot.com
Gone are the days when you purchased a console, plugged it into your TV, plugged the power in, put in a game and.. the game was ready to play. Total setup time: 2 minutes.
for an extra 130 bucks they will play the games for you too
True, although the hinting is mostly just used for when things get tiny. SVG works well from sizes from 32x32 up to infinity, which is fairly impressive, I think.
I could see this being useful for people with short tempers and limited tech skills.
Comcast developing system to deliver TV to mobile devices
It's for people who think that setting it up themselves would take more than $129 worth of time and/or frustration. There's nothing wrong with that.

I ran into a very odd networking issue with my XBox 360. A combination of it and my network setup led to the behavior that upon startup, the XBox would be unable to connect to XBox live. After quitting the game, loading up the network diagnostic tool, and running the network diagnostic, it would report everything as fine. Then I could go back to the dashboard or game and sign-in to XBox live with no problems, at least until I restarted the XBox.

Very frustrating. Turned out that for some odd reason (most likely something to do with my network), the XBox wouldn't pickup DNS settings over DHCP, until the network diagnostic tool ran. Setting the DNS servers manually solved it.

Is there ANY way my Uncle, Mom, Cousin, Nephew, neighbor, etc... could figure that out? Probably not. Would it be worth $129 for several of them to get that solved? yes.
To clarify, they are not seriously suggesting that there are less programmers at this moment than previously, and they are not eliciting stories of why some programmers have left.

The question in the title was a setup for asking for applications to an undefined job. Add "likes nebulous offers" to the list of qualifications.
They're ignorant and stupid but they can be educated. They can even be protected from themselves to some extent. I think it's worthwhile to keep pointing out privacy concerns because one day, maybe more people will care.
activating from preferences doesn't always work, i ended up installing tightvncserver. eventually i'm frustrated with ubuntu (i needed to use bluetooth) and goes back to openbsd.

but maybe the article is intended for enabling remote desktop on remote ubuntu (like sftp the code, ssh to remote ubuntu, execute vnc viewer) ... but that requires ssh server (ubuntu doesn't have by default, only ssh client -- more secure but less usable)
It could have been done with html and css and achieve the same results, but it would not have been as easy.
Why am I not surprised that the iPhone's "killer app" is something that lets you circumvent the copyrights and advertising on content sites?

Is there a way to block this app or have it generate just a link instead of a full-text version of the article that lacks all the advertising?
The thing is though that is relatively easy to google, so I don't think there are that many problems for those of us who frequent this place.

150$ after tax isn't too bad, so it would be worth spending a couple of hours reading up on how to do it and by the tools.
Death of Cursive
i'm delighted to see that solidworks (cheap) was used while other unis were still using pro-e/i-deas/catias (expensive)

maybe it's a stretch to say that schools which use cheaper, alternative resource tend to be of better quality compared to those which use more expensive, 'proven/best practice' resource
Look at it positively: it opens up a market for people who want to charge a more reasonable amount for the same service ;) You're already doing your friend a favour by setting up his console, but now it's a favour worth $129...
What Have VCs Really Done for Innovation?
Mr. Murdoch, is that you?
Advice for Apple: Grow the iPod Touch
http://dailybooth.com/search/nakedfriday
It should still be a mesh, not a tree.
I usually find that things I bookmark for later consumption, are rarely read. Unless they apply to something technical that I implement and read up on later.
hey amichail, i'm happy for you and imma let you finish, but the internet has some of the best memes of all time.
Yes, it is a product for people who are less technically inclined than you are. Yes, it costs a lot of money. No, it is neither abusive nor irrational.

The typical customer of this is older than you are, and significantly wealthier. Many of them have home entertainment systems which cost a significant portion of my net worth. They have the (reasonable) expectation that their $20,000 toy is going to work when they get home, and they're willing to pay to make sure it does.

You could, incidentally, try selling things to these people, rather than to other twenty-somethings who are offended by the thought of paying money for things you could possibly get for free.
I have be waiting and have been excited for the day to have an unrestricted Internet mobile device that does everything my laptop/desktops do, but in my pocket! I don't think Apple would ever do what the author is suggesting, but it does leave the door open for competitors to create something like this. I'd buy a Zune HD if it did this, but alas that device is more focused on music and does not have built in 3G/4G.
There are more memes type than just conservatives that has opposed universial healthcare.

We have libertarianism and individualist anarchism that will oppose any kind of statist control on healthcare for example. Since they are natural opponents of conservative and liberals anyway, you don't hear much of them.
If thats what you think Instapaper is, you've completely missed the point of it. Instapaper saves articles so you can read them later, offline. You know, without having to wait for a large site to load over 3G (or worse, EDGE. Or the lack of wifi, if you have an iPod touch).
On a Mac, Print -> Save as PDF.

On Linux, Print -> /usr/bin/ps2pdf.
Now its plug power in, plug hdmi cable in, put in game, change input to hdmi 1 and play

that extra step = 130 bucks
Whoever wrote the article is an ass:

Although still a desktop software product, JMP is so robust today that the latest, version 8, can display graphically millions of rows of data.

Although?? It's a desktop software product because the desktop is powerful. The personal computer you have under your desk is a very powerful machine. It's a shame that a lot of software moves as slowly as molasses and isn't coded with performance in mind.

:/
X-Windows for Embedded Systems
Creating custom command on windows
You have to look at it realistically. Yes, you can google it. But do you can your own vegetables at your house? You can google how to do that too, but do you? You can google how to fix your car, but do you do that? You can google how to build your own house, but you probably didn't do that either.

I'm not trying to single you out, just illustrate a point. People would rather pay someone else to do the labor. We are now a services industry. Our economy is now based on paying someone else to do the things you are too incompetent, lazy, or busy to do for yourself.

There's a perfectly valid reason why too: Technology is getting more complicated than the consumer can comprehend. Home networking, computer backups, cell phones, .. it's all a mess and eventually the people who are buying it just won't understand it.

It's good news for the geeks. The world is changing and more people are needing our services than there those of us who can satisfy them.
81% of all programmer jobs? Man these VC guys must be smoking crack
Do you have sources or an article on that?
It's relatively easy to Google up instructions on filing basic legal forms, too. People still pay lawyers. A lot of simple auto repairs require nothing but basic tools and a trip to Pep Boys. People still pay shop rates to get it done.

The only reason we talk about this is because we're geeks and we'll never get it through our heads that keeping this information in-core is a net lose for most people.
These are things that people aren't posting, though. This program doesn't look at a field on people's profiles which states their sexuality. It guesses from the information which they make available. You may well conceal the information you want to keep hidden, but then the information you post as public lets people make inferences.
No, because unlike 20 years ago with your SNES, your TV already has a DVD player, a cable box, and a DVR plugged into it, and your receiver has separate audio inputs and mappable digital inputs, and your SNES didn't care about whether you had a WEP key or a WPA PSK key.

[edit] and as pointed out below, your SNES didn't have to download updates or set up accounts. You plugged it in, and there was Punch Out.

Give me a break. There's absolutely no reason a dentist or attorney should have to bother with this stuff.
Read It Later does much the same thing. I use it all the time to bookmark things for later use. It's an addon for Firefox, but works with any browser through bookmarklets.

http://readitlaterlist.com/iphone/
The written word was a technology advancement as well. It let stories be retold/copied with more precision than song and dance. One could argue that simply formalizing language in writing stifled human creativity as well.

However, its not just memetic evolution that dictates creativity, its also mental abstraction. Even if you copied the same memes to the head of every human, the ideas of the individuals would soon diverge as our mind mixes and matched these 'terminal' memes to propose brand new memes.

I think that the greatest risk to human creativity is much the opposite of widespread propagation. The greatest risk is that the new memes with the most utility can not be understood by enough people to be propagated widely enough, fast enough. The greatest risk is ending up with the mediocrity of new memes that propagate only because they are simple enough to be quickly understood.
Regarding modern medicine, it does seem to have the effect of allowing people to survive today who might not have otherwise. But this means that it increases the diversity of viable genes. Is that really "slowing down" evolution? I'm not sure what a "rate of evolution" might be. Is it the rate of mutation? Has that really changed with medicine? Is it the probability that a mutation turns out to be viable? If so, hasn't that increased at the hands of modern medicine?
I like the dichotomy between High Fidelity and Convenience. Harvard is a Hi-Fi immersive experience, but it costs a lot of money and you have to move to Cambridge MA for four years. Online courses lack fidelity but are high at the convenience end. Maney thinks that the Fidelity end will remain intact, but the emergence of tech solutions at the convenience end will drive out the colleges in the middle because the the education from the convenience sources give will be good enough for the job market.

Makes sense, but it does leave out areas where coaching is an important part of the education. For example, my SO is a self taught artist, but she says she sometimes has difficulties, because she doesnt have anyone to give her a five minute course correction that allows her to get the effect that she wants. The state of the digital art is such that it is very difficult to get an accurate image of a piece of art, let alone real time collaboration.
http://www.givemesomethingtoread.com

Instapaper's popular items
Many well-informed criticism of state actions aren't against the goals of the intervention as such but merely against all the possible implementation those goals.
Having fun with Tokyo Tyrant
Misleading title:

"You may be interested to know that this document was originally written for internal use in the Operations department at Google. At the time, I was campaigning for the right to use Ruby on internal projects and I felt that a style and usage guide would probably assist in the battle for the language's acceptance, as the officially sanctioned languages at the time already had one. If nothing else, we'd at least all end up writing code that was easier to maintain. "
so, not only they make all the money, they also want to be credited for all the innovation and leadership...
Rate my startup: iter8r
Title is missing the word "proposed".
Looks like it, certainly doesn't appear to contain anything of significant value. Flagged.
The First Global Revolution, a Club Of Rome publication
Creating an Unobtrusive Javascript Image Callery Using YUI
Disclojure: all things Clojure
Some of this critique is surely valid. But people are way too binary about this (vcs-suck vs. no-they-don't). You can see that in the first paragraph, where he argues that VC money wasn't essential to either Microsoft's or Google's success. I don't believe that's true in Google's case. I'm pretty sure that without VC money they wouldn't have been able to hire or scale in the way they did, and without those things they wouldn't be Google.
Note to readers who might misunderstand: the above posts (parent and parent parent) are trolls. The only thing worse than dialog boxes are attention whore dialog boxes with poor writing. The user does not want to read your stupid dialog box because they should not have to read your stupid dialog box.

If you use an exclamation point, you incite the user to anger; if your message cannot be perfectly understood every time by every person with a quick skim at 30% attention, they will click a random button because they have better shit to do than read the stupid dialog box that you put there because you couldn't be bothered to come up with a sensible design.

The user has a job to do. They want to do that job. Your job is to help them do their job and make the computer disappear, not remind them that they are using yet another piece of shitty code in a shitty program on a shitty and infested piece of junk that they would destroy with a baseball bat, like that guy in Office Space, if they could do it without getting fired.
this applies to internet companies, but any other business needs VCs. Sure you may code your startup in a few years on your own, but how are you going to open a factory without any outside investment?
Frankly, a lot of us aren't even funded by VCs anymore. Boot strapping and staying frugal has helped. I don't really have it in me to go grovelling to VCs anymore. DONE.

So whats in it for the individual startup chaps? Or will VCs continue to dominate everything?
I wrote a HTML stripper for my Amiga in 1998! Hardly innovative.